(Dobbs) Warfare Could Strike Right Here At Home
There is a new weapon that every one of us would feel.
If Russia does invade Ukraine and we end up in a war, it might not be fought with just missiles and tanks, bombs and bullets. It might also be fought with cyberattacks against our infrastructure, launched from computers. Which would bring a foreign war right here to our homeland, because unlike every other weapon on earth, there is no limit to the range from which cyber-attackers can strike. Although we have sophisticated cyber-defenses, a first strike against us could be devastating.
Having once briefly covered the Pentagon, I know that there are contingency plans for almost everything. So for cyberattacks, you can assume that each side has drawn up the blueprints. This is the newest evolution in warfare.
During the Cold War, I visited an American listening post in northeastern Turkey which monitored missile fields along the southern Soviet border. The commander there told me that if the Soviets launched missiles, within seconds we would see them coming and send up our defenses. A cyberattack is not so obvious. If it outsmarts the cyber-defenses, the strike itself is the first thing we’d see.
If you think this is far-fetched, think about this: everything that depends on the internet is vulnerable, and today that means darned near everything on which modern life depends. Over the years we’ve seen successful cyberattacks against a wide spectrum of American society, from an east coast gas pipeline that hackers shut down, to high-tech companies like Microsoft and Adobe and Yahoo, to financial institutions like American Express and Chase, to major entertainment producers like Sony, to retailers from Saks to Marriott to Macy’s. And the United States government has not escaped. USAID, the Agency for International Development, has been hacked. So has the United States Senate. NASA too.
An aggressor can sneak in and we never see him coming.
Yet compared to some, those cyberattacks were small potatoes. One of the most valuable companies on the planet, the oil giant Saudi Aramco, was attacked for a $50-million ransom a few years ago and had to shut down its whole network and destroy more than 30,000 of its own computers. For half a month or more, they couldn’t load oil for transport, they couldn’t process payments.
These attacks come from all over the world. The Islamic Republic of Iran has attacked the State of Israel and the State of Israel has attacked the Islamic Republic of Iran. U.S. intelligence blames Iran for the attack against Saudi Aramco, China for the hack against Microsoft, North Korea for the hit on Sony Pictures— apparently Dear Leader was peeved by his portrayal in a movie being produced. And Russia? Look no further than our presidential elections.
Now expand cyberattacks to the very foundations of our society. If adversaries have the means and the motive, they can cripple our energy grids, our transportation systems, our financial records, our information networks, our healthcare connections, our military communications, our digital links, our sources of entertainment. Not to mention creature comforts that depend on the internet. We could find our flights cancelled, our homes going dark, our records of bank deposits erased. And these days, if we lose the use of our cell phones, most of us lose our connection to the world.
In a worst-case scenario, cyberattacks against us might not melt buildings like a nuclear bomb, but they could melt the society on which they stand.
This all comes up because the tension in Ukraine has prompted cyberattacks there. Just two weeks ago, only hours after Russia’s deputy foreign minister declared diplomatic talks with the United States “a dead end,” 70 Ukrainian government websites were targeted by cyberattacks. Ministries of everything from energy to foreign affairs, environment to agriculture, were hit, with this ominous message showing up on some: “All data on the computer is being destroyed. All information about you became public. Be afraid and expect the worst.”
This underscores the selective nature of this weapon. Whoever attacked the systems in Ukraine— and Russia is suspected— left the websites of Ukraine’s president and its defense ministry alone. This was just a warning shot across the bow.
The good news is, the United States has colossal capacity itself to launch cyberattacks against others. And it probably does. The bad news is, unlike military capacity where the U.S. is supreme, anyone with the know-how and a laptop computer can launch an attack. Donald Trump’s motives were suspect when he wrote off charges that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election but he wasn’t so far off when he said, “It could be somebody sitting in a bed someplace.” Sometimes it is. An actual government with boundless resources, or a terrorist organization, can only be worse.
But the other good news is, at least some perpetrators of cyberattacks understand the Cold War concept that protected nuclear powers from nuclear attacks: Mutually Assured Destruction, better known by the apt acronym “MAD.” It applies equally in this new world of cyberwarfare.
Still though, just as we build better ships and tougher tanks and faster planes to prevail over enemies in a traditional war, American firms with government support are working on so-called quantum-computers that would prevail in cyber-conflicts. This means computers that would operate 10-million times as fast as the world’s speediest “supercomputers” today.
Given our dependence on the internet at all levels of life, with computers like that we could deter and dominate our enemies, and we’re working on it. But so are they.
For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his writing also appears on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.
Well said. My concern is what happens if we are attacked? Do we respond in kind? Does it escalate? Does the escalation at some point move from the world of cyber to more traditional methods of war? I am not sure our leaders or the people are fully aware of the seriousness of the situation. And how easy it is for it to get totally out of hand and end up where neither side intended or wanted. It is not a board or video game being played. Real lives are at stake.