CJR_war

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

   SciAm, December, 1995:


   "Fighting Future Wars. U.S. military planners may be
   preparing for the wrong conflict."

      Policy experts, technical gurus and defense contractors
      have begun to study a range of other potential threats,
      from a newly hatched superpower to a regional power with
      dramatically altered fighting tactics, to legions of
      mercenary hackers that bring down banks and stock
      exchanges with computer viruses and other malevolent
      software. The vast array of scenarios is a measure of
      the speculative turn that has gripped the
      military-planning establishment.

      Debate on high-tech fighting culminates in the question
      of whether information technologies -- a computer virus,
      for one -- could make conventional military hardware
      obsolete and whether they would make possible a virtual
      invasion of the continental U.S. A battle of the bits
      would be fought by destroying an enemy's information
      assets, its financial, electrical, telecommunications
      and air-traffic-control networks. Direct strikes at the
      military would not be ruled out: cracking a government
      computer is already a not infrequent hacker rite of
      passage. In addition, more than 95 percent of military
      communications travel over public networks.


   CJR_war