The War of the Future is Here Now
By: Lisa M. Hayes
Wars of the future won’t look like wars we’ve seen before for three reasons:
1. Fighting in the traditional way, destroys the physical infrastructure of a country leaving it largely worthless to the conquerer. Bombing breaks things.
2. Traditional warfare is shockingly expensive – as in billions of dollars spent on troops, machines, and weaponry.
3. Technology has advanced to the point where war can be waged out of sight, keeping it largely out of mind until it’s gone too far to ignore.
Not to mention, the quickest way to win a war is through a coup, but that’s a whole other subject.
Russian hackers are conducting a broad assault on the U.S. electric grid, water processing plants, air transportation facilities and other targets in rolling attacks on some of the country’s most sensitive infrastructure, U.S. government officials said Thursday.
The announcement was the first official confirmation that Russian hackers have taken aim at facilities on which hundreds of millions of Americans depend for basic services. Bloomberg News reported in July that Russian hackers had breached more than a dozen power plants in seven states, an aggressive campaign that has since expanded to dozens of states, according to a person familiar with the investigation.
Cyber-attacks are “literally happening hundreds of thousands of times a day,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry told lawmakers during a hearing Thursday. “The warfare that goes on in the cyberspace is real, it’s serious, and we must lead the world.” I think we might want to figure out how to save ourselves before we take on any “leading the world” posture.
An October report by researchers at Symantec Corp., cited by the U.S. government Thursday, linked the attacks to a group of hackers it had code-named Dragonfly, and said it found evidence critical infrastructure facilities in Turkey and Switzerland also had been breached. It’s a safe guess to say countless other countries have been affect or are currently vulnerable to similar attacks.
Many of the targeted power plants are conventional, but the attacks included at least one nuclear power plant in Kansas, Bloomberg News reported in July. While the core of a nuclear generator is heavily protected, a sudden shutdown of the turbine can trigger safety systems. These safety devices are designed to disperse excess heat while the nuclear reaction is halted, but the safety systems themselves may be vulnerable to attack.
The operating systems at nuclear plants also tend to be legacy controls built decades ago and don’t have digital control systems that can be exploited by hackers.
Then there is the cyber attack on the 2016 elections in the U.S.
It happened and the public undoubtedly still doesn’t know the extent of that electoral attack.
Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, made some pretty blunt statements to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Rogers acknowledged that Russian President Vladimir Putin probably believes he’s paid “little price” for the interference and thus hasn’t stopped. He also said flatly that Trump has not granted him any new authorities to strike at Russian cyber-operations.
Thus, bringing us back to the stark fact that the quickest way to win a war is through a coup.
The challenge with what’s happening right now is we’ve never seen it before, so it’s difficult to recognize it for what it is:
This is war – we are in it – it’s not happening in the future. It’s happening now. Just because it doesn’t look like wars we’ve seen before doesn’t mean it’s not war.
Our only defense in this war will happen on election day in 2018.
We have to get ourselves, friends and neighbors to the polls to vote in such large numbers that cyber-influences can’t tip the scales of our democracy – and we can. The margins were intentionally orchestrated to be just enough. We need to be better than razor-thin margins of enough.
We can’t trust our leadership to fight this war for us, especially considering the highest levels of our leadership may not be on the side of the American people.
It’s time to take our democracy back. Focus on November, 2018.
