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The New Air Force Mission?
mvnicosia asks: "The US Air Force has released its new mission statement, which reads 'The mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests -- to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace.' With the recent rows over US Internet governance, what do you think is the impact of a US government overtly practicing cyberspace warfare? And what are the US's legal limitations?"
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You could be worried about it but if you read it more narrowly and in context, it's not that scary. The USAF will fight in space, air, and cyberspace as it relates to warfare. Given how dependent the US miliary and other militaries are on information, it's reasonable to expect them to practice techniques for attacking and defend networks. Put it another way, while the air force practices gaining air superiority, we rarely ever see them go around downing civilian aircraft in times of peace (though there have been mistakes). Just because they're developing the ability it doesn't mean they're going to recklessly use it on everyone. The military needs to be prepared for things that might happen.
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After spending 22 years wearing the USAF uniform I think I can be confident in saying that the new mission statement has been looked over and discussed by many General officers, public affairs officers and lawyers both civilian and blue-suiters. They don't often post public statements like that without knowing exactly what ramifications might pop up.
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, For you are crunchy and go well with ketchup.
US surrenders to Fatal1ty
The US airforce today acknowledged defeat in cyberspace after being challenged by 1 individual, Johnathan Wendel, aka Fatal1ty.
The chief of staff confirmed that after hurling 20 marines at Fatal1ty, they discovered that they were not able to defeat him. Extrapolating this knowledge to the rest of the airforce, they surrendered the complete airforce to him.
There has not been any news yet from other defenses until now. The expectation of this news agency is however, that by the end of the month, the US will have a new president for live.
Note: This news agency is in no way forced to support either party because of continuing cyber attacks. We are not under attack, serious, we mean it.
Backroom noise: Aaahhh, he fragged me for the 10th time this hour. PUBLISH THE ITEM, PUBLISH THE ITEM!
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I was going to enlist, but my screen name was taken. :(
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Optimists surrender.
In all likelyhood, yes... it is from the early 90's. You see the US government is not quick in doing anything, and especially not something as serious as coming up with a new "mission statement." You see, a committee was initiated to accomplish a new USAF mission statement in October, 1989 (beginning of the 1990 fiscal year). After a two year fact-finding period, a new mission statement was proposed without the words "sovereign" and "global interest." Strangely, there were references to the contries economy ("in defense of the nation's economy" - i'm paraphrasing).
After six years of berrating from the Department of the Treasury, this last line was taken out. At this time, the democratic party held the commander in chief position and the Air Force Secratary was forced to add a more global impact to the mission statement. Quite frankly, the only reason it wasn't released in FY99 was that it was sitting on a civil servant's desk awaiting a rubber stamp. A month ago, the Air Force had a clean-up "down day" which allowed this employee to clean their desk and find the mission statement paperwork.
An Army grunt stands in the rain after marching 12 miles with 35-pound pack on his back and says, "God, this is shit."
An Army Airborne recruit stands in the rain after jumping from an airplane and marching 18 miles with a 45-pound pack on his back and says with a smile, "God, this is the shit."
An Army Airborne Ranger lies in the mud after jumping from a plane into a swamp and marching 25 miles at night past the enemy with a 55-pound pack on his back and says with a grin, "God, I love this shit!"
A Green Beret kneels in the stinking mud of a swamp with a 65-pound pack on his back after jumping from an airplane into the ocean, swimming ten miles to the swamp and crawling 30 miles through the brush to assault the enemy camp and says with a passionate snarl, "God, give me some more of this shit!"
An Air Force recruit sits in an easy chair in his air-conditioned, carpeted quarters and says, "The internet connection's out? What kind of shit is this?"
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None.
People need to realize, there is no such thing as international "law." There certainly are things that are called international law, but it is not actually law. They are parts of treaties and agreements built between nations, and they are broken by all nations when it is in their best interest. The U.S. does it; Canada does it; Mexico does it; Japan does it; China does it; They ALL do it. There are no legal implications, unless the U.S. decides that they will allow some other nation to bring legal charges. I really don't see that happening.
Of course, that does not mean there are no other implications... like retaliation.
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I think that the USAF tossed in "cyber warfare" into their mission statement because it's a great way to get in at the ground level of something that they think might be big in the future, even though they're not really sure what it is. However, I think it's fair to say that some bunch of generals somewhere though that in the future, this might have a lot of money and responsibility associated with it, and maybe by putting it into their mission statement, they could corner the market.
Frankly I think it's ridiculously outside of their mission. Cyberwarfare ought to be the domain of one of the intelligence agencies, since they're basically the ones with the signals interception, encryption, and intelligence analysis capabilities already. Neither the technical capabilities nor institutional culture of the Air Force really lend themselves to this mission.
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The fact of the matter is that the USA did not become the world's only superpower by force -- quite the opposite, it got their by being a benevolent power that other countries trusted.
What?!? Are you just, like, making up history as you go along?
We became the world's only superpower by (1) building a giant friggin' arsenal, (2) training a ridiculously immense armed forces, and (3) developing a staggeringly robust economy to sustain both. The previous century's other superpower had (1) and (2), then fell short on (3). (I leave the debate re the efficacy of the respective economic systems to a different thread.)
Now, China teeters on superpower-dom, if it can't be classified as one already. Is that because the Chinese have labored so hard at presenting a benevolent face to the world and building up other nations' trust? Obviously not.
If you got to be a superpower by being nice, Iceland would rule the solar system. Or, at least their women would...
Disclaimer: I'm a lowly airman and have no idea what really goes on at the top, but this is what I can glean from my perspective.
Is this to say that the Air Force will be in charge of any "cyberspace"-related activity?
No. Loads of people are reading this wrong, though it's not entirely their fault since they don't understand how the Air Force works. The best way to visualize the AF is as a gigantic (even international) company dedicated to US defense through air power. By and large, the AF does its own thing and hardly ever mingles with the other branches except to provide air support in joint-service operations.
The cyberspace that the AF will be in charge of is it's own cyberspace. On the surface it seems redundant that they'd include cyberspace in its mission statement. Of course they're going to protect their own information systems. But I think they were primarily driven to include cyberspace in the statement due to the ever-increasing numbers of attacks on Air Force information assets. Particularly those connected to the Internet.
The AF has one of the largest information systems in the world. So it's a huge target. Also, the AF is extremely reliant these days on their information technology. Every single member has an email account that they're expected to monitor and almost everyone needs a computer to access applications that they need in order to do their job.
Finally, those running this huge information network are incompetent. More often than not, they're civilian contractors with paper MCSEs who just sort of bumble along and solve problems based on trial and error rather than having actual knowledge of how things work. (Trust me, I've met a few of them and most revealed themselves as MS fanboys during casual conversation.) The enlisted members in the info admin shops are undertrained, underbugeted, and understaffed. To top it all off, the entire Air Force information system is based on high-powered expensive Microsoft solutions that are extremely fragile and just rarely work.
(As an example, our netadmins are *always* sending out notices to everyone telling them not to open emails with a particular subject line or attachment. But of course they wouldn't have to burden us, the end users, with this crap if they just filtered viruses out properly at the mail server.)
These result of all of these factors is that the Air Force is frequently on the receiving end of script kiddies, hackers, and viruses. This new missions statement indicates to me that the AF leadership have reached the unfortunate conclusion that they merely need to fight harder to protect our information assets rather than wake up and realize that they really just need to bring in some I.T. people and vendors with a clue.
Traditional Geneva Conventions apply to air. There are few practical constraints here.
There are separate treaties outlawing militarization of space. How prohibitive the treaties will be in practice is yet to be seen. Regardless the US will always act to defend itself, particularly in regards to its satellite system which is today's "high ground" that facilities military dominance. Certainly the US will deploy defensive systems to protect satellites. Whether it will deploy systems designed to disable enemy satellites is uncertain, but likely.
There are no legal treaties explicitly controlling cyber wars. There may be some older international law that could be applied to this new arena. Such would be similar to the desire of some to apply the international laws allowing nations the right to attack and capture pirates to the current war on terrorism -treating terrorists as pirates. If legal scholars can see parallels here, they'll surely see them in cyber warfare.
Today many would consider carpet bombing an entire city filled with civilians in an attempt to destroy a radar tower as a practical violation of the Geneva Conventions' rule against targeting civilians because the same tower could be destroyed with other means that would not endanger a whole city of noncombatants.
Would targeting an entire ISP to take out one terrorist website be similar? If that ISP refused to take down the website, how careful does the US have to be if it chooses to electronically attack it? Can it wipe out the data on all the ISP's servers, thus affecting "noncombatant websites?" Or must it be more careful and try to affect only the enemy's website? Probably not because the collateral damage is not that serious... loss of a website, eh... he'll live.
But what if the US is at war with an entire country, how careful must it be in attacking entire networks in that country? In that case, there may be some serious considerations. Taking out a major ISP may disrupt not only government and military networks of the enemy but also hospital networks or networks that control municipal water systems, etc, etc, which would knowingly endanger civilian lives and possibly affect third party nations. In war a country must differ to saving its citizen's lives over those of the enemy when it has no other options. So, I suppose the legal limitations are such that the US has to decided, what options it has that will likely defeat/incapacitate the enemy and then choose the ones that least endanger civilians (lives and property). Maybe it will be that cruise missiles are safer to civilians than a cyber war.
If you don't want an air attack from the USA now, all you have to do is block their IP range!
-/What do you mean there's Internet from satellites now?! Damn!
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The Air Force has had specialised a unit for about twenty years that deals with cyberwarfare, at least the computer/network security aspects of cyberwarfare.
Neither the technical capabilities nor institutional culture of the Air Force really lend themselves to this mission. Given the mega-tonnage of stratigic nuclear weapons in the Air Force invetory, the entire world hopes you are wrong about that.
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The mission statement's use of "cyberspace" is likely a bit misleading, as it is more often used in reference to the internet (by people who don't know the correct terms to use). Actually, however, the Air Force has been deeply involved in electronic warfare since before the cold war.
Today, aircraft like the AWACS and JSTARS are integral to controlling theater level communication and are often used for intel gathering.
Other dedicated surveillance aircraft like the Rivet Joint are packed full of sensory equipment to intercept, block, and manipulate wireless communication transmittions(cellular, 802.11, 900MHz).
After Vietnam, the Prowler was repurposed for radar jamming and surveillance in support of combat operations.
In the last few American wars, the EC-130E was used quite a bit to broadcast radio and TV content for PsycOps.
These days, it could be argued, the Air Force is used for electronic warfare more than it is as an "ordinance taxi service". Either way, this role certainly disserves mentioning in its mission statement.