How We Lost the High-Tech War of 2007
DUNLAP, CHARLES J. Jr.
How We Lost the High-Tech War of 2007 A Warning from the Future by Charles J. Dunlap, Jr. The following is the transcript of a secret address delivered by the Holy Leader to the Supreme War...
...Furthermore, Americans increasingly relied upon commercial, off-the-shelf cybertechnology We could acquire the same products on international markets- and often more quickly than the bureaucratic Americans, fettered as they were by complex contracting rules and regulations...
...For example, when the U.S...
...These were filled not with well-trained, physically fit combatants, but rather, as Szafranski put it, "mind-nimble (not necessarily literate), fingertip-quick youth" who tended to equate their success at video games with competency to engage in real war...
...The views and opinions expressed in this essay are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Defense or any of its components...
...With material and expertise gleaned from governments hostile to the U.S., as well as help from criminals in the former Soviet Union, we were able to assemble a handful of crude nuclear devices by 2006...
...agriculture because agriculture was virtually unprotected and within our means to strike...
...Our strategy was to make warfare so psychologically costly that the Americans would lose their "will to win...
...A warrior in such societies, Keegan wrote, "prefers death to dishonor and kills without pity when he gets the chance...
...Now the Americans beg for our scraps...
...Praise The One Above, the microchip ended the educational and training advantage the American military had enjoyed...
...The Americans eventually had to use troops to try to dislodge us because even in the 21st century, as Bevin Alexander put it in 1995, "victory comes from human beings moving into enemy territory and taking charge...
...Had she demonstrated the will to face her responsibilities as a superpower in the post-Cold War world, nations like ours might not have dared oppose her-we keenly understand brute force and its consequences...
...Our analysis showed that we could not stop their high-tech aircraft from hitting anywhere in our country...
...By the grace of The One Above there was no method of warfare that we failed to consider: We left AIDS-infected needles on bathing beaches and polluted America's coastlines by scuttling oil tankers we covertly hired...
...military...
...We also remembered that after the uproar following the bombing of the Al Firdos bunker during the First Gulf War, when hundreds of Iraqi civilians died in an attack on what the Americans mistakenly believed to be a command center, very few strikes occurred against Baghdad...
...Whatever the case, America was shocked by what we did next: We used our infamous Boys Brigade to rape the women, and then to amputate their limbs and burn their faces...
...To counteract the effectiveness of cyber-attacks on our military forces, we trained them to operate autonomously if normal communications were cut...
...would try to wage this supposedly "bloodless" war by assaulting us from afar with cyberarms...
...We expected that the U.S...
...Easy-to-learn graphic displays allowed poorly educated soldiers to quickly master elaborate but user-friendly war-fighting machines, rather like a 15-year-old American figuring out how to dispense Coca-Cola at a fast-food restaurant by pressing the right pictograph...
...America lost because of its democracy...
...Of course, we did not concern ourselves with the effects of these actions on our own people because our faith told us that The One Above would protect us...
...From inside our own borders we attacked the ozone layer by releasing damaging chemicals into the atmosphere...
...Countries such as ours, organized as they are around exceptionally powerful ethnic, religious, or cultural forces and frequently endowed with potent internal security forces, are much more resistant to vacillations in public opinion than are the diverse, pluralistic democracies of the West...
...In no way did we try to hide what we did...
...Because our people truly believed in America's wickedness, it was not necessary to hide our ferocity...
...Ultimately, however, we found a way to use our nuclear weapons against America...
...Ralph Peters, who wrote in 1994 that the "new warrior class already numbers in the millions...
...So desperate are they that they send their children here to be our servants...
...In the end, attacking these proliferating methods of communication typically made as much sense as using a laser-guided missile to disable the rifle of an individual soldier...
...Predictably, the Americans sent their stealthful F-117 bombers and cruise missiles against the laboratory...
...instead, we could rely on the free flow of data, because the Americans rarely achieved the necessary political consensus to interfere with these modern "news-gathering" techniques...
...The Americans discovered this when they sought to use information warfare to corrupt and destroy our command and control systems...
...Several journalists reported the progress of the raid on live TV...
...The world reaction to what was thought to be an American first-use of nuclear weapons was universal condemnation...
...The synergistic effect of these schemes was devastating...
...They neglected those, like Donald E. Ryan, who cautioned that "even technologically backward societies have a nasty habit of devising strategies to offset [America's] high-tech superiority...
...Sadly, it was the Will of The One Above...
...Most critically, America failed to deal decisively with barbarism when confronted by it...
...Liddell Hart's strategy of the indirect approach, however, led us to concentrate our efforts against America's soft underbelly, Mexico...
...No, my friends, The One Above called upon us to use every tactic to defeat the cyberscience that the Americans thought would make them so superior...
...To find a way to protect our key facilities, we once again examined history and recalled how Somali gunmen had effectively used their wives and children as human shields...
...Furthermore, their "law" presented no deterrent because the West demonstrated over and over that it lacked the conviction to enforce it...
...It was our own...
...After all, our people are accustomed to far worse...
...So we chose a more exposed target: America's swelling population of politically influential elderly...
...Just as we destroyed their confidence in government, we destroyed their trust in nature...
...tried their pathetic cyberbased psychological operations to mislead our people, the world press quickly exposed the American deceit...
...For us and for many non-Western peoples, martyrdom and self-sacrifice are cultural totems more valued than self-preservation...
...Like us, they are "brought up to fight, think fighting honorable, and think killing in warfare glorious...
...We buried major command posts and logistics bases below schools, hospitals, apartment complexes, and even places of worship...
...THOUGH WE rarely defeated the Americans on the battlefield, we were able to inflict such punishment that they were soon pleading for peace at any price...
...We told the press that we would take reprisals against American POWs for the nuclear "attack...
...We planted bombs in eldercare facilities, public parks, medical centers-anywhere we thought they would gather...
...We knew we would have that chance...
...war never developed into the almost genteel electronic exchange that some foresaw...
...For example, we viewed the technology-spurred globalization of the news industry as a means of making war...
...would first attempt to weaken us with its airpower...
...We had no need to build costly satellites or even pay spies...
...To carry out our plan, our fighters captured a few dozen...
...Thus, it became part of our strategy to capitalize on television's power to influence decisionmakers by aiming to wage war in the most brutish-and public- way...
...We carefully noted how this obsession enabled far weaker adversaries to defeat the so-called "superpower...
...hostages to targets...
...Furthermore, whatever patriotic or legalistic pressure the Americans could bring to bear on their domestic news people was wholly ineffective against scoop-hungry foreign reporters...
...Similarly, the specter of casualties was enough to delay intervention in Bosnia in the 1990s despite the occurrence of outright genocide...
...It was the Will of The One Above...
...Families at home could now watch and hear their loved ones die...
...Studying the Vietnam conflict, we were heartened by the remarks of a former North Vietnamese commander, Bui Tin: Support for the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable...
...The late 20th and early 21st century saw the reemergence of what British historian John Keegan called "warrior" societies...
...Moreover, that "superiority" was never as great as the Americans hoped...
...Our hackers were able to disrupt and corrupt them on a massive scale...
...The Americans believed that their nation could endure the sight of women as POWs...
...The spectacular fireball vaporized everything for miles, all to the horror of a global broadcast audience numbering in the hundreds of millions...
...The cyberscience that fueled the "revolution" did not require the mature infrastructures needed to produce traditional war-fighting platforms like ships, planes, and tanks...
...We developed additional methods of bringing the war home to America...
...Our most vital facilities were built underneath POW camps...
...through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win...
...Our search for other low-tech ways of attacking America drew us to environmental warfare...
...Despite what many technology-infatuated strategists thought in 1995, cyber-science cannot elimi nate the vicious cruelty inherent in human conflict...
...To the contrary, with our strategy it became more savage than ever-at least in the eyes of the many Americans who in previous conflicts had been spared the unedited, real-time "virtual" battlefield presence that the new communication nets allowed...
...The "revolution in military affairs" did not, therefore, make warfare less murderous...
...We likewise portrayed ourselves as nuclear "victims" and gained a surprising amount of sympathy despite our acts against the prisoners...
...Just as the Americans dropped their bombs, we secretly detonated our atomic weapon...
...Many of you have confused expressions on your faces...
...By the mid-1990s, international news organizations using the latest electronic wizardry no longer had to depend on government help in war zones...
...SUCH HIDEOUS EXPERIENCES DESTROYED predictions of "non-lethal" conflicts made by over-enthusiastic cyberprophets...
...Accordingly, we allowed the people of our Military City the honor of dying for our cause...
...We also secretly inoculated farm animals with highly contagious diseases...
...We saw how Serb forces back in the 1990s successfully countered NATO's sophisticated airpower by chaining U.N...
...Today, with His grace, I speak of our great victory over our most evil enemy, America...
...We would rather be feared than respected...
...Next, we induced the Americans to strike by constructing a genuine biological warfare laboratory in the heart of the City-realizing, of course, that their state-of-the-art intelligence sensors would easily identify it...
...To do so we freed ourselves from the decadent West's notions of legal and moral restraint...
...We control their future...
...But America's most likely opponents were invariably unlike America and thus not beholden to the American interpretation...
...Clearly, Americans had grown so cynical of their government that they were quite willing to believe it capable of anything...
...We bragged about our responsibility for all these deeds, staggering Americans with our willingness to attack them in every conceivable way...
...By the turn of the century, America had developed fairly sophisticated methodologies to protect their critical military and civilian computer systems from cyber-subversion...
...But my friends, it was not an American weapon that exploded...
...Rather, we used ruthless tactics openly to intimidate the American people and break their resolve...
...That is the price of defeat...
...military that their sudden withdrawal wrecked the effectiveness of the deployed forces...
...Operational security became impossible as news groups launched information-gathering and communications satellites, monitored proliferating Internet transmissions, gave their reporters self-contained communications suites, and even flew their own unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicles to transmit real-time views of battle areas...
...Soon, frightened seniors joined the burgeoning antiwar movement...
...We knew that direct cyber-attack could not do the kind of damage necessary to defeat the United States...
...I will explain...
...The prescient Ryan noted that "technologically advanced, information-intensive military organizations are more vulnerable to information warfare simply because they are information dependent...
...At the heart of the "revolution in military affairs" were the amazing new technologies that Americans believed "would make cyberwar and information war the distinguishing feature of future conflict," as one of their experts, Richard Szafranski, put it in 1995...
...This was not easy...
...Our proxies spread destructive Mediterranean fruit flies throughout growing areas in California and Florida, and introduced various plant funguses and blights into Midwest grain crops...
...We used the indirect approach again by attacking other vulnerable targets outside the United States...
...But few believed its government, even among the nation's own people...
...The following is the transcript of a secret address delivered by the Holy Leader to the Supreme War Council late in the year 2007...
...At the same time, we used modern document technologies to print billions in near-perfect counterfeit pesos to further sabotage the economy...
...The effort proved futile because many communications devices became so inexpensive and miniaturized that our armed forces could afford to make them ubiquitous and redundant...
...We used runners, low-tech signaling devices, and even coded statements of our leaders, broadcast on international news programs, to coordinate actions until contact was restored...
...We saw how many people- including plenty of Americans-overlooked Japanese atrocities during World War II to castigate the American use of The Bomb to end the war...
...It was virtually impossible for cyber-assaults to negate them all...
...But by 2007, women had become so incorporated into the structure of the U.S...
...Perhaps they were right...
...American thinking about the revolution in military affairs was based on grand visions of long-distance wars-push-button conflicts against cybernetically inferior foes...
...Our plan, thanks to The One Above, worked perfectly...
...In any event, we decided not to worry too much if we could not always match the high-tech equipment of the U.S...
...In warrior cultures such as ours nothing is more glorious than dying in battle...
...Nothing else succeeds in conflicts waged against warriors of our zealotry...
...You are thinking: "It was the Americans, not we, who used nuclear weapons in the Great War...
...We used them to coerce their governments into allowing us access to essential international satellites and communications centers, while denying the same to the Americans...
...Information technology changed all that, because its requirements were far less demanding: Small numbers of people working with commercially available computers could perform more than adequate high-tech research and development...
...Their F-22 fighters, theater missile defenses, and ultra-modern hunter-killer submarines were systems we could not realistically overcome...
...The Japanese were especially appalled...
...Americans could not enjoy a meal, relax on a beach, or even breathe the air without wondering if they were about to become victims of yet another of our assaults...
...They were guilty, as those who defy the sayings of the divine usually are, of idolatry- though in this case they did not worship graven images, but the silicon chip...
...is a colonel on active duty in the United States Air Force...
...With their economy in ruins, their borders compromised, their people demoralized, and civil unrest everywhere, they could not continue...
...Finally, our clandestine assistance re-ignited the simmering Zapatista revolt in Chiapas...
...Although they enjoyed some success, this was really a diversion...
...Too many Americans assumed that warrior societies like ours lacked the sophistication to integrate new technology into a war-making doctrine that could defeat the United States...
...And why not...
...We waged it against U.S...
...Because the Americans believed their information technologies reduced the need for conventional combat forces, they disbanded such forces in favor of trendy "information" units...
...In fact, the technology-empowered media made "information equality," not "information dominance," the key to the "revolution in military affairs...
...Yes, our Military City was destroyed by an atomic attack that killed 30,000 of our people...
...She failed to consider how enemies with values and philosophies utterly at odds with hers might conduct war in the information age...
...In the name of The One Above, I offer greetings to my fellow warriors...
...Though we let them suffer terribly, we were careful not to kill them...
...Though the Americans claimed that information technology would allow them to get inside an enemy's "decision loop," the irony was that we repeatedly got inside their 'acquisition loop' and deployed newer systems before they finished buying already obsolescent ones...
...Their so-called "laws of wars" were conceived by the First World to keep our people oppressed...
...Since we no longer had to concentrate our forces to oppose the now-defunct armored formations that dominated the First Gulf War, we took our cue from methods used by the North Vietnamese against the Americans and dispersed our army into small, mobile combat teams that combined only when required to strike a common objective...
...POLITICAL DISSENT SOON BURNED AT THE FABRIC of American society, and we managed to inflame that controversy even more...
...Americans also underestimated the effect of rapidly declining cyber-costs-for, as George Gilder accurately predicted, in the year 2000 we could purchase silicon chips for $100 with as much power as the $320 million defense supercomputers of the early 1990s...
...They had no choice but to leave us with the lands we conquered and the valuable resources they contain...
...We even put some on air transports and helicopters...
...Let us praise The One Above...
...With the advent of off-the-shelf armaments, the American military no longer possessed a monopoly on the most advanced weaponry available...
...Not only did they cease contributing to the effort against us, they also began systematically to withdraw billions of dollars invested in American bonds...
...In full view of the world media, we shackled captives to vital structures and openly bound them to tanks and military vehicles...
...Of course, we hired the best hackers around the world to challenge the American safeguards...
...However prepared the Americans thought they were to see their daughters come back in body bags, they were not ready to see them returned home strapped to wheelchairs, horribly mutilated, and shrieking in agony...
...Worse yet for the Americans, advances in computer software eroded the demand for highly trained specialists to operate complex weapons...
...Peters wrote that: [America] will often face [warriors] who have acquired a taste for killing, who do not behave rationally according to our definition of rationality, who are capable of atrocities that challenge the descriptive powers of language, and who will sacrifice their own kind in order to survive...
...WE CONSTANTLY LOOKED FOR IMAGINATIVE WAYS to turn our technological shortcomings into decisive strengths...
...The exasperated columnist George Will wrote that the "West . . . almost preens about having become too exquisitely sensitive to use force against barbarism...
...But America's powerful information-technology weapons left us without a reliable way to deliver The Bomb...
...As though a speck of sand could defeat the will of The One Above...
...TRAUMATIZED RELATIVES FRANTICALLY DEMANDED the removal of their wives and daughters from the combat zone, and those demands were swiftly met...
...Millions of refugees flooded the United States, prompting desperate calls for military assistance to control the influx...
...And they took it for granted that their potential adversaries would accept the American interpretation of this "revolution...
...As a last resort, our forces struck preplanned targets, martyring themselves in the process when necessary...
...The Mexican government collapsed and the economy disintegrated...
...We converted the repatriation into what they called a "media circus...
...We found we could contend with the light, supposedly high-tech combat units that completed most of America's remaining battle forces...
...made in adapting to the "revolution in military affairs," several stand out: America too often assumed that the revolution would favor technologically advanced nations like herself...
...And we were confident we could influence the American public and its poll-sensitive decisionmakers...
...For example, our agents set huge fires in equatorial rain forests, raising fears in ecologically conscious America that the world's oxygen supply would be jeopardized...
...A little more than 10 years ago experts thought that what became known as the Revolution in Military Affairs would leave developing nations like ours incapable of opposing a high-tech power like the United States...
...YOU KNOW THE REST, MY FRIENDS...
...Our primary aim, after all, was simply to cause casualties among the Americans...
...We agreed with those, like George J. Stein, who said that information warfare "is fundamentally not about satellites, wires, and computers...
...As successful as this strategy was, we still wanted to strike the American homeland...
...It is about influencing human beings and the decisions they make...
...We then returned the POWs to the Americans-we said it was a "humanitarian" gesture...
...This phenomenally valuable information was, of course, available to us...
...Only the soft, convenience-loving West would think that the loss of electrical power or phone service would stop us...
...financial markets panicked, and the American economy fell into chaos...
...We had broken their will...
...The events surrounding the 50th anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima taught us that the condemnations would be few...
...We anticipated, however, that the U.S...
...Techno-offensives that cripple civilian systems do not deter us...
...This, my friends, is the ultimate meaning of the Revolution in Military Affairs...
...With that in mind, we found that the radical changes in news gathering and reporting allowed us to develop a strategy to exploit America's growing fear of casualties...
...In the last 10 years industrialized countries have perfected security techniques that make attacks against defended facilities very difficult...
...With such platforms the First World's military power once dominated global affairs...
...In order to create diplomatic pressure on the United States, we took lots of hostages from other nations, even neutrals...
...The Americans ignored a warning from one of their own, Maj...
...Other important members of the world community turned against America as well...
...Adopting B.H...
...The Mexican economy depended upon computers, but its machines were not as protected as those in the U.S...
...Thank The One Above, the easy capture of a few of these self-styled "digital warriors" yielded a treasure trove of intelligence data...
...We also made a concerted effort to take hostages from militarily weak nations so that America would not gain valuable allies...
...Shortly before the start of the war, we deployed a nuclear device to the Military City hidden in an ambulance (protected from air attack by its red crosses...
...Those absurd forecasts, combined with the memory of a nearly casualty-free First Gulf War, caused many Americans to conclude erroneously that the occurrence of any casualties was irrefutable proof that a campaign was inherently flawed and should, therefore, be abandoned...
...The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor...
...Accordingly, hostage-taking also became an important part of our "revolution in military affairs...
...Besides, our technical deficiencies inspired us to innovation-approaches overlooked by the gadgetry-obsessed Americans...
...Not only did this make our troops harder to find, it also forced the Americans to expend their limited number of precision weapons on what were often tiny groups of soldiers...
...Of the many mistakes the U.S...
...Once again, the Americans neglected to study history's many examples of supposedly outmatched combatants prevailing over better-equipped rivals...
...We taught the Americans that no computer wages war with the exquisite finality of a simple bayonet thrust...
...This strategy fit our warrior nation well...
...to the contrary, we advertised it-using video clips on the Internet-as a warning of things to come...
...Naturally, we used terror bombings, but we prudently avoided traditional targets...
...We consoled ourselves with the knowledge that reliance on cybersystems was not an unqualified virtue...
...As you know, this was the first major war in which America deployed large numbers of female combat soldiers...
...We told the world that our women suffered much more in the atomic catastrophe...
...With the help of The One Above, we proved them wrong...
...Of course, the United States vigorously claimed innocence...
...The deaths of 18 American soldiers in Somalia-followed by the telecast of a U.S...
...soldier's body dragged through Mogadishu's streets-caused a public outcry that forced a humiliated America to forsake its policy objectives...
...We also observed how rebel Chechens took 2,000 hostages at Budyonnovsk and cowed the Russians into meeting their demands...
...Angry Americans loudly objected to troops fighting thousands of miles away when a crisis existed quite literally in their own backyard...
...The Americans feared-rightly, we believe-that the spectacle of their pilots killing "innocent" civilians would be too much for their public (and world opinion) to bear...
...Time and again our efforts earned a bonus: America-for political reasons-was obliged to accept new "allies" whose logistical requirements and marginal fighting ability made them more of a burden than a help...
...Since our doctrine called upon us to present the Americans with moral conundrums that would complicate their efforts to attack us, we fully integrated our military infrastructure into civilian areas...
Vol. 1 • January 1996 • No. 19
