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when Desert Storm came along in 1991, something very different emerged in the campaign to liberate Kuwait from the large, modern Iraqi Army – so recently battle-tested in eight, ultimately successful, years of bloody fighting against Iran. The Iraqis were also abundantly equipped with Russian artillery that outranged American guns, and well trained in both Soviet and Western theories of modern maneuver warfare. In fact, the very area in which General Schwarzkopf’s famous armored “left hook” was launched had served as Iraq’s principal training ground for tank commanders. Despite all this, the Allied ground offensive defeated an Iraqi field army of over 50 divisions in just four days, the victors suffering the loss of only 148 killed in action. Over 70,000 Iraqi soldiers were taken prisoner. The reason for this result: the Iraqis had to “fight blind,” while Allied forces knew where virtually all enemy units were positioned, where there were gaps in their artillery coverage, and where and when they tried to move. It was an information edge that made an enormous difference. Despite this, in the planning of Desert Storm, it was not fully appreciated early on. At the time (August 1990 – February 1991), I was a member of the small RAND strategic analysis team working for General Schwarzkopf, and had become completely convinced that the huge Allied advantage in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) meant that the boldest maneuvers could be executed – in this instance, a flanking movement around the entire Iraqi position in Kuwait – with little risk and even less bloodshed.

But many senior officers advocated for a more direct approach, and strongly opposed the case for the wide “left hook,” which they thought too risky. A heated debate ensued that went on for weeks. Ultimately, General Schwarzkopf chose to believe in the power of the Allied information edge and sided with those who favored a major flanking movement; the results bore out his judgment. And the Allied edge was not only in sensing and communications; it also extended to the increased “information content” of weapons as well, whose guidance systems made them far more lethal than in any previous conflict. Colonel Kenneth Allard summed up the reasons for this “turning point” victory in military affairs:

      Computer-assisted weapons intended to kill at great ranges with a single shot were now the stock-in-trade of the frontline soldier. He was supported by commanders and staffs who used “battle management” systems to monitor the status of enemy forces, friendly forces, and the all-important movement of logistics. Strategic direction in the form of information, intelligence, orders, and advice arrived in a river of digital data that flowed incessantly.³⁴

      In the wake of my work on Desert Storm, I brought insights from this experience to my colleague David Ronfeldt, appearing at his office door one afternoon to say, “I have one word for you, David: ‘Cyberwar.’” And so we were off to the races, striving to make the case for truly revolutionary change in military affairs.

      We found a few defense intellectuals who accepted our logic about the concrete value of having an information edge. A useful analogy was the thought experiment I suggested about a chess game between two players of equal strength, but with one side limited in vision to seeing only his or her own pieces. An opposing piece would reveal itself only in making a capture or when a friendly piece stumbled upon it. In such a situation, could the side with the information edge win with fewer pieces? If so, how many fewer? Invariably, the answers were that the fully sighted side could do without much of the traditional full complement of pieces. Thus, the issue of assessing the material value of an information edge began to come into focus as a matter of serious enquiry.

The most influential defense official who appreciated this point was the Director of Net Assessment, the legendary Pentagon strategist Andrew Marshall. He and others in his orbit soon began to champion the notion of a “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) – in part based on the informational dimension, in part on other emerging technologies and their implications for organizational redesign and doctrinal innovation. But most individuals in the military establishment recoiled from the word “revolution,” making pursuit of a true RMA difficult. Cyberwar languished. Then, as evolution of the Net and the Web quickened, the cyberwar concept itself was narrowed just to operations in and from the virtual domain – neglecting its physical warfighting dimension. The narrowing had great appeal.

      The most important early advocates of this way of thinking about cyberwar came from the communities of experts in nuclear strategy and air power; naturally, their habits of mind led them to conceive of cyberspace-based operations as a form of strategic attack on a nation’s cities and critical infrastructures. Much as they had played a significant role in parsing the complexities of nuclear strategy and air power for generations, RAND experts now came to the fore in developing these much more limited views of cyber strategy as well – most notably in the team led by Roger Molander, whose study Strategic Information Warfare and the table-top wargame exercises developed therefrom proved highly influential.³⁵

Needless to say, this approach ignored the notion of Bitskrieg as a possible next face of battle. What followed were several years of technical speculations about how to take down power grids, seize control of SCADA systems, and create widespread psychological effects akin to those sought by Klaatu, the cool alien emissary, when he shut down virtually all the world’s power systems for half an hour in the original film version (1951) of The Day the Earth Stood Still.³⁶

      Klaatu aside – in the original film, it’s not clear that his demonstration of disruptive power would work to gain humanity’s compliance with his demand that Earthmen not bring their violent ways into space – Ronfeldt and I have always bristled at the evolving emphasis on cyberwar as simply a strategic “weapon of mass disruption.” This manifestation of cyberwar has none of the horror that attends nuclear conflict – a threatened holocaust that has led to deterrence stability under the rubric of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD). And to the extent to which this “strategic” view of cyberwar is associated with the notion of victory through conventional aerial bombing, it only needs to be noted that very few air campaigns – if any – have ever achieved their aims politically, militarily, or psychologically.³⁷ Instead, as Ronfeldt and I have argued for decades, the notion that cyberwar is key to a new “strategic attack paradigm” – the term introduced by James Adams³⁸ – will ultimately prove to be a grave error, engendering ruinous costs for little results. We strove to make an alternate case, favoring far more tactical-level uses of information systems to empower forces in the field, at sea, and in the aerospace environment, to enable them to make the shift to Bitskrieg.

The first significant opportunity to wage this sort of cyberwar came in Kosovo in 1999, when NATO sought to end a predatory campaign conducted by the Serbs against the Kosovars. I served on a team advising the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Henry “Hugh” Shelton. We proposed a plan of campaign that focused on inserting key elements of our Special Forces into the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The idea being that elite US Army Green Berets, working closely on the ground with the Kosovars, and linked to the ISR network – as well as to air and missile strike forces – could find and target Serb forces swiftly, reliably, lethally. Shelton embraced the idea of having the Special Forces fight alongside the KLA. However, the opportunity was forgone, for the most part, because of sharp criticism of and concern about the risks entailed in this approach. Instead, NATO leaders argued that the air-only operation was “making real progress,” that guerrilla-style operations would not work, and stuck to their stated preference for a far larger force to be deployed if there were to be any boots on the ground.³⁹ President Clinton sided with the NATO position. The air-only campaign proceeded for 78 days, during which Serb field forces suffered very little damage, and the bombing caused serious civilian casualties – sparking widespread international criticism. But Belgrade did finally agree to withdraw from Kosovo.

Kosovo was a case, as Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon labeled it, of “winning ugly.”⁴⁰ It was also a missed opportunity to wage the first full-blown Bitskrieg using our vision. To some degree, the KLA formations did force the Serbs to move about, and enabled attack aircraft to detect, track, and strike at them. But not nearly often enough – a broader presence of Green Berets with them was needed to give the insurgents the kind of strong connectivity with NATO that would have