Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [98]
In April 2003, he was selected for his current position by then-President Vladmir Putin during one of Putin’s working holidays in the Sobolinaya Mountains. Days were spent skiing, while the President’s evenings were reserved for meetings with his advisors and various experts. General Burutin evidently made an impression because by the time he left the ski resort he had a new title: Presidential Adviser for Military and Defense Matters.
The speech
General Burutin opened his speech with a discussion of how science and technology are acting as agents of change in society as a whole and in the armed forces specifically. Kinetic force is having to make room for information superiority. He describes how in a future war the emphasis will shift to attacking “state and military control systems, navigation and communication systems, and other crucial information facilities.”
Burutin explains how the use of “information weapons” can be executed by a small specialized team, or even one expertly trained individual, without ever having to physically cross a state border.
The general refers to the same strategic benefit that his contemporaries in the People’s Liberation Army point to: the greater the technological achievements of a particular nation, the greater the vulnerability that nation has to a cyber attack against its networked infrastructure.
Predictably, Burutin obliquely refers to “certain nations” that are actively standing up a military cyber force. He then acknowledges Russia’s response:
For this purpose specialized subdivisions are being created in the armed forces and special services, conceptual documents regulating questions of preparation and conducting information operations are being developed, and appropriate training is being conducted.
Burutin goes on to discuss how Russia, as a world leader, has always been a target for lesser countries that aspire to Russia’s dominant position, through the use of relatively inexpensive communication strategies promulgating anti-Russian sentiment. He then proposes some additional measures that the RF should take to protect itself:
Systematic efforts to reveal threats in the information sphere and their sources, create a structural framework for the goals and tasks of ensuring information security in the field of defense and to realize these goals and tasks
Active counteraction to influence the consciousness of the population with the purpose of changing national ideology
Development of a domestic technological and production base in the field of information technologies
Increase of information and telecommunications systems security, as well as of the systems and means of introducing information technologies in weaponry and military equipment, and troop and weapons control systems
Improvement of the structure for ensuring information security in the area of defense
Preparation of experts in the field of ensuring information security
Analysis
Burutin’s speech is pretty straightforward in terms of describing Russia’s approach to cyber warfare, or “information warfare,” which appears to be his preferred term.
Note that this speech was delivered in February 2008. He specifically called out the Northern Caucasus (i.e., Georgia) as a problem area. This adds another dimension to the cyber component of the Russia-Georgia conflict of August 2008.
“RF Military Policy in International Information Security”
There are five authors mentioned in this article from Moscow Military Thought (English), March 31, 2007 (an English translation appears in TheFreeLibrary.com): I.N. Dylevsky, S.A. Komov, S.V. Korotkov, S.N. Rodionov, and A.V. Fedorov. Unfortunately, little background information is available for some,