Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [99]
The paper
This rather lengthy treatise explores the Russian perspective of what other nations are planning in the sphere of information warfare, and what the Russian Federation should be doing in light of those activities. The authors propose the following definition for information warfare:
[The] main objectives will be to disorganize (disrupt) the functioning of the key enemy military, industrial and administrative facilities and systems, as well as to bring information-psychological pressure to bear on the adversary’s military-political leadership, troops and population, something to be achieved primarily through the use of state-of-the-art information technologies and assets.
They also warn readers that the United States is already fully capable of embarking on “psychological and technical information operations,” and cite three documents to support their view:
DOD Directive No. 3600.1, Information Operations. October 2001
DOD Information Operations Roadmap. October 30, 2003
JP 3 - 13 Information Operations. February 13, 2006
Each of these documents is explored in “China Military Doctrine.”
To further boost the need for Russia to develop its own Information Operations (IO) capability, the authors go on to criticize the United States for not supporting UN efforts to ensure international information security:
In 1998, the Russian Federation suggested to the United Nations that it was necessary to consolidate the world community’s efforts in order to ensure international information security. Since then the General Assembly annually passes the resolution “Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security.” This fact reaffirms the importance of assuring international information security and the UN readiness to study and solve the problem. But progress in this matter is extremely slow on account of counterproductive attitudes displayed by the United States.
For example, this was the reason why a group of government experts on international information security that operated under the auspices of the First Committee of the UN General Assembly from 2004 to 2005 failed to realize the results of its work. The stumbling block was the Russian Federation’s motion (supported by Brazil, Belarus, China and South Africa) on the necessity of studying the military-political component of a threat to international information security.
As is to be regretted, the U. S. is consistent in its reluctance to address the information security problem at the international level. At the 60th and 61st General Assembly sessions it was the only state to vote against the said resolution. It cannot be ruled out that Washington will behave similarly towards a new group of government experts the UN is setting up in 2009.
Predictably, much of this document paints US policies in a negative light, even to the point of accusing it of fostering the “flower revolutions” that have taken place in the countries that used to make up the Soviet Union and are now known as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS):
A case in point is the moral-psychological and political-economic aftermath of a string of “flower” and “color” revolutions masterminded in a number of countries contrary to the will of their peoples (the “rose revolution” in Georgia, the “orange revolution” in Ukraine, the “purple revolution” in Iraq, the “tulip revolution” in Kyrgyzstan, and the “cedar revolution” in Lebanon). For the masterminds of the “flower revolutions” there was an instant spin-off from bringing to power the desirable leaders and governments. But with the passage of time it became clear that political crises in the countries in question and, as a consequence, their economic decline could not be surmounted.