Strategic Warfare in Cyberspace, by Gregory J. Rattray. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. ⅸ + 517 pp. $49.95. ISBN 0-262-18209-2.

摘要

A favorite cyberwar threat scenario entails the downing of a jetliner as a result of either an enemy attack on the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) national air traffic control system or the targeted disruption of a plane's onboard computer and communication systems by a group of terrorists or a hostile foreign power. A great deal has been written in the last decade on both information warfare (opportunistic, tactical, and strategic) and network-centric terrorism, but the frequently apocalyptic scenarios rehearsed in the professional and popular press, of which the sabotaged jetliner is but one example, have yet to occur. Despite the numerous, widely reported incursions of Department of Defense (DoD) and other high-security computer systems and networks by hackers of one kind or another, the much heralded "digital Pearl harbor"―the rationale for establishing the Critical Information Infrastructure Commission in 1996 by then President Clinton―has not taken pace. As Gregory Rattray, a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force, notes in this compendious and remarkably level-headed volume, "The actual resiliency of key U.S. information infrastructures in the face of orchestrated, malicious attacks remains unknown" (p. 425). So far, the doomed jetliner scenario―the kind of scenario routinely developed and assessed by RAND consultants and other experts on military and guerrilla strategy―remains just that.