Defending Cyberspace and Other Metaphors

摘要

Information warfare, as any casual observer of the Pentagon can attest, remains a hot-button topic in the military community. Broader claims for it have been toned down, and few now argue that all aspects of warfare are now revealed as information warfare, but an ideology of information warfare has nevertheless wended its way into the heart of defense planning. The Air Force's Cornerstones of Information Waffare, for example, has approached the status of doctrine. The spring 1996 establishment of the 609th Squadron (at Shaw Air Force Base) dedicated to information warfare offers further evidence of the seriousness with which that ideology is maintained. In 1996 the National Defense University (NDU) ended its two-year experiment of offering a forty-four-week program on Information Warfare and Strategy after forty-eight students were graduated, but what has replaced it is a broader thmst in teaching the all four hundred students the rudiments of information warfare (and offering related electives). In 1995-96 large portions of the Defense budget were designated information operations (although only a small portion represents information warfare).