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Infowar evolved with every recent U.S. military foray. In the first day of the Persian Gulf War, Air Force stealth planes armed with precision-guided munitions blinded Saddam by knocking out his communications network and electrical power in Baghdad. The Pentagon launched a sophisticated psy-ops campaign against Haiti's military regime to restore deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Using market-research surveys, the Army's 4th Psychological Operations Group divided Haiti's population into 20 target groups and bombarded them with hundreds of thousands of pro-Aristide leaflets appealing to their particular affinities. Before U.S. intervention, the CIA made anonymous phone calls to Haitian soldiers, urging them to surrender, and sent ominous E-mail messages to some members of Haiti's oligarchy who had personal computers.
This was just the beginning. The promise of infowar has grown exponentially with the increasing power and pervasiveness of computer microprocessors, high-speed communications and sophisticated sensors--all with tremendous battle potential for those who know how to manipulate them.
Infowar offices are being set up in the Army, Navy and Air Force. In June the National Defense University in Washington quietly graduated its first class of 16 infowar officers, specially trained in everything from defending against computer attacks to using virtual reality in planning battle maneuvers. Last month the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, finished a global war game that had information-warfare specialists plotting ways to cripple enemy computers. Later this summer senior Pentagon officials will analyze the results of more than a dozen secret infowar games conducted during the past two years to determine how future military tactics should be changed.
Spy agencies are also dabbling in hacker warfare. The National Security Agency, along with top-secret intelligence units in the Army, Navy and Air Force, has been researching ways to infect enemy computer systems with particularly virulent strains of software viruses that already plague home and office computers. Another type of virus, the logic bomb, would remain dormant in an enemy system until a predetermined time, when it would come to life and begin eating data. Such bombs could attack, for example, computers that run a nation's air-defense system or central bank. The CIA has a clandestine program that would insert booby-trapped computer chips into weapons systems that a foreign arms manufacturer might ship to a potentially hostile country--a technique called "chipping." In another program, the agency is looking at how independent contractors hired by armsmakers to write software for weapons systems could be bribed to slip in viruses. "You get into the arms manufacturer's supply network, take the stuff off-line briefly, insert the bug, then let it go to the country," explained a CIA source who specializes in information technology. "When the weapons system goes into a hostile situation, everything about it seems to work, but the warhead doesn't explode."