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Outside the military, the NSA is deeply worried that computers controlling banking, stock exchanges, air-traffic control, phones and electric power could easily be crippled by determined hackers. "We're more vulnerable than any nation on earth," says NSA director Vice Admiral John McConnell. A wired adversary could take down these computers "without ever entering the country," an outside panel studying future Pentagon missions warned in a report last May. The results of such attacks could cause "widespread fear throughout the civilian population," according to another Pentagon report released last December.
Senior Pentagon and intelligence officials have told TIME that senior White House aides have been considering a top-secret presidential directive spelling out what agencies of the government would defend against infowar or retaliate with a strategic attack by the U.S. (A Clinton adviser even fears an information-warfare strike before next year's presidential election; one of his jobs, he says half-jokingly, is to find a "Cabinet member to blame if something really bad happens.") Senior officers say that in the future, the President's black bag containing the instructions for launching a nuclear strike may also have inside it the codes for U.S. infobombs.
The potential for low-cost and bloodless resolution of conflicts brings with it other problems. Army chaplains recently met to consider the moral implications of cyberwar--fearing, for example, that in lightning-quick electronic attacks, an enemy that wanted to surrender would never have the chance. Treaties may have to be rewritten before chemicals are used to tag enemy soldiers for aerial sensors or biological agents are deployed to eat electronics. Knocking out a stock exchange may seem attractive at first glance, but Washington is reluctant to engage in financial fiddling for the same reason it avoids assassination of foreign leaders: the U.S. is uniquely vulnerable on both counts. The Bush Administration at one point considered disrupting Iraqi computers that controlled government financial transactions, but the CIA opposed the action. "Every time screwing around with financial systems has been discussed as a covert action, people have walked away from it," says a former senior CIA official. "Messing with a country's money represents a fundamental attack. No CIA director has ever recommended it."
Indeed, in some respects, infowar may only refine the way modern warfare has shifted toward civilian targets, from the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo during World War II to the "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia. Taking down a country's air-traffic control or phone systems might be done cleanly with computers-but it still represents an attack on civilians. Economic warfare can be as dire as other forms of war, as embargoes have shown. With its fancy technology, infowar may be able to avoid some of the battlefield's lethal, bloody and dirty traditions. But the words of William Tecumseh Sherman will still apply: "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it."
--With reporting by Mark Thompson/Washington