The Pilots of Cyberwar

As a bit of a history buff I can’t avoid a slight tingling of déjà vu every time I read some new story commenting upon the ethics, morality and legality of cyber-warfare/cyber-espionage/cyberwar/cyber-attack/cyber-whatever. All this rhetoric about Stuxnet, Flame, and other nation-state cyber-attack tools, combined with the parade of newly acknowledged cyber-warfare capabilities and units within the armed services of countries around the globe, brings to the fore so many parallels with the discussions about the (then) new-fangled use of flying-machines within the military in the run-up to WWI.

Call me a cynic if you will, but when the parallels in history are so evident, we’d be crazy to ignore them.

The media light that has been cast upon the (successful) deployment of cyber-weapons recently has many people in a tail-spin – reflecting incredulity and disbelief that such weapons exist, let alone have already been employed by military forces. Now, as people begin to understand that such tools and tactics have been fielded by nation-states for many years prior to these most recent public exposures, reactions run from calls for regulation through to global moratoriums on their use. Roll the clock back 100 years and you’ll have encountered pretty much the same reaction to the unsporting use of flying-machines as weapons of war.

That said, military minds have always sought new technologies to gain the upper-hand on and off the battlefield. Take for example Captain Bertram Dickenson’s statement to the 1911 Technical Sub-Committee for Imperial Defence (TSID) who were charged with considering the role of aeroplanes in future military operations:

“In case of a European war, between two countries, both sides would be equipped with large corps of aeroplanes, each trying to obtain information on the other… the efforts which each would exert in order to hinder or prevent the enemy from obtaining information… would lead to the inevitable result of a war in the air, for the supremacy of the air, by armed aeroplanes against each other. This fight for the supremacy of the air in future wars will be of the greatest importance…”

A century later, substitute “cyber-warriors” for aeroplanes and “Internet” for air, and you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference from what you’re seeing in the news today.

Just as the prospect of a bomb falling from the hands of an aviator hanging out the cockpit of a zeppelin or biplane fundamentally changed the design of walled fortifications and led to the development of anti-aircraft weaponry, new approaches to securing the cyber-frontier are needed and underway. Then, as now, it wasn’t until civilians were alerted to (or encountered first-hand) the reality of the new machines of war, did an appreciation of these fundamental changes become apparent.

But there are a number of other parallels to WWI (and the birth of aerial warfare) and where cyber-warfare is today that I think are interesting too.

Take for example how the aviators of the day thought of themselves as being different and completely apart from the other war-fighters around them. The camaraderie of the pilots who, after spending their day trying to shoot-down their counterparts, were only too happy to have breakfast, and exchange stories over a few stiff drinks with the downed pilots of the other side is legendary. I’m not sure if it was mutual respect, or a sharing of a common heritage that others around them couldn’t understand, but the net result was that that first-breed of military aviator found more in common with their counterparts than with their own side.


Today, I think you’ll likely encounter the equivalent social scene as introverted computer geeks who, by way of day-job, develop the tools that target and infiltrate foreign installations for their country, yet attend the same security conferences and reveal their latest evasion tactic or privilege escalation technique over a cold beer with one-another. Whether it’s because the skill-sets are so specialized, or that the path each cyber-warrior had to take in order to acquire those skills was so influential upon their world outlook, many of the people I’ve encountered that I would identify as being capable of truly conducting warfare within the cyber-realm share more in common with their counterparts than they do with those tasking them.

When it comes to protecting a nation, cries of “that’s unfair” or “un-sporting” should be relegated to the “whatever” bucket. Any nation’s military, counter-intelligence organization, or other agency tasked with protecting its citizens would be catastrophically failing in their obligations if they’re not already actively pursuing new tools and tactics for the cyber-realm. Granted, just like the military use of aircraft in WW1 opened a Pandora’s box of armed conflict that changed the world forever, ever since the first byte’s traversed the first network we’ve been building towards the state we’re in.

The fact that a small handful of clandestine, weaponized cyber-arms have materialized within the public realm doesn’t necessarily represent a newly opened Pandora’s box – instead it merely reflects  one of the evils from a box that was opened from the time the Internet was born.