A New MAD?

A number of bloggers have written about the (Russian) cyber Denial of Service attack on Estonian computers in response to Estonian plans to remove a Soviet-era memorial to the Russian "liberation" of Estonia from the Nazis.

John Robb, writing at Global Guerrillas, proposes a countermeasure:

The key is to develop an offensive capability that draws on the lessons of the cold war.... We may shortly see a reprise of this concept for warfare between states in an interdependent world, where disruption replaces destruction in a new MAD.... The option for Estonia is clear, will it establish a similar capability alone (or in conjunction with other states to form an umbrella of protection) to make the new MAD a reality? The best approach for this is to develop an open source network of hackers/black marketeers that can match the Russians. That shouldn't be hard.

Maybe, one day in the future, we will be reading newspaper reports of the progress of "cyber-battles" the way our ancestors read about the progress of battles in World War 1 or 2. But seriously, the implications of open source network of hackers raises the issue of non-state actors working, in this example, on behalf of states, that is specific states versus other specific states. It is an interesting exercise to think about that in relation to discussions going on in the blogosphere about third gen gangs and their growing influence and the threat they pose in Iraq and in the U.S. as well as Central America.

Open source hackers fighting off a cyber attack on the state in which they in represent the mobilization of a gang-like group of people to defend a state. If 3rd gen gangs can pose a threat to nation states, it also seems that they can be used by nation states.

Richard at Belmont Club posts an email from a Marine heading back to Iraq:

...we may have found part of the answer to your query as to how to handle 3rd Gen gangs/irregular warfare/the problem with no name (as in your post: "Total Blurring of Crime and War"): the answer is not to eradicate an insurgency, it is to create or find one's own group that offers a reasonable alternative. This is really what has happened in Anbar: the tribes were colluding with Al Qaeda and other criminal and terror groups, but now we have turned them and empowered them.

Just as the Estonians could recruit their own hackers to fight off a Russian cyber attack, maybe what we're seeing in Iraq is that the tip of the spear of U.S. policy in the GWOT, which is the military, has begun to figure out the solution to the problem of how to counter the tribal, decentralized nature of the enemy we face. We started down this path in Afghanistan in 2001 with our support of certain warlords. It appears to be happening again in Anbar.

The unnamed Marine adds another point, which is that:

Here's the real takeaway though: this never would have happened without some sort of American presence in Iraq. It was not diplomats that turned the tribes, it was military officers.

He then adds to this, and this is the Money Quote:

That is the secret that will be hard to swallow: we are in an age wherein the opposite of the 'exit strategy' will have to be the lynchpin of strategy: presence, not early exit, is what is required in these broad swaths of the world that where instability threatens US interests. The key will be not to figure out whether to be there or not, which is the current debate. The key will be to figure out how much to be there and in what form: soldier, diplomat, spy, or some other category that has yet to be determined: perhaps a combo of all three, or perhaps some privatized version of any one of them.

Maybe we will see the rebirth of MAD.