In Bruce Sterling’s science-fiction novel, Distraction, set in 2044, the Chinese have attacked the U.S. economy by making all American intellectual property freely available electronically to anyone in the world. The U.S. economy has quickly fallen apart. Nomads roam the land, existing on cheap transportation and even cheaper computer power. The situation is so bad that members of the U.S. Air Force, unable to collect their pay, resort to highway robbery. In Sterling’s bleak novel, warfare has shifted from the battlefield to global networks, and China holds the information edge.

They first described how some of the claims about digital warfare are hyped. Then they moved into the many ways that its threat may be all too real.

JOHN ARQUILLA: In the 20th century, as weapons became much more accurate at long range, militaries had to spread out their operations. But that put a premium on communications and made it easier for a foe to interfere with military operations.

Now, because warfare can target information and communications, and because technology helps apply substantial force precisely, there’s the idea that we don’t need to destroy as much as we used to.

But I am reminded of the studies on air power 80 years ago. The hope was air power could bring an opponent to its knees, without requiring that its military be defeated. Yet, all these years later, it is hard to point to a bombing campaign that has worked at the extreme level hoped for.

I expect the same will be true for information warfare. It won’t replace conventional warfare, though it may effectively supplement operations in the field.

MARTIN LIBICKI: The effects of information warfare tend to be temporary. If I put a virus in your computer, there are ways to get the virus out. If I jam your communications, you often can resort to other media and keep information flowing.

Still, with the introduction of information technology, the very nature of the way we think about fighting has changed. It is crucial to be able to identify all the important targets in the battlefield in real time. This shifts the center of gravity in a modern military away from the ability to organize forces and toward the ability to illuminate the battlefield.

This shift has been going on since the late 1970s, when our primary enemy was the Soviet Union, and we were worried that the Soviet tank advantage in Europe would be overwhelming. Our initial notion was that any attack in Europe was also against the U.S., and we would, therefore, respond with nuclear weapons. As the Soviet Union gained nuclear parity with the U.S. in the late ’60s and early ’70s, though, it became harder to make this strategy credible, because it could lead to all-out nuclear war. The Department of Defense had to find a way to deal with the Soviet threat through conventional means.

It came up with something based on the assumption that, at the beginning of a war, most of the forces opposing NATO countries would move through Poland and eastern Germany to get to the front lines. The strategy, called "follow-on forces attack," was to destroy the forces before they could even get to the battle.

We developed munitions—such as laser-guided bombs and fancy devices like the Tomahawk cruise missile—that we can get to within 10 meters of a targeted location. We also started work on sensors that would tell us where those targets are, even if they’re moving. Finally, we began building networks that would let us constantly update information about the targets. Because of information technology, we are approaching the point where we can tell a weapon to go to a moving point on the map and update the location during a flight.

The way that people are going to get killed, by and large, isn’t going to change because of information warfare. In other words, they’re going to be blown apart by flying metal. But, in past generations, you had to get up really close to somebody and shoot him. And as the old assertion goes, if the enemy is in range, so are you. Now, you don’t have to be close.

ARQUILLA: In Kosovo, we had an interesting problem. We were able to fight at "standoff" ranges, but we also let the enemy know that that’s how we were going to fight them. They were able to disperse their forces because they knew there wasn’t going to be a ground attack. They spread out and hid tanks in barns all over. They didn’t concentrate equipment anywhere, so the effectiveness of the bombing campaign was small.

The information revolution does also give us the ability to engage very close in because of the rise of very precise location sensors. That is going to be important given demographic changes. Much of the lesser-developed world’s population is moving into a small number of very large cities, so we may find that military conflict is going to migrate into urban settings.

Technology also allows for interesting new strategic moves. For example, I favor installing electronic sensors as a decoy someplace you don’t have troops. You can create a raft of electronic signals that the enemy suspects represent a force in the field when, in fact, there’s nothing there. It’s a bit like Gen. Erwin Rommel in the North African war using trucks to kick up dust and to make the British think his tanks were in a certain location. Now, we’ve got a kind of electronic dust that can be created.

Various countries are also building microwave weapons, which take the kinetic energy of electrons and transform it into a microwave field that can do more than cause a short-term disruption to a communication network. What we can say openly is that both the Chinese and the Russians are experimenting with more powerful versions that combine microwave fields with traditional explosives.

People in other areas have been developing unusual weapons, including some in the form of mechanical ants that swarm. They can have lots of uses, anything from gumming up the treads of tanks—making it impossible for the machinery to move—to eating away at hard-to-reach communications lines.

Lasers can be used in nonlethal ways as part of weapons that are able to dazzle or blind adversaries on occasion.

The range of effectiveness of some of these weapons, though—namely those that use microwaves—is quite small today.

LIBICKI: Other facets of battle have changed, too, including how much nonclassified information gets filtered back to the enemy. Back in World War I, you had two forces on the Western front fighting each other, and neither of them had a good sense of how the other side was holding up psychologically because both countries were fairly buttoned up on the home front. It’s quite unlikely that anybody is ever going to fight a war like that again, because there is so much information available out there.

ARQUILLA: The corollary is that it will be much easier for a repressed people to see what’s going on in the rest of the world. People will know that they’re being abused and that they have supporters in foreign countries, so military dictatorships will have less ability to retain power against democratizing forces.

LIBICKI: Everyone will also have new ways to gather information because sensors are getting increasingly small. People talk jokingly about spies using fairy dust. That may be a little bit of an exaggeration, but you can certainly get microphones smaller than buttons. You might even get them one-tenth the size of buttons. In fact, the most difficult thing to do would be to get them to transmit what they recorded. It may be that you bug somebody by covering an area with all these tiny buttons, then sweep them up later.

Still, gathering intelligence is, in some ways, getting harder. The National Security Agency is having a tougher time partly because a personal digital assistant has enough processing power to encrypt a message in ways that all the machines in the basement of Fort Meade can’t decode. Another reason is that fiber optics make it harder to tap communication lines.

The amount of traffic out there will also make it difficult to track any conversation. We’re getting to the point where we may have a billion people on cellphones in about three years. That’s a lot of conversation. All the innocuous stuff is not so easy to sort through.

ARQUILLA: Micro electromechanical machinery and minuscule sensors are probably going to be the way to go for intelligence gathering. The problem is that, to sprinkle these small sensors where you want them, you have to get close to your opponent.

Each day, I spend some time in a facility for sensitive material, which isn’t quite like what you see in the movies. As I go through the retinal scanner every day, I always pause a moment and look at that Coke machine next to the door outside the vault. I think about how many people buy a Coke on their way into the vault. It seems to me it would be easy to put small sensors on the cans, or even to turn some of the cans into sensors. Because my facility in California dutifully recycles, someone could retrieve the cans once they’re outside the facility.

My point is that we need to think in low-tech ways about the use of incredibly high-tech sensors. And we must think about all the people in large commercial enterprises with access to sensitive areas who could plant things: janitors, disgruntled employees. The number is enormous.

This doesn’t just apply to the military. Commercial enterprises must understand that they could be on the front lines of future wars. It’s only a matter of time before terrorists hack into businesses’ information systems and disrupt service as part of an attempt at economic warfare.

Think back to the history of attacks on airplanes. It was 1949 when a young man packed his mother’s bags and sent her off on a trip with a bomb in her bag that exploded the plane. It took 20 years before terrorists began to try to do that. Over the last 30 years, terrorists have tried to get bombs on planes 70 times and have succeeded in bringing planes down about 15 times.

Now is the time for commercial enterprises to begin planning for informational attacks. Strong encryption can help protect companies, but an attack that jams up communication lines so that service can’t be delivered properly can’t be dealt with just with encryption. Companies need other contingency plans.

LIBICKI: The more the government talks about cyber terrorism, the more people will think of major computer attacks as acts of war, and thus as something the government is responsible for warding off.

Let’s say a hacker caused the lights to go out in Chicago in order to cause panic and stress. Is the hacker more likely to achieve his ends (that is, a panicked population) if immediately afterward some Army general gets on television to declare everything under control—or if the governor of Illinois gets on television to excoriate Commonwealth Edison Co. for lapses in how it administers its systems? Probably the former. Conversely, I want ComEd to worry that the focus will be on its lack of security rather than on the ill will of the attacker.

People have to be held responsible for security. There are too many instances where we sacrifice security for convenience. That’s not where you want to be.

Even the military needs to think harder about the security of the devices they use. Using high-tech communication has its advantages, but the best reason not to outfit every soldier with a cellphone or even a uniform with wireless communication capabilities is that he could give away his position.

The military knows better, but maybe half the Israeli army carries cellphones into battle. The soldiers often use their phones to order pizza.

ARQUILLA: Many soldiers will call home, too. After all, we’re talking about battle space that is highly urban.

You’re right that they’re violating security principles. The more your force relies on digital communication, the more vulnerable it may be to detection. Even if the opponent can’t read the exact communications, they can learn a lot about where you are and what you’re up to.

As we strive to make operations more efficient by using advanced information technology, we will invariably run up against the problem of weakening security. This is a trade-off that businesses also have to worry about.

Libicki can be reached at libicki@rand.org.