Cyberwarfare and the Game of Go
Last Updated on Saturday, 2 August 2008 10:39 Written by Jeffreycarr Monday, 28 July 2008 06:16
When playing Go, resentments clear away. Thought become like the moon arising at night. There, on the beach of the ocean of endless births and deaths the Go stones become uncountable grains of sand. The white and black stones become the colors of day and night , the star-points become the nine lights of heaven, the three hundred and sixty intersections render the numbers of the days of the year. (from the Noh play Go)
The U.S. Air Force released its list of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant topics today. Predictably there were several in the area of cyberwarfare. This is a tough issue, not just for the USAF but for all of the military services as well as the intelligence agencies like the NSA and the Central Security Service who are tasked with the responsibility of protecting our critical information infrastructure, among other duties.
LTG Keith Alexander (US Army) wrote “Warfighting in Cyberspace” for the Joint Forces Quarterly almost one year ago today, and covered the challenges quite well. Here’s an excerpt:
The speed at which the cyberspace domain is evolving and its ever-growing impact on national security make this potentially as critical a period as that faced by Mitchell, Claire Chennault, and their contemporaries as they realized the potential of the air domain and sought to develop airpower doctrine. Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of 20 years to develop strategy, tactics, and doctrine to deal with this revolution and maintain U.S. superiority in this rapidly changing environment.
The trends for advances in technology, often (correctly or incorrectly) related to Moore’s Law and derivative theories, such as the Law of Accelerating Returns proposed by Ray Kurzweil in his 2001 essay, dictate that we must move quickly. If one examines the advances in Internet and computer technology in just the last 5 years, it is readily apparent that we could find ourselves behind or even militarily irrelevant in cyberspace.
It struck me this morning that the game of Go offers a paradigm that’s similiar to the distributed network of cloud computing. Most of our nation’s legacy networks (including the Department of Defense) are obvious targets for the cyberwarfare activities of our opponents. By moving strategic networks into the cloud, we can deny our opponents a hard target to focus on. Additionally, by leaving old networks in place as a focus for cyber attacks, we employ the Weiqi strategy of Lure the Tiger down from the Mountain; i.e., don’t fight where your enemy is strong.
It’s clear that innovation is called for when thinking about cyberwarfare. Perhaps considering the strategies of an ancient Chinese board game can inform our future tactics in cyberspace.
See also Unrestricted Warfare, The Chinese Box, and the Game of Go
UPDATE: Here’s an excellent post on some of the security advantages offered by Cloud Computing.
Unrestricted Warfare, the Chinese Box, and the game of Go
Last Updated on Sunday, 20 April 2008 11:19 Written by admin Sunday, 20 April 2008 11:19
In 1999, a seminal work on Chinese military strategy was published by two Senior Colonels of the Peoples Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), SrCol Qiao Liang and SrCol Wang Xiangsui, entitled Chaoxian zhan (translated as “Warfare that exceeds boundaries”).
Their book gained international prominence after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center because Liang and Xiangsui appear to have predicted it with uncanny accuracy. One Panamanian publisher reproduced it with a picture of the WTC in flames on its cover, thereby furthering the claim that the book was a blueprint for an attack against the West. James Perry more correctly defines it as a new way of looking at the future of warfare.
In July, 2002, the Asia Times printed a new article by the two Colonels “Chinese box approach to international conflict“. In it, they discuss China’s uber strategy in dealing with specific international issues:
“It is Chinese practice to attack an issue with a framework larger than the issue itself. When a crisis occurs, Chinese leaders first detach from it temporally and spacially. They spend time thinking about the issue before action, thus allowing more room for maneuver in the future. This is somewhat like playing with a magic box: first you pack the specific problem and related factors into a box and then fit it into larger boxes with related problems in different levels. Finally, you come up with a framework of highest generality to harness the whole situation.”
In this article, the authors later allude to the Chinese game of Weiqi (more commonly called by its Japanese name “Go”) and the strategy of the “idle piece”.
“Although the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), established in 1996, is the first regional organization created under the auspices of China, because of the lack of any concrete follow-up measures and the stable conditions of Central Asia at the time of its creation, it was regarded as expendable, like an “idle piece” in the Chinese game of go.
After September 11, the United States, with its victimization by terrorists as a moral justification, marshaled a global anti-terrorism campaign and waged a war in Afghanistan. Suddenly tension rose in Central Asia. Faced with this emergency, SCO members could not even come up with a common position. Instead, they declared their support for the US anti-terrorist campaign individually. The fact that Russia and China remained silent to US double standards in regard to Chechen and East Turkestan terrorists especially exposed the impotence of the SCO.
This changed when the SCO held its summit in St Petersburg recently. The six members passed the Charter of SCO, issued an “anti-terrorist statement”, decided to set up an office in Beijing, and established an anti-terrorist center in Kyrgyzstan, which helped gain some say for China, Russia and the Central Asian countries in the global anti-terrorism campaign. Suddenly the SCO had become a real thing.”
Today, the SCO’s membership (both full and observer members) gives the organization a leadership position in global economic, military, and energy sectors, and that’s worrisome to both Japan and the U.S., who was denied observer status in the SCO in 2005.
“The SCO is becoming a rival block to the US alliance,” said a senior Japanese official recently. “It does not share our values. We are watching it very closely.”
Unrestricted Warfare doesn’t imply chaotic thinking. If anything, it expands traditional thinking into new areas. In the game of Go, like the Art of War:
“Those who calculate greatly will win; those who calculate only a little will lose. But what of those who don’t make any calculations at all?!” This is why everything must be calculated, in order to foresee victory and defeat.” – Sun Tzu
The U.S. approach to studying Unrestricted Warfare is being primarily driven by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory’s annual Unrestricted Warfare Symposium. Unclassified papers and presentations for each of the three events are linked to below:
Inside Cyber Warfare
