Fundamentally new troops
Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Rayevsky training ground (Krasnodar Territory) 29.03.2013/XNUMX/XNUMX while observing the development of ground forces, combat and military transport aviationNavy ships
From now on, we live in the world of cyberwar, kibervoysk and commands officially, as recently became known from the statement of the Minister of Defense. The pioneers here were the United States, riding the technological wave of information technology - but who at the same time remembers that one of the information theorists weapons was the Soviet marshal? It is the quietest weapon in the world, but it can also be the most efficient, unprecedented way combining physical and humanitarian scientific principles.
Information Operations Troops
In the Armed Forces of Russia, there are troops of information operations, said Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu during his speech at the “government hour” in the State Duma 22 February. Usually, the Minister of Defense speaks in the State Duma behind closed doors, but on the eve of Defender of the Fatherland Day it was decided to hold the meeting open.
During the discussion, Vladimir Zhirinovsky suggested not to forget about counter-propaganda - in Soviet times, there was a special seventh directorate in the structure of the Ministry of Defense, he recalled, and it can be recreated. “Now we need special propaganda to not only know the enemy’s army, but also to prepare for working with the population,” Zhirinovsky said.
“I just want to tell you that four years as created. True, it is not called the seventh, but a little differently. During this time, troops of information operations were created, which is much more effective and stronger than all that we previously created in the direction called counter-propaganda. Because propaganda should also be so clever, literate, ”the minister said in response.
According to the head of the State Duma Committee on Defense, Vladimir Shamanov, information operations troops were created primarily "to protect the interests of national defense and confrontation in the information sphere."
Of course, it is not a secret for specialists that since the beginning of the 2000s in Russia, courses have been organized for officers whose purpose was to increase information literacy. In the 2014 year, by order of the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation Sergei Shoigu, information operations forces were created and received a regular structure in the army, and cybernetic command was created at the general staff. 12 May 2014 of the TASS, with reference to its source in the Ministry of Defense, published the following message: “The proposal to create such a structure, designed for cybernetic and informational confrontation with a likely adversary, has been in the works for more than one year. Last year's revelations by the CIA ex-officer Edward Snowden of global electronic surveillance by the NSA United States only accelerated the decision-making process. ”
According to the agency's interlocutor, units and subunits in military districts and in fleetsstaffed with highly qualified specialists: mathematicians, programmers, engineers, cryptographers, signalmen, electronic warfare officers, translators and others.
Now, not only about the availability, but also about the high level of new ones, it is even possible to clarify - the Minister announced the fundamentally new troops. Ex-Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (2004-2008) Army General Yuri Baluyevsky, commenting on the statement of Sergei Shoigu, said that victory in the information confrontation is often more important than in a classic war. “The victory over the enemy in this war can be much more important than the victory in the classic military confrontation, since it is bloodless, and the effect is amazing, exsanguinating and paralyzing all the authorities of the enemy state,” Baluyevsky told RIA News.
Cyberwar - the fifth area of war, after land, sea, air and space
Every day, the number of people accessing the Internet, across the globe, is steadily increasing. By 2017, according to various sources, from 42 to 48,% of the world's population will be able to access the international network. Billions of emails and messages are sent every day, even the most obstinate retrogrades can no longer deny the triumph of the information age on planet Earth.
But all these messages, including secret ones, can be vulnerable. The British magazine The Economist described cyberwar as "the fifth war area, after earth, sea, air and space." But how realistic is the threat of an invasion of the cyberspace of any state, what are the dangers, and what are the prospects for this, the most futuristic part of the modern hybrid war?
More recently, against the background of constantly coming news about the interference of “Russian hackers” in the affairs of the European Union states and the United States, a report by the international firm Zecuricon Analytics was published. Kommersant cites data according to which Russia spends up to 300 million dollars a year on its cyber divisions. The total number of employees in the relevant divisions of employees reaches thousands of people.
Despite its high potential, Russia is only in fifth place, in the unofficial cyber warfare standings. The United States, China, Great Britain and South Korea are consistently located in the top four. Moreover, the number of employees can reach 20 thousand people, as in China, and financing - up to 7 billion dollars like the United States. It is worth noting that other countries have their own, sometimes even sensational units of cybersecurity, for example, the 121 squadron in North Korea, remembered by the hacking of the American servers that kept a joke movie about Kim Jong-un.
The pioneers were the Americans. The head of the US National Security Agency (NSA), or NSA, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, announced the beginning of the formation of cyber war as a special unit of the US Strategic Command, 5 in May 2009. The main task of the unit, according to the general, was to protect the country from attacks through computer networks and ensure the security of electronic systems. However, as demonstrated by Edward Snowden, who worked for the CIA and the same NSA, the United States used its power computer capabilities not only to protect networks and systems, but also for quite active operations, creating an unprecedented network of global surveillance.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the National Center for Defense Management
Two battlefields and two principles of cyberwar
It is known that in the 21 century, many sciences have moved to interdisciplinary living conditions, which means that in order to consider any problem, we need to explore it not only within one science, but also to connect related disciplines, and perhaps the most unexpected approaches. An exception is not military science. Many have heard terms like hybrid, network-centric, information warfare. Cyber war in this case, synergistically, as in the theory of the action of complex systems, is included in each of the above types of wars. In this case, we do not mean the classical means of electronic warfare, but information systems.
The chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia, Army General Valery Gerasimov, explained in detail that “in modern conflicts, the emphasis of the methods used in the struggle is shifting towards the integrated use of political, economic, informational and other non-military measures implemented with reliance on military force.” He wrote the article published in the newspaper “Military-Industrial Courier” by the article “According to Syria’s experience” from March 9 of 2016.
Linked by a global network, satellite positioning data transmitters, a multi-level reconnaissance system from dronesreconnaissance aircraft, control aircraft and spy satellites, the modern armies of developed countries act as a single whole in an unlimited space. Between the Iraq campaigns conducted by the United States, the total bandwidth of the Pentagon's military network increased 7 times, to 3 GHz. And this is for 12 incomplete years from 1991 to 2003. Unfortunately, data on the modern development of information military systems in the United States is not available, which in its own way speaks of their importance.
During the operation to force Georgia to peace in 2008, the Russian command made numerous forced mistakes in controlling units on the battlefield. There were practically no unmanned systems, communication did not work satisfactorily, decision-making time was delayed. It got to the point that the army commander 58, General Khrulev, was ambushed because of disgusting reconnaissance and was wounded.
In the incomplete 8 years, tremendous work has been done to eliminate these shortcomings. This is what Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu told about the work done to the State Duma deputies of February 22: “In 3, the timeliness of decision-making on critical issues was increased. Improved characteristics of data processing systems. For comparison: the Russian National Center surpasses the combined control center of the French armed forces “Balar” in 19 times in the total amount of stored data and in 3 times in computing power. At the same time, the complex of buildings of the Ministry of Defense of Russia is built in 3 times faster and in 2,6 times cheaper than the French center, ”said Sergey Shoigu.
The information platform of the National Center allowed to assemble into a single system of interdepartmental interaction 73 federal executive bodies, authorities of all 85 subjects of the Russian Federation, 1320 state corporations and enterprises of the military-industrial complex. The head of the military department separately highlighted the quality capabilities of the National Center for Defense Management, which monitors and coordinates the 6500 activities of the Armed Forces Action Plan around the clock: “For the first time, a single protected information space was created at the federal, regional and local levels,” said Sergey Shoigu.
But the information war is many-sided. During and after the mentioned conflict between Russia and Georgia, the information sphere also became a battlefield. Not only in combat operations and in diplomatic negotiations, but also in the course of “battles” on websites, in the press and in television studios, it was decided what the final feature would be under the outcome of a short-lived war.
The principle of conducting cyber war itself is divided into two directions: espionage and attacks. The main purpose of espionage is the least possible penetration into the enemy network and the abduction of the necessary information. Attacks are carried out in many directions and may differ from each other. This may be vandalism of sites and servers, for example, with the substitution of their real content for all sorts of obscenity. These are attacks on infrastructure, computer network, failure of services in order to disrupt the normal work of a department or an entire state. And finally, the role of propaganda is growing, given the current opportunities to influence minds across borders.
In developed countries, including Russia, the Internet has long become an integral part of not only the daily lives of citizens, but also such serious systems as exchanges or management systems, including urban transport or a bank. Attacking such systems, government servers, can lead to very serious disasters or social upheavals, discord in the daily life of the country, disrupt the management of military or civilian infrastructure.
As the US government security expert Richard Clark writes in his book Cyber War, "cyber war is the actions of one nation state with the penetration of computers or networks of another nation state to achieve damage or destruction." Network, we add, not only infrastructure, but also media.
The most silent weapon
Any cyberwar has a secret character. America has become the birthplace of such operations, and it’s the first to suffer from them, and it’s completely possible that these are “auto-goals”. Fake news spread on the Facebook social network, say, about Pope’s support for Donald Trump, or about the death of an FBI agent investigating the unprotected mail of Hilary Clinton, could actually have some effect on the US election campaign. The question is who was behind these stuffing. We note only that they were beneficial to the Americans themselves, who took part in the presidential race, to a greater extent than the mythical Russian hackers.
The founder of the Facebook network, Mark Zuckerberg has already announced his statement about the fight against such false news, and whether his team can cope with such a task, time will show. The investigation revealed that such an unexpected country as Macedonia served as a base for the attack. In the city of Velez, there are servers from which hundreds of websites were launched, they spread news, in the style of "Trump hit a Muslim", or "New York was attacked by Syrian jihadists."
Trump, having numerous conflicts with representatives of traditional media, won his cyberwar. Having staked on the Internet, Twitter President Trump was largely interested in supporting his online campaign. It means that any group of hackers, of any country, could help him in this, as well as himself, by putting together a group of his own specialists.
In this case, the systems do not stand still, but are constantly being improved, as in their time armor and anti-tank guns. Now hackers of any level, both civilian cybercriminals and military officers, are improving their skills and coming up with new ways to hack existing systems. At the end of 2016, many world leaders were alarmed by the increased number of cyber attacks on their servers, for example, in Germany compared to 2015, the total number of cybercrime increased by 70%.
Such dynamics, in general, is relevant for all developed countries. Hackers perfect the cyberwar sword, and states create a shield, hiring highly skilled specialists in their computer troops.
In 1980, no one would have thought that most of the major military powers would have their own cyber divisions. But it is curious to note that in the middle of 80-ies, Marshal of the Soviet Union Nikolai Ogarkov in the book “History teaches vigilance "described a similar development of military science, so our country also has a share of pioneering in this area. “In 50 – 60, when nuclear weapons were still small, they were considered only as a means to increase the fire power of the troops. Now information systems are considered as auxiliary means, but once, they will bring military construction to a new level, as nuclear weapons have already brought. ” - wrote a marshal. Obviously, he was right.
Information