On May 31, 2001, the IDF's
Combat Engineering Corps
conducts training in the
southern part of Israel,
in order to strengthen
the security grip on one
of the country's largest
land borders. Credit: Israel
Defense Forces.
world
The future of high-tech warfare
and Israel's role within it.
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Cyber Superpower
Ronen Shnidman
JNS.org
A
s technology grows by leaps
and bounds, leading thinkers
gathered last week at the 2013
Israeli Presidential Conference to discuss
the future of warfare. Israel's cyber weap-
ons will eventually replace the pre-emptive
strike role the Israel Air Force famously
played in the 1967 Six-Day War, according
to Israel Defense Forces Brig. Gen. (res.)
Yair Cohen, former commander of Israel's
much-vaunted signal intelligence corps
Unit 8200.
Cohen predicted that in the future,
Israel would be able to neutralize enemy
weapons systems and units with "a single
keystroke:' Unit 8200, besides serving
as the Israeli equivalent to the America's
National Security Agency (NSA), is also
considered one of the breeding grounds
for the talent behind Israel's "startup
nation" society of innovators and entre-
preneurs, which most recently made head-
lines with Google's $1.3 billion acquisition
of the Israeli navigation startup Waze.
"[Israel has] the potential to be the
[world's] No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3 cyber
superpower:' Cohen said during the June
19 Presidential Conference panel titled
"Tomorrow's Wars — No Longer Science
Fiction:'
Besides for Cohen, Israeli panelists
included IDF Brig. Gen. (res.) Daniel Gold,
who won the 2012 Israel Defense Prize for
74 June 27 • 2013
his role in developing the Iron Dome bat-
tery to defend Israel against short-range
missiles and rockets, and Dr. Ariel Levite,
a nonresident senior associate in the
Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie
Endowment. The panel also featured two
Americans, Professor Edward Luttwak, a
senior associate of the Center for Strategic
and International Studies of Washington,
D.C., and Prof. Michael Walzer, co-editor
of the magazine Dissent and contribut-
ing editor to The New Republic as well as
professor emeritus of social science at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton
University.
The Future Of War
Despite Cohen and Gold's presentations
of the IDF's advanced technological capa-
bilities, American panelists Luttwak and
Walzer agreed that wars — even in the
future — will still be decided by infantry.
Luttwak stated that based on
Israel's experience fighting Hezbollah
in the Second Lebanon War of 2006
and America's experience in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the actual trend for wars
these days is to begin with the deployment
of high-tech weapons like drones, then
revert to medium-tech weapons such as
armor and eventually employ light infan-
try to achieve war goals.
Luttwak also expressed reservations about
overspending and the political implica-
tions of overreliance on new technology in
the U.S., with particular reference to the
"Israel has the potential
to be the world's No. 1,
No. 2 or No. 3 cyber
superpower."
- Israel Defense Forces
Brig. Gen. (res.) Yak Cohen
NSM recently revealed PRISM surveil-
lance program.
During the panel, Levite predicted
that the world was moving toward a state
of constant low-intensity warfare along
"physical, cognitive and cyber" dimen-
sions. He stated that warfare was becom-
ing like "a chronic disease with occasional
flare-ups:'
Levite's implication was that amid these
conditions, countries need to take active
measures to defend against attack at all
times and to handle large-scale confronta-
tions when they occur.
Cyber Warfare
Middle East Internet usage and cyber
threat expert Tal Pavel echoed and elabo-
rated on many of the panel's points in an
interview with JNS.org . Cyber warfare,
in particular, should be considered as an
enhancement to physical warfare, not a
replacement to it, said Pavel, founder and
CEO of Middleeasternet, a consultancy
that monitors and researches the Internet
and cyber threats in the Middle East and
the Islamic world.
The major difficulties with cyber war-
fare, Pavel explained, are also present with
traditional, physical warfare — one has
to determine who attacked and how to
deter them. The change brought by cyber
warfare, he said, is its ability to make basic
wartime questions incredibly difficult to
answer and traditional limitations, such as
the distance to a target, meaningless.
During his presentation, Cohen gave a
recent example of the problems caused by
the difficulty in determining the origin
of a cyber attack. In January 2012, Saudi
hackers allegedly stole thousands of Israeli
credit card numbers and personal details
(originally it was claimed that 400,000
were stolen). Some independent Israeli
hackers then retaliated by unleashing a
cyber counterattack on Saudi credit card
holders. But according to Cohen, the ini-
tial attack actually did not originate from
Saudi Arabia.
Pavel said a distinction needs to be
made when addressing cyber threats,
between attacks that only cause cyber
damage, such as defacing websites, and
cyber attacks that can cause real-world
damage by disabling or taking control of
computer systems responsible for manag-
ing tangible operations. Pavel explained
the distinction as the difference of a
hacker attack that takes the Tel Aviv-Jaffa
municipality website offline, and an attack
that shut downs the computers that con-
trol Tel Aviv's traffic light system. One
shuts down a website, but the other can
paralyze the city and can cause physical
injuries and fatalities as well as significant
financial losses.
Cohen, like Pavel, emphasized the need
to distinguish between simple hacker
attacks on websites and email accounts, and
those aimed at bringing down computer
systems that manage important infrastruc-
ture. Cohen presented the vast size of this
high-tech problem, saying that the IDF esti-
mates that, on average, "500 million cyber
attacks take place per second:'
But while warfare is rapidly expand-
ing onto new fronts, the consensus
among experts at the Israeli Presidential
Conference was that the rules of the game
largely remain the same.
"The Internet area didn't invent much:'
Pavel said. "These problems exist in the
physical world:'
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