"I have the power, the capability, sitting in my home with my computer and my modem...to wage war," says James Adams. "That is a very different environment than anything that we have experienced in the past." Adams is Chief Executive Officer of Infrastructure Defense, Inc., which provides a forum for exchange of information and decision making on the critical infrastructure within the private sector and between the private and public sectors worldwide. This article is adapted from comments by Adams at the U.S. Information Agency in August 1998.

The U.S. military last year organized an exercise that involved a simulation in which an international crisis was brewing and a foreign government had hired 35 computer hackers to disrupt the United States' response to that crisis. The "hackers" taking part in the exercise -- called Eligible Receiver -- were, in fact, U.S. government employees. They were given no advance intelligence. They bought their laptops from a local computer store.

The hackers successfully demonstrated that they could with ease break into the power grids of all the major U.S. cities -- from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington, D.C., to New York -- that were linked to the U.S. capability to deploy forces. At the same time they were able to break into the "911" emergency telephone system and could comfortably have taken both of those networks down.

They then moved on to the command and control system of the Pentagon. Over the course of a few days they interrogated 40,000 networks and got root-level access to 36 of them. They were able to go deep inside the command and control structure and, if they had so wished, could have prevented that structure from working effectively.

What this exercise demonstrated was that 35 people using publicly available information with skills that were available around the world really could have prevented the United States from responding to the crisis.

That is an extraordinary demonstration of the power that information warfare represents. That power has impelled the United States to invest very large sums of money in developing an effective offensive capability where war can be waged by other means.

For those who have the capability, there is the opportunity to wage war -- not by deploying soldiers in a conventional sense on a battlefield, with many thousands dying, or, indeed, even deploying missiles in the conventional way -- but instead launching through cyberspace bits and bytes that can effectively destroy a potential aggressor before the troops meet each other on the battlefield.

This means turning out the lights in a major city. It means preventing the foreign exchange market from operating properly. It means interrupting the information flow in a foreign country and inserting one's own information flow to make it possible to wage very effective psychological operations against a potential enemy.

These things sound quite mild but, in fact, they can cause the kind of loss of life that a very large bombing campaign might equally achieve.

For example, a study by the U.S. Air Force on the consequences of taking out the Southwestern power grid in the United States showed that 20,000 people would have died. That would have a devastating effect on the morale of the country and present very interesting new challenges of how we respond.

In the drama with Iraq a few months ago, as we scaled up to take possible military action, there was an effort detected to interfere with the U.S. logistics network. The source of the effort eventually was tracked down to a building in Abu Dhabi. The assumption was that this was Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein waging information war against the United States in advance of the military action. Americans were deployed to deal with this threat. After they reached the relevant building, they discovered a router (transfer point) on the Internet and, in fact, that the "attack" was being launched by some teenagers in the United States.

That is an absolute illustration of the real challenge and opportunity that information warfare represents. We can launch an attack, and it can appear as if it came from somewhere far distant from its actual point of origin. Likewise, when an attack is launched against us, it's very, very difficult to discover where that attack came from. Even if you can discover the source, it's very difficult then to launch a strike. What are you striking and why are you doing so? What public response, public support, will there be for the actions that you are taking if thousands of people die? How do you actually persuade people that this was the right thing to do? There is no evidence to cite of dead babies lying in the street. There is no man standing on the street corner with a gun in his hand. It is not the kind of thing that people are used to. This presents a real challenge.

These issues and the opportunities they represent are proving to be very attractive to just about every country that has an information operations capability. For the nation state the potential of information warfare is something that's attractive, but it's also extremely threatening, because information warfare is not about nations; it's about the power that is given to individuals.

Information warfare is, I believe, fundamentally changing a dynamic that has existed for a very long time that has helped sustain stability between states, and that is that the government decides the pace of change, by and large, and is an instrument for a lot of the change.

When a new weapons system is developed, it takes quite a long time for that weapons system to go from the country that generated it to a country that does not have the capability to produce it. You are looking at a 20-year cycle. Today the latest computer is developed by Compaq, softwared by Microsoft, and is available at CompUSA, a computer store with outlets throughout the United States. Maybe, just maybe, the government might buy it within the next two or three years, but it's unlikely. Whereas, I can go to the computer store with my checkbook in hand and buy it. In an information war, that is my weapon.

I have the power, the capability, sitting in my home with my computer and my modem -- if I only understood how to do it -- to wage war. That is a very different environment than anything that we have experienced in the past.

It is particularly interesting, I think, that what we are seeing as the information revolution unfolds -- and we're only at the very, very, very beginning of it -- is the new range of alliances that is emerging. I recently talked to a friend who had put together an on-line conference of mountain men. These are people who live in the mountains all over the world -- whether it be the Alps or the Urals or the Rockies or wherever -- and they had a two-day on-line conference. These people who had never communicated before learned that they had a lot in common. They all hated the people in the valley. They all hated government, and they all cared passionately about the environment.

That's an example of a new community whose members have more in common with each other than they do, perhaps, with the other citizens of the nations in which they actually live. Now those groups -- whether they are the 52 terrorist organizations who currently have web sites, environmental organizations, or people who simply feel disenfranchised -- all have an opportunity to talk to each other, to share knowledge, and to express their frustrations. It's striking how there is a unity -- or an ability to unite -- among these groups that never existed before.

While we do not have the ability to eliminate the likelihood of war, we have the offensive ability to wage war by other means and certainly change the way we escalate to traditional conflict. And that presents some real challenges. First of all, government has to understand what war means. We are still locked into a Cold War environment. If you ask the Air Force or the Navy or the others who are developing these capabilities, "When are you allowed to use what you have?" they say, "Well, we asked the Justice Department that question a couple of years ago, and they haven't answered yet."

That is a big issue. These weapons are designed to be used exactly before we go to war to prevent us from going to war in the traditional sense. And yet they are very aggressive and very powerful. That is going to be a very big challenge for government. It already is. How does government remain relevant when everything around it is changing at such a pace?

We also, in a defensive way, have to deal with a different type of threat. Traditionally the military has seen itself as soldiers who go to the front line, fight, get wounded, die, or come back; they either succeed or they fail. But in the new environment, all of us are actually on the front line. The issue is how we defend and protect ourselves as well as how we are protected by government or by the private sector. We are part of the process. This represents a very different environment.

The Y2K (year 2000) computer problem is a very good illustration of this. It's actually a social issue, just as information warfare is a social issue. Information warfare is about turning off the water supply, cutting the power, making the wastewater treatment plants fail, stopping the ATM (bank automatic teller machine) systems, taking away the fabric of life.

Dealing with Y2K is going to demonstrate the scope of the interdependence of critical infrastructures. We don't yet -- any of us -- fully understand how interconnected everything we do is. If one piece of the puzzle falls out, the rest of the puzzle fragments as well. It's not just a national issue, it's an international issue.

So as we move forward addressing the challenges of information warfare, we have to address at the same time the challenges of government. What does that mean in this new environment? We have to address the challenge of the critical infrastructure. How do we defend that adequately?

A vital element is the private sector because it's the private sector that is the engine now driving the change unfolding around us. The government has to demonstrate its relevance and to take some form of leadership here, which I believe is noticeably absent.

The private sector can articulate many of these things to defend itself and, thus, to defend each one of us. If we fail to recognize that, I think we will experience some very serious trouble, beginning with Y2K. We will become victims of the new aggressors out there, who will have power that we have never really begun to understand, and when we understand it, it will be too late.

What I would argue is to try to educate people about these issues and to encourage not only public awareness but more action by those who have the ability to spread the word and, thus, create defenses against what is going to be an extremely aggressive environment in the next century.