Securing Freedom in the Global Commons / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Securing Freedom in the Global Commons / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0804770115
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804770118
- Pub. Date:
- 02/10/2010
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0804770115
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804770118
- Pub. Date:
- 02/10/2010
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
Securing Freedom in the Global Commons / Edition 1
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804770118 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/10/2010 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Securing Freedom in the Global Commons
By Scott Jasper
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7011-8
CHAPTER 1
Disruptions in the Commons
Scott Jasper and Paul Giarra
Defining the Commons
"Transnational terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, piracy, climate change and energy security, cyber attacks, to name just a few—the threats to our collective security in a globalized world—that do not stop at national borders and cannot be successfully addressed by any nation alone."
General John Craddock, U.S. Army, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) clearly recognizes its essential role in confronting and defeating these and other threats and challenges. For NATO and its partners around the world, national security and prosperity depend on the safekeeping of a global system comprising mutually interdependent networks of commerce, communication, and governance. The essence of globalization, fueled by vertiginous technological innovation, has created new realities of connectivity and continuity on which the supercharged global system depends. These developments confront military planners with profound challenges. The globalized system can tend toward instability and dysfunction, especially when vulnerable social structures are threatened by hostile actors. The military opportunities of globalization—networking, speed, and connectivity—are a two-edged sword: defense planners will have to consider new configurations of infrastructure and operational vulnerability, diminished deterrence, the potential for elemental or systemic disruption, and the implications of preemption and decapitating attacks.
The global commons—outer space, international waters and airspace, and cyberspace—constitute the underlying infrastructure of the global system. In old English law, the term "commons" referred to a tract of ground shared by residents of a village, belonging to no one, and held for the good of all. Extrapolating from this construct, global commons have been characterized as natural, or man-made, "assets outside national jurisdiction." Global commons are similar to but less wide-ranging than the elucidation of the term "military domains." A case in point would be the maritime domain, described as "the world's oceans, seas, bays, estuaries, islands, coastal areas, littorals, and the airspace above them," which encompasses far more than just "international waters." That said, the global commons can extend to domains that may be either within or outside of national jurisdiction, so long as the international community has a lawful right to the asset, such as international straits or innocent passage in a territorial sea. Although some might consider the commons to include ungoverned spaces like Antarctica, for the purpose of analytical consistency regarding defense objectives related to the global commons, the U.S. Secretary of Defense's definition cited above is used throughout the volume.
The maritime and air commons are relatively traditional constructs, albeit with new circumstances and implications. The space and cyberspace commons add new, crucial, and yet somewhat imprecise conceptual and operational dimensions. The U.S. military's definition of cyberspace was revised in May 2008 to be "a global domain within the information environment consisting of the interdependent network of information technology infrastructures, including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers." While this interpretation was meant explicitly to describe cyberspace, the absence of previous references to the use of the electromagnetic spectrum initially led to confusion over the role of electronic warfare.
In and through these traditional or emerging global commons, nation-states and non-state actors conduct global enterprise, for good or ill. In essence, the global commons as a set combines in numerous ways into physical and virtual utilities that serve as conduits for the free flow of trade, finance, information, people, and technology in the world's economic system. Likewise, the global commons entail much of the operating space of the international security environment, enabling the physical and virtual movement and operations of allied forces as well as those of transnational, regional, and emergent peer competitors.
As nodal and systemic conduits, most of the commons "are areas that belong to no one state and that provide access to much of the globe." Conversely, the pathways of the commons, like a global vascular system, can also accelerate the vulnerability of critical economic and national infrastructures; the transfer of advanced weapons and military technology; the spread of ideas and ideologies; the movement and communications of criminals and terrorists; and the diversion of dangerous materials. Securing freedom of access to, transit through, and use of the global commons is fundamental to safeguarding the globalized systems.
Integrating the Commons
"We are [also] witnessing new forms of conflict. Cyber attacks against a country's electronic infrastructure have now happened, against Estonia—and they can be crippling. Piracy, long believed to have been eradicated, is back as a major international concern— and in more than just one essential maritime route on which our trade and oil and gas supplies depend."
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO Secretary General
It is misleading to conceptualize or deal with the interests of stakeholders in the global commons independently, that is, to differentiate between the military, civil, or commercial spheres, or to segregate military service roles. This is because the domains of the commons are inherently interwoven—military maritime, space, aerospace, and cyberspace operations overlap with civilian and commercial activities—and because the networks that enable operations or activities in the various overlapping sectors are themselves threaded together. For instance, 80 percent of U.S. Department of Defense satellite communications for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is managed by private-sector companies such as Globalstar, Inmarsat, and Iridium. Military dependence on commercial satellite services will continue until the launch of more secure, higher-capacity connectivity solutions in the 2010 to 2016 timeframe, such as the Wideband Global Satellite and the Advanced Extremely High Frequency system.
The importance of the global commons underlies the power of networks in a military, civil, and commercial context, and new manifestations of networked and interdependent security. Enterprise integration, however, brings with it new levels of vulnerability. First, connectivity enables access. Civil and commercial networks are accessible by design, and thereby vulnerable at very low cost. Likewise, military systems and networks are integrated among services, and with parallel and supporting civilian or commercial applications and networks, at unprecedented levels of connectivity. This greatly enables elemental access to networks, and thereby enhances both the usefulness and the vulnerability of the systems and applications that depend on networks. To protect cyberspace advantages, for example, the infrastructure the U.S. military uses to both launch and defend against cyber attacks runs through the public internet system, which leaves the U.S. military open to attack by adversaries through the same public channels.
Second, systemic integration among and between the military, civil, and commercial sectors enhances the potential for mass disruption and even collapse of critical infrastructures or functions, potentially with effects on the scale of even the most extreme kinetic or weapons-of mass-destruction attacks. To illustrate, the cyberspace linkages in Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, which regulate the operations of most critical infrastructure industries (such as utility companies that manage the electrical power grid), make attractive cyber targets. Cyber attacks on these and other civil or commercial functions that result in energy disruption, financial sector collapse, water system failure, or air traffic disruption would produce cascading impacts on the support infrastructure for military operations.
This dynamic between integration, capability, and vulnerability presents fundamentally different challenges for international defense planners. Securing freedom in the global commons requires protection against attacks from and through these physical and virtual domains, while preserving and enhancing the capability to operate in the global commons for strategic and operational advantage. Strategic trends and drivers in the global system will both define challenges and dictate appropriate solutions that will have to fit the new realities. For example, the current world population growth rate of 60 million people per year will strain economic systems and require global energy production to rise by 1.3 percent per year. By the 2030s, oil requirements could go from 86 to 118 million barrels per day If energy output falls short of demand, the implications for international tension and future conflict are ominous.
Defense planners will have to refer to the history and nature of national policies and international regimes that influence or govern activities in the commons. National domestic concerns can affect international regime formation. Regimes are explicit or implicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-area. By entering, or not, into international agreements, nations accept, or reject, constraints on their absolute freedom of action. Treaties may impose unequal demands on nations, due to the need for signatories to accept a common denominator for policy objectives. For instance, the 2006 U.S. National Space Policy states that "the United States will oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space." Accordingly, the United States does not vote for United Nations General Assembly resolutions intended to prevent an arms race in outer space.
Legal regimes can limit vulnerability and guide appropriate responses, but sometimes only in theory. A case in point: the ubiquitous nature of cyberspace is problematic when it comes to determining attack attribution and prosecution rights, as was seen in Estonia in April 2007. Amid a furious row with Russia over the removal of a Soviet-era war monument from the center of the Estonian capital, swarms of computers from more than fifty countries conducted an anonymous cyber riot that swamped the websites of Estonian ministries, banks, newspapers, and broadcasters with bogus requests for information. 19 International laws and legal codes were not prepared to rule on this cyber aggression, which might have merited designation as an act of war even despite the absence of armed force by a clearly identified enemy.
Protecting the Commons
"The President must prioritize the safety and reliability of high traffic energy shipping routes, such as the Straits of Hormuz. Maintaining open and reliable lanes of commerce protects the U.S. and the global economy from potentially devastating supply disruption and resulting price volatility."
General James L. Jones, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired), President and Chief Executive Officer, Institute for 21st Century Energy
The protection of the global commons is intrinsic to safeguarding national territory and economic interests. Protecting the commons as the locus of the global system is part of the ongoing competition for control that traditionally has been an aspect of rivalry among peers. National leaders and defense planners must contend with the reality that globalization has reduced the barriers to entry for competitors. This reduction has devalued the traditional competitive advantage of dominant global powers, and changed the terms of competition, which in turn has enabled the rise, virtually unprecedented in its speed, of a range of transnational, regional, and emergent peer competitors who are presenting elemental and systemic challenges to international order and legal regimes.
In the case of cyberspace, the skills and tools used in intrusions by criminals are also ideal for state-sponsored computer network attacks. "Robot" networks, or "botnets," made up of computers that are infected with malicious code, can disrupt internet traffic, harvest information, or distribute spam, viruses, or other "malware." Remarkably, some 15 percent of online computers maybe botnet-infected machines, unknowingly controlled through the internet by a malign master. Botnets, like the Storm Worm botnet that spread infectious malware through millions of e-card links, typically facilitate criminal activity but also have political utility. As many as one million botnets were used in the distributed denial-of-service attacks on the Estonian websites. Some observers charge that the Russian government rented botnets from transnational cybercriminals to orchestrate the onslaught for political reasons.
Elemental and systemic challenges are constantly changing, as seen in the cyber-threat landscape, where the majority of malicious activity has become Web-based. Attackers are targeting or altering vulnerable sites (like the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook) that are likely to be trusted by end-users, to gain confidential information during code execution or file download. Underground economy servers, like the Dark Market forum, then sell end-user bank account credentials, credit card information, and identities. While denial-of-service and confidential data loss mostly disturb civil or commercial functions, of even greater concern to the military are designer attacks that are engineered for deep penetration into specific computer systems to steal defense secrets or manipulate data, like the spoofing of global positioning system (GPS) coordinates in precision-guided munitions so a bomb hits the wrong place.
The irony of the commons is that their powerful role in enhancing economic growth and prosperity, the exchange of information, and the flow of goods and services in a globalized world is the very basis of increased insecurity. This is partly familiar, and partly unprecedented. Traditional challenges that emanate from the global commons persist: state actors could aspire to interrupt or deny strategic maneuver in key regions, and challenge assured access to strategic resources, such as in the Strait of Hormuz, where roughly a quarter of the world's oil must pass on tankers. Hostile state actors could deliver mass-effect attacks from the maritime, air, or space commons in an integrated littoral campaign. They could also use cyberspace to mount disruptive attacks on critical, yet vulnerable, infrastructure networks. Depriving allied populations of electricity, communications, and financial services might not be enough to provide the margin of victory in a conflict, but it could damage the political will to win.
Just as state competitors do, non-traditional threats likewise add to defense challenges. Maritime terrorists and other non-state actors, such as modern-day pirates, can disrupt the flow of energy resources and manufactured goods along global lines of communications or at points of entry to critical national infrastructure. Criminal organizations that thrive on the smuggling of weapons, narcotics, and humans also use the commons at low cost for tremendous disruptive effect, sometimes adapting in creative ways to avoid capture. Drug cartels have expanded the ways they transport drugs, using submarines built of fiberglass, wood, and steel, technically known as self-propelled semi-submersibles, to move ten to fifteen tons of cocaine at a time. The custom-built submarines do not fully submerge but are so low to the water, rising less than two feet, that they avoid radar detection, and are usually camouflaged with paint to avoid aerial surveillance.
The powerfully disruptive effect that pirates have on freedom of navigation for commercial shipping in the maritime common is another case in point. The International Maritime Bureau defines piracy as the act of boarding any vessel with intent to commit theft or any other crime, and with an intent or capacity to use force in furtherance of that act. While over 230 actual or attempted attacks occurred worldwide annually from 2004 through 2008, incidents off Somalia and the Gulf of Aden—a key choke point passed each year by over 20,000 vessels, which must reduce speed to ensure safe passage and thus heighten their exposure to interception—surged 200 percent to 111 in 2008.34 All types of vessels are being targeted, attacked, and hijacked by armed Somali pirates, including crude-oil supertankers and chemical tankers, large luxury cruise ships, and freighters ferrying military cargo. Despite the presence of international warships patrolling maritime corridors, eliminating pirate mother ships and apprehending suspected pirates, the brazen pirates, hailing from a violent failed state that has little to offer its population, are undaunted from seeking luxury lifestyles funded by million-dollar cash ransoms.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Securing Freedom in the Global Commons by Scott Jasper. Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Foreword Patrick M. Cronin ix
Acknowledgments xvii
List of Acronyms xix
1 Disruptions in the Commons Scott Jasper Paul Giarra 1
Part 1 Determinants of Security
2 Strategic Trends and Drivers Jeffrey Becker 19
3 The Changing Security Environment Dick Bedford 34
4 Indistinct Legal Regimes James Kraska 49
Part II Challenges To Freedom
5 Maritime Security Jeff Kline 67
6 Cyberspace Control Steven H. McPherson Glenn Zimmerman 83
7 Space Assurance Mike Manor Kurt Neuman 99
8 Ballistic Missile Defense Will Dossel 115
9 Air Superiority Mort Rotleston 131
10 Sea Control Thomas Bowditch 144
Part III Thinking Across Commons
11 Leadership for Complexity and Adaptability Sandra M. Martínez 159
12 Advanced Technology Enablers Marco Fiorello Donald McSwain 174
13 Integrated Training Systems Scott Jasper Scott Moreland 199
Notes 219
About the Authors 261
Selected Bibliography 269
Index 281