In a secure vault in the U.S. Army’s super-secret Intelligence and Security Command in northern Virginia, Colonel Mike Tanksley sketches the barest outlines of the new Armageddons. These are only “What ifs?” he insists, so there cannot really be details. Yet his war scenario resounds with almost biblical force. The next time a tyrant out of some modern Babylon threatens an American ally the U.S. doesn’t immediately send legions of soldiers or fleets of warships. Instead Washington visits upon the offending tyranny a series of thoroughly modern plagues, born of mice, video screens and keyboards. First, a computer virus is inserted into the aggressor’s telephone-switching stations, causing widespread failure of the phone system. Next, computer logic bombs, set to activate at predetermined times, destroy the electronic routers that control rail lines and military convoys, thus misrouting boxcars and causing traffic jams. Meanwhile, enemy field officers obey the orders they receive over their radios, unaware the commands are phony. Their troops are rendered ineffective as they scatter through the desert. U.S. planes, specially outfitted for psychological operations, then jam the enemy’s TV broadcasts with propaganda messages that turn the populace against its ruler. When the despot boots up his PC, he finds that the millions of dollars he has hoarded in his Swiss bank account have been zeroed out. Zapped. All without firing a shot. A glow comes over Colonel Tanksley as he talks about this bloodless retribution. “We may be able to stop a war before it starts,” he says. Or, more likely, wage war in a whole new way. The vision from the vault in Virginia is of “information warfare”–now the hottest concept in the halls of the Pentagon. Info warriors hope to transform the way soldiers fight. Their goal: to exploit the technological wonders of the late 20th century to launch rapid, stealthy, widespread and devastating attacks on the military and civilian infrastructure of an enemy. In interviews with scores of military, intelligence and Administration officials, TIME discovered that the Pentagon has wide-ranging plans to revolutionize the battlefield with information technology much as tanks did in World War I and the atom bomb in World War II. Says Admiral William Owens, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “This is America’s gift to warfare.” The cyberwar revolution, however, poses serious problems for the U.S. Some are ethical: Is it a war crime to crash another country’s stock market? More perilous are the security concerns for the U.S., where a tyrant with inexpensive technology could unplug NASDAQ or terrorist hackers could disrupt an airport tower. Giddy excitement over infowar may be shaken by an electronic Pearl Harbor. Last year the government’s Joint Security Commission called U.S. vulnerability to infowar “the major security challenge of this decade and possibly the next century.”
