"That, in turn, will lead to an increasing dependence on IW [information warfare] as the perfect solution for fighting wars with no risk of casualties and at relatively low financial cost. But that is to seek the very silver bullet history has shown us does not exist. As David proved against Goliath, strength can be beaten. America, today, looks uncomfortably like Goliath, arrogant in its power, armed to the teeth, ignorant of its weakness."

PAUL SCHINDLER: How do you define information warfare?

"America today looks uncomfortably like Goliath, arrogant in its power, armed to the teeth, ignorant of its weakness."

ADAMS: Our definitions that we use to describe information and warfare are very old-fashioned. We need to rethink all of that. That is a trap I have seen happen before, in dealing with terrorism in the 80s, for example. I have seen people write whole books trying to define the issue. I am not really going to do that. People can waste their time doing that if they want.

I am much more interested in addressing the capabilities, the opportunities, and the challenges, rather than spending 500 pages saying, "What is this thing," which I don't think is very helpful.

SCHINDLER: In your book, The Next World War: Computers are the Weapons and the Front Line is Everywhere, you include much more than cyberspace and computers.
ADAMS: Yes. What I was trying to do was frame the debate. The actual literature on the subject is extremely thin. As I delved into this, I would go and talk to people, and they would say it is this, or it is that. I have presented the panoply. Here is what's out there. Here's what the discussions are today.

Information warfare, to me, means what do information systems allow you to do in whole different arenas? What do we mean by warfare? You can take both of those things in a fairly broad way. The military now have changed the words 'information warfare,' and are now toying with the words 'information assurance.' That's because no one wants to have a Ministry of War, everyone wants to have a Ministry of Defense.

The military itself cannot even agree on what this is, never mind anyone in the civilian sector.

I think what we will see, as we did with nuclear strategy, we will see this debate begin to frame itself over the next five years or so, as the nation states struggle with their identity, as cyberspace itself starts to take on a different form. You would be able to take every single one of these chapters and write a book in its own right, I would expect. I think people will do that. That's fine with me.

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SCHINDLER: In your book, your describe a war game called Eligible Receiver. Please describe it.
ADAMS: This is an exercise organized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the summer of 1997. The premise of the exercise was that a group of hackers employed by the North Korean government were tasked with preventing the United States [from] responding to a crisis in Asia.

Thirty-four people from the National Security Agency were given the role of the North Koreans. They were deployed in four teams. They were given no information. They were told only they had to prevent America from responding to this crisis in this time frame.

They were given some cash. They went to their local computer stores and bought laptops. They downloaded hacks that were publicly available on the Web. Then they started to see what they could do.

"Thirty four hackers did more than the massed might of Saddam Hussein's armies, than the Nazis in the Second World War."

They went into the power systems of many of America's major cities. Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco. They left calling cards that showed they could have shut down those power systems. They did the same thing with the 911 systems. So you can see, the power would go, then they would call 911 and there would be no response. You would have chaos.

Having done that, they then interrogated the Pentagon's own command and control systems across the world. They went through 40,000 different computer networks. They got root-level access to 36 of them. They left enough material there, got inside those and roamed free. This caused chaos in the command and control of the Pentagon.

This would, essentially, have stopped America going to war. So you had 34 hackers who did more than the massed might of Saddam Hussein's armies, than the Nazis in the Second World War, than the Koreans in the Korean War. That is an absolute illustration of the power and the threat that information warfare represents in this age.

SCHINDLER: The book seems ambiguous. Do you lament political spinelessness and suggest that IW is being used as a substitute for traditional war, for which there is no substitute?
ADAMS: There are several things at work. First, I think political spinelessness is the norm. I think that is a factor, as I discuss in the book, of ignorance of conventional warfare.

War itself, which I have covered first hand, and which I have no wish to support or encourage as a solution for anything ... but it is important to understand capability. That allows you to understand under what circumstances you use the capability you have.

Information warfare represents a tremendous capability. Used properly, it presents an opportunity. It can prevent the kind of carnage we have seen down the centuries. To that degree, it should be welcomed.

But because there is so much ignorance about the capabilities and so evidently a lack of willingness to address the issues raised by those capabilities, for example, the Justice Department's definition of war for example, I think we are ending up in the worst of all worlds.

We are not prepared to commit conventional forces, although we have a lot of them and they are very powerful, and we are not prepared to take advantage of the opportunities represented by the information revolution that would not prevent those wars happening, but [would] allow us to defend ourselves and prosecute war if that was the need.

We have opportunities to prevent carnage, but not being able to exploit them, because we won't address them, because they are challenging. We end up absolutely in the worst of all worlds, when we could be in a much better place.