Russia-Ukraine war: Cyber warfare demonstrates changing nature of battlefield

The Russian grab for territory has ground to a halt, however, Volodymyr Zelensky's much-vaunted counter-offensive in the south has also slowed and now his forces are only inching forward. The brave and the foolhardy - soldiers willing to risk their lives because they believed a particular action might be decisive - have been killed: the battle today is being fought by wiser and more cautious troops operating with artillery barrages and remote fires.

Small, remote drones are vital for reconnaissance and spotting. Maintaining a secure line of communications to the rear is just as crucial as keeping a shifting and sometimes vague front line resupplied with ammunition and food. The way the war is fought is changing. It's a new form of warfare.

This change is dramatically apparent in the cyber sphere - but in a way few expected.

The US military had a simple definition of cyber war. It involves "actions by a nation state or international organisation to attack another nation's computers or information networks through computer viruses or denial-of-service attacks ... electromagnetic warfare, and information operations". It conjures up an image of darkened rooms and young, slightly overweight or possibly pimply men, hunched over keyboards in front of banks of glowing monitors. This missed the most important part of the picture. Cyber war is no longer just fought behind the lines - it's a central ingredient of tactical success at the forward areas of the battle front.

Currently, most (western) nations think of cyber operations as a strategic force. This is much same way military theorists began thinking about air power. In the years before World War II the British and US strategic thinkers in particular envisaged fleets of bombers as the ultimate weapon. It was assumed the sudden appearance of squadrons of aircraft to rain down bombs on a helpless populace would cause them to rebel and demand an end to the war. It took the total destruction of city after (German) city to demonstrate that although strategic air power could have a decisive effect, it would be by cutting production and disrupting the economy, rather than causing civilian morale to collapse.

Tactical air power, however, rapidly became vital.

A Brisbane-born New Zealander, Arthur Coningham, was sent to Egypt to command the Western Desert Air Force in 1941. Erwin Rommel's Africa Corps had the British on the run. Coningham's radical innovation was to send pilots to act as forward observers. These officers understood both what aircraft could and couldn't do and the desperate need of the troops for air support. They helped to change the dynamic of the fighting by calling in tactical air power to assist the defending soldiers.

Because of natural bureaucratic resistance - no organisation ever changes very fast - it took a long time for the army to fully learn this lesson. Nevertheless, by the time the Allied forces were poised to attack the German border in 1945, every tactical commander would expect officers to be allocated to both bring in close air and artillery firepower to support any assault. They became an integral part of the tactical battle-sphere.

We need to start thinking of cyber the same way: not simply as a strategic resource, but as a highly tactical one that determines the outcome of conflict on the ground.

None of this is any secret to Marcus Thompson. Until 18 months ago, he was the Major-General commanding Defence's Information Warfare division. Bearing in mind the way he's challenging the way we view things it's probably unsurprising that his PhD thesis was on taxonomy; the way we mentally classify ideas. Thompson was one of the first to recognise, way before the Russian tanks rolled across the border into Ukraine, that we needed to think about cyber warfare differently. As he put it in his thesis: "Domain-specific ontologies may have utility within their respective security domains [but this specific language] tends to become confused when applied to another domain." Now chair of cyber-tech company Penten, Thompson remains a strong advocate for urgently introducing such capabilities to the Australian forces.

Another way of putting this is that if the problem changes, the answer probably will as well. It's a simple concept, and it's playing out in southern Ukraine today. Tactically, not just strategically.

This is not a criticism of project Redspice, a decade-long, $10 billion boost for the Australian Signals Directorate or Major-General Susan Coyle, the current head of Information Warfare. The issue is Redspice protects the country from what's currently happening: hostile cyber penetration, theft, and potential sabotage. This is vital, but it's not actual war - that's why it's unhelpfully called the 'grey zone'. It's aggressive, dangerous, and could escalate at any moment. Or it might not. The problem is, rather, that this is not the same as actually using cyber on the battlefield to achieve superiority. Because that's now a possibility.

Weapons increasingly rely on communications and electronic equipment but offensive capabilities haven't been targeted similarly. If a missile's coming at a ship, for example, the assumption is it needs to be exploded by a kinetic defence, in other words 'shot down'. What if, however, a beam of intense energy could be directed to scramble the computer circuits directing the missile and cause it to drop harmlessly from the sky? What about the potential to use tactical cyber weapons to disrupt, isolate and confuse enemy tanks and equipment on the battlefield.

MORE NICHOLAS STUART COLUMNS:

What's happening in Ukraine shows these are not insignificant questions.

Cyber is no longer just a strategic domain of war-fighting. It demands significant resources and expenditure directed at the tactical level. This means something will have to give.

The scope of the current Defence Review needs to be dramatically expanded if it is to provide a genuine answer to Australia's future defence needs. The taxonomies of the past don't hold true any more.