Securing Freedom in the Global Commons

Scott Jasper, Scott Jasper

• Publisher: Stanford Security Studies
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780804775991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Sécurité nationale

The new millennium has brought with it an ever-expanding range of threats to global security: from cyber attacks to blue-water piracy to provocative missile tests. Now, more than ever then, national security and prosperity depend on the safekeeping of a global system of mutually supporting networks of commerce, communication, and governance. The global commons—outer space, international waters, international airspace, and cyberspace—are assets outside of national jurisdiction that serve as essential conduits for these networks, facilitating the free flow of trade, finance, information, people, and technology. These commons also comprise much of the international security environment, enabling the physical and virtual movement and operations of allied forces. Securing freedom of use of the global commons is therefore fundamental to safeguarding the global system.

Unfortunately, the fact that civil and military operations in the commons are inherently interwoven and technically interdependent makes them susceptible to intrusion. This intrinsic vulnerability confronts the international defense community with profound challenges in preserving access to the commons while countering elemental and systemic threats to the international order from both state and non-state actors. In response, the authors of this volume—a team of distinguished academics and international security practitioners—describe the military-operational requirements for securing freedom of action in the commons. Collaborating from diverse perspectives, they examine initiatives and offer frameworks that are designed to minimize vulnerabilities and preserve advantages, while recognizing that global security must be underscored by international cooperation and agreements.

The book is written for security professionals, policy makers, policy analysts, military officers in professional military education programs, students of security studies and international relations, and anyone wishing to understand the challenges we face to our use of the global commons.

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, Europe¹

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 cyberspace²—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.³ Extrapolating from this construct, global commons have been characterized as natural, or man-made, “assets outside national jurisdiction.”⁴ 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,”⁵ 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,⁶ 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.”⁷ 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.”⁸ 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 General⁹

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.¹⁰ 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.¹¹

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.¹²

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.¹³ 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.¹⁴

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.¹⁵ 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.¹⁶ 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.”¹⁷ Accordingly, the United States does not vote for United Nations General Assembly resolutions intended to prevent an arms race in outer space.¹⁸

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 s...