Center for Strategic and International Studies

Center for Strategic and International Studies Military Strategy Forum: Admiral Michelle J. Howard on the Cyber Cold War Speaker: Admiral Michelle J. Howard, Vice Chief of Naval Operations, United States Navy Moderator: Dr. Kathleen H. Hicks Senior Vice President, Henry A. Kissinger Chair, and Director, International Security Program, CSIS Location: CSIS, Washington, D.C. Time: 9:00 a.m. EDT Date: Friday, September 25, 2015 Transcript By Superior Transcriptions LLC www.superiortranscriptions.com KATHLEEN H. HICKS: Perhaps you’re here to see Admiral Howard, who’s the vice CNO, and I’m going to give a quick introduction and turn the floor over to her. She does have a hard stop, so we’re going to do a little less Q&A, probably, today than we normally do. But I promise I will take it from my time and not your time. Admiral Howard is a 1982 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. She, early in her career, was awarded the Secretary of Navy-Navy League Captain Winifred Collins Award, given to one woman officer a year for outstanding leadership. She’s had a series of command – command positions – excuse me. As commander of USS Rushmore in March of 1999, she became the first African-American woman to command a ship in the U.S. Navy. In 2009 she deployed to the CENTCOM theater, where she commanded Task Force 151, the multinational counterpiracy effort, and Task Force 51, expeditionary forces. And in 2010, she was the Maritime Task Force commander for BALTOPS under 6th Fleet. She has served in a variety of positions on the OPNAV staff and in Joint Staff, where I first met her, and of course now serves as the 38th vice chief of naval operations. She’s here to speak particularly this morning about cyber, which is ever timely. And so, Admiral Howard, the floor is yours. Thank you. ADMIRAL MICHELLE J. HOWARD: Thank you, Kathleen. Thanks for the kind introduction. (Applause.) Well, thanks for your time today. I have been proselytizing on cyber for about three years, and literally in the last 13 months have spoken probably over 200 times on this topic to the public, whether it’s a Chamber of Commerce or a policy forum, strategy forum, industry day forum, or just high school students. So there’s a theory of the case that I’ve been working on. And what’s great about the cyber domain is how it’s not only connecting ideas, but it’s connecting language and making things shorter and more concise. And I love the word “app,” but in reality the word “app” is application. And so I’m going to talk to you today about what I think is the application of what we know and the lessons learned from the Cold War. And if you walk away unconvinced, please feel free to build your own app. But for me, as I’ve had this conversation with different folks, from the public to my own sailors in all-hands call, it’s helped me sharpen my thinking on where we are in this domain and what we need to do. First slide. So in order to talk about this metaphor of the Cold War and the cyber domain and what’s going on, I find it useful just to sort of give a quick history recap. You know, it was actually George Orwell who, shortly after World War II, coined the term “Cold War” in a(n) article. And then that got picked up in another article by Walter Lippmann, and it was all about the atomic bomb – “You and the Atomic Bomb.” And during that same time frame, as the world continued to unfold and the United States was the sole power – atomic power – in ’47, nations got together and signed the North Atlantic Treaty. So April of ’47, we, as different world powers, are starting to get concerned about Soviet aggression. And then in August of – I’m sorry, August of that year, the Soviets explode their own first atomic weapon. And so now we’re into the nuclear age, with two countries with this capability. After they did that, Harry S. Truman said, OK, the Soviets have an atomic bomb; I’m going to create a hydrogen bomb. And sure enough, shortly after that, in the Marshall Islands, we exploded a hydrogen bomb – 25 square miles of a plume and destruction that destroyed the Enewetak Atoll, and with enough energy that it could have destroyed half of Manhattan – (snaps fingers) – just like that. And that really is the start of where the world changed. And it changed for all of us in this country. And we don’t have really, I think, a strong collective memory of this as the American public, but people started to build bomb shelters in their backyard. We started to have drills. We were into a new age and a new way of life, and there was a lot of fear associated with that. Next slide. There was not only a lot of fear, there was a lot of spying going on. The Russians were in us and around us – I’m sorry, the Soviets were around us and looking at us, and we were doing the same to them, trying to figure out and understand what the other person was doing. And at the same time, we start to codify this relationship. But the intensity of this fear and the potential of this weapon permeated. McCarthyism comes out. McCarthyism could be about communism, but it’s because of the communists one of the great powers had the bomb as well. In ’53 we convict the Rosenthals (sic; Rosenbergs) for selling nuclear secrets to the Soviets, and we execute them in Sing Sing Prison. My service starts to come into this role of the Cold War with the launch of nuclear-powered submarines and the carrying of ballistic missiles. We start to settle into a more structured relationship. We stand up the Strategic Air Command in the ’50s, and that lasts until it becomes Strategic Command that we know today as a combatant commander. All of this – this intensity – it was all up and front. We started to have a dialogue with the Soviet Union. We get into strategic arm(s) limitation talks. But what was interesting during this time frame, all of this – this tension between our nations and the angst in the public – for many of us, it was unplaying out in the conventional side. A lot of people say there were proxy wars between conventional forces. But I will tell you, as I came into the service, there was a lot of cat-and-mouse activity going on between our submarines, between our surface ships. It got to the point where we created an agreement called the Incidents at Sea to prevent unintentional miscommunication between U.S. ships and Russian ships. What we didn’t want to have happen is a conventional conflict or a(n) incident grow into something larger – grow into something like the use of the atomic weapon. And so we sort of settled into this, this is just the way life is. Next slide. So I come into this after – before the Berlin Wall falls. So I come into the service in ’82. And as I started my life at sea, the Russians were still out there monitoring us all the time. We got quite used to it. We were trained as officers to expect that we would have this big fight at sea, and we were really very good at understanding the Russians – the Soviet Union, their tactics. And they were always watching us. Every time you went to sea, whether it was out of San Diego, San Francisco or Norfolk, there was somebody there with eyes on you. And so we believed, underneath this umbrella of nuclear deterrence, that there might be – possibly still be a conventional war fight with the Soviet Union. Well, as an officer, our biggest threat was the – was the Soviet submarines. Now, during those days I was on a(n) ammunition ship. And you don’t have any offensive capability on that kind of ship. We knew it would be up to the other folks in the battle group, folks who had – on the destroyers and cruisers with their sonar to find the submarines and basically protect us. But on the other hand, we came to the realization that, if you’re on a ship like this with lots of ammo and you happen to take a torpedo, first of all, it would probably be OK because you wouldn’t have to worry about the paperwork afterwards. (Laughter.) But in the end, if you took a torpedo and exploded, you’d probably wipe out the rest of the battle group if they were anywhere nearby. And so we took this thought – this anti-submarine warfare role, where we had no offensive weapons – and said, hmm, we only have defensive measures on this ship at the tactical level. I can try and make the ship lighter. I can do zigzag patterns to make sure it’s hard for a Soviet submarine to track me and figure out where to put a torpedo in the water. But one of the things we figured out was that if we spotted the Soviet submarine and could communicate that to the other folks in the battle group we’d have a better chance of surviving. Well, we didn’t have sonar, but we had lookouts. And so all of the folks across the waterfront who were on ammunition ships, we drilled our lookouts really hard – 17- and 18-year-olds.

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