ABSTRACT
In the 1990s, information warfare (IW) burst on the scene and subsequently left with a whimper. It came to prominence when a community of military strategists, citing the works of John Boyd, the Tofflers, and Sun Tzu, argued that competition over information would be the high ground of warfare. Subversion can be the starting point for multiple IW elements. The point of subversion is to usurp the normal state in which systems do only what their owners want. Insofar as other IW operations start with compromising systems, they consequently would wait until those systems are sufficiently compromised; thus these IW operations can also start with large degrees of unpredictability. Variance complicates the use of IW elements to support modern kinetic combat or various forms of irregular warfare, all of which represent a highly complex and synchronized affair dependent on the careful integration of effects.
