Soldiers, Spies, Cyberwarriors: '@War' In The Internet Age

"It was a really instructive and, I think, very scary war gaming exercise for people in the military," writer Shane Harris tells NPR's Arun Rath. "The adversary in this game really got the advantage very quickly and won pretty decisively, because the American side really hadn't developed a playbook for how you would go to war between two large militaries in cyberspace." Harris recounts that 2010 Schriever Wargame in his new book, @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex. The book looks cyberspace as war's "fifth domain" (after land, sea, air and space). Harris covers topics like the NSA, the role of cyber warfare in the Iraq troop surge of 2007, China's "rampant" espionage on American corporations — and the U.S. government's strategy of playing the victim. Harris tells Rath that after that alarming war game, the U.S. military's cyberforces became much more organized and sophisticated — but that China, the real-life country that parallels the imaginary Red, also is believed to have impressive capabilities.