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To provide cyber professionals relevant and current readings on cyberspace operations and theory, the Air Force Network Integration Center commander offers the following monthly book as suggested reading. The books suggested are offered to help cyber professionals see aspects of cyberspace from new perspectives. While readers may or may not agree with authors' points of view, the goal of the book of the month is to encourage thinking outside the average constrains of daily cyberspace operations.
Hope you enjoyed last month's book, The Innovator's Dilemma
October 2012The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
By  Jon Gertner
A sweeping, atmospheric history of Bell Labs that highlights its unparalleled role as an incubator of innovation and birthplace of the century's most influential technologies.
Bell Laboratories, which thrived from the 1920s to the 1980s, was the most innovative and productive institution of the twentieth century. Long before America's brightest scientific minds began migrating west to Silicon Valley, they flocked to this sylvan campus in the New Jersey suburbs built and funded by AT&T. At its peak, Bell Labs employed nearly fifteen thousand people, twelve hundred of whom had PhDs. Thirteen would go on to win Nobel prizes. It was a citadel of science and scholarship as well as a hotbed of creative thinking. It was, in effect, a factory of ideas whose workings have remained largely hidden until now.
New York Times Magazine writer Jon Gertner unveils the unique magic of Bell Labs through the eyes and actions of its scientists. These ingenious, often eccentric men would become revolutionaries, and sometimes legends, whether for inventing radio astronomy in their spare time (and on the company's dime), riding unicycles through the corridors, or pioneering the principles that propel today's technology. In these pages, we learn how radar came to be, and lasers, transistors, satellites, mobile phones, and much more.
Even more important, Gertner reveals the forces that set off this explosion of creativity. Bell Labs combined the best aspects of the academic and corporate worlds, hiring the brightest and usually the youngest minds, creating a culture and even an architecture that forced employees in different fields to work together, in virtually complete intellectual freedom, with little pressure to create moneymaking innovations. In Gertner's portrait, we come to understand why both researchers and business leaders look to Bell Labs as a model and long to incorporate its magic into their own work.
Written with a novelist's gift for pacing and an ability to convey the thrill of innovation, The Idea Factory yields a revelatory take on the business of invention. What are the principles of innovation? How do new technology and new ideas begin? Are some environments more favorable than others? How should they be structured, and how should they be governed? Can strokes of genius be accelerated, replicated, standardized? The history of Bell Labs provides crucial answers that can and should be applied today by anyone who wants to understand where good ideas come from.
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 "Hangar Flying" - A new book by former Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Merrill A. McPeak
Check out the book review by Air Force Association's President and CEO, Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Michael Dunn
(11 Jul 12)
I just finished a book by former Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General (Ret) Merrill A. McPeak. It is entitled Hangar Flying. It details his early life and his first years in the Air Force (1957-1969). There were several interesting things about the book. General McPeak intersperses small paragraphs of world events as he describes what is happening to him.
Secondly, he reminds us of the dangers of aviation - especially in the late 50s and early 60s. Third, his section on the Thunderbirds is one of the best I've seen. He takes the time to describe the training process and the challenges of flying as one of the solo pilots. Finally, he describes his participation in Vietnam and in the Operation Commando Sabre - known as Misty. The idea of the operation was to use F-100Fs as fast FACs (forward air controllers) to do the mission of visual reconnaissance and strike control in the higher threat, out-country environment.
The book is not just about the general's life and times. He also provides some pithy commentary about Airpower. For example - on Vietnam air operations:
"...the overall theater commander has ultimate responsibility for target selection, but if we are to win at reasonable cost the process must be "joint." That is, the senior airman and his staff should qualify and nominate air targets for the commander's review and approval. This did not happen in South Vietnam. Bright, well-intentioned Army officers, who thought they knew something about air fighting (or thought they didn't need to), picked all the targets. The Air Force, with plenty of hands-on, hard-won experience, was excluded from participation. We'd earned a place at the targeting table but were never given one, a sad failure to make effective joint use of armed forces." (p. 330)
"In application, an air campaign can have various phases or aspects, such as establishing control of the air, deep bombardment, or close support for surface forces, but the instruments of airpower - the pilots, aircraft, and munitions - have the inherent flexibility for rapid concentration and re-tasking. Therefore, the highest and best use of airpower is achieved only when it comes under central direction. Had we acted in accordance with this view, we would have considered all air operations in Southeast Asia part of a system and organized an integrated air campaign, led by a senior airman.
In fact, we fought several separate air wars. MACV, under Westmoreland and later Abrams, ran the in-country air war, using the 1920s model in which the Air Force served as an Army auxiliary - a sort of winged artillery. In practical terms, our presence meant the Army couldn't be defeated militarily, a live possibility if we hadn't been there. As for the more purposeful uses of airpower, MACV was clueless.
The second air war, the on-and-off bombing of the North, was run by the White House, reaching through the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Adm. Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, head of Pacific Command. Because of inability or unwillingness to conduct coordinated air operations, the North Vietnamese landscape was subdivided by Admiral Sharp into "route packages," each package assigned to either the Air Force or Navy.
Chopping up the real estate in this way was a classic mistake. Air operations enjoy considerable freedom from the constraints of geography, including those synthetic lines people draw on maps, a fact accounting for much of the leverage airpower brings to the fight. Sadly we gave away this edge, increasing our exposure and driving up losses." (p. 337-338)
The book is readable and straight-forward. It is the first part of a planned trilogy of three books. General McPeak has agreed to speak at the Air & Space Conference and will sign his book there (17-19 Sep 2012).
Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Michael M. Dunn
President & CEO
Air Force Association
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Listed below are books the leadership of 24th Air Force encourage others to read about cybersecurity and national security in the digital age.
Inside Cyber Warfare
By Jeffrey Carr
This book goes beyond the headlines of attention-grabbing distributed denial-of-service attacks and takes a deep look inside multiple cyber conflicts that occurred from 2002 through summer 2009.
 Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It
By Richard A. Clarke & Robert Knake
This book goes behind the "geek talk" of hackers and computer scientists to explain clearly and convincingly what cyber war is, how cyber weapons work, and how vulnerable we are as a nation and as individuals to the vast and looming web of cyber criminals.
 Cyberdeterrence and Cyberwar
By Martin C. Libicki
The protection of cyberspace, the information medium, has become a vital national interest because of its importance both to the economy and to military power. The author discusses the value of deterrence and vigilance and other actions the United States and the U.S. Air Force can take to protect itself in the face of deliberate cyberattack.
 Cyberpower and National Security
Edited by Franklin D. Kramer, Stuart H. Starr, and Larry K. Wentz
This book is intended to help create a coherent framework for understanding and utilizing cyber power in support of national security. The Department of Defense's 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review noted the DoD lacked a coherent framework to assess cyber-power policy issues, which drove the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy to direct the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University to undertake a study of the subject area. This book is a result of that study.
 Cyber Warfare: Techniques, Tactics and Tools for Security Practitioners
By Jason Andress & Steve Winterfeld
This book explores the battlefields, participants and the tools and techniques used during today's digital conflicts. The concepts discussed in this book will give those involved in information security at all levels a better idea of how cyber conflicts are carried out now, how they will change in the future and how to detect and defend against espionage, hacktivism, insider threats and non-state actors like organized criminals and terrorists.
 Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
By P.W. Singer
An amazing revolution is taking place on the battlefield, starting to change not just how wars are fought, but also the politics, economics, laws, and ethics that surround war itself. This upheaval is already afoot - remote-controlled drones take out terrorists in Afghanistan, while the number of of unmanned systems on the ground in Iraq has gone from zero to 12,000 over the last five years. This book takes the reader on a journey to meet all the various players in this strange new world of war. |
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24th Air Force Leadership 
