Eisen Jr. and the 1995 Shift to State-Sponsored Netwar

By Harlan Pryce · September 14, 2026

The 1995 manual for attacking enemy networks moved cyber-warfare from the fringe to the bridge, while the actual targets remained hidden in classified annexes.

The technicians and civil servants of foreign governments were the first targets of a war they did not know had begun. They paid for the military's learning curve in compromised grids, erased records, and the quiet infiltration of their most secure systems.

What survives in the archive is a curated description of a paper rather than the original pages. The record establishes that on June 22, 1995, Stefan Eisen Jr., an author and researcher at the Naval War College tasked with integrating new technology into fleet doctrine, submitted a paper titled "Netwar, It's Not Just For Hackers Anymore." The Naval War College, the staff college and "Home of Thought" for the United States Navy at Naval Station Newport in Rhode Island, exists to educate leaders and define the future of maritime missions. Eisen Jr. wrote this piece at a moment when the internet was transitioning from a scholarly curiosity to a strategic vulnerability.

Not Just For Hackers

According to the record, Eisen Jr. argued that "network warfare represented the latest tool of information warfare." He did not treat this as a theoretical exercise in computer science, but as a requirement for command. The description notes that Eisen Jr. maintained that "commanders needed to employ it both for defending their command and control assets as well as attacking an opponent's."

This phrasing is a pivot. By explicitly stating that netwar was "not just for hackers anymore," the record moves the act of network intrusion out of the realm of the adolescent delinquent and into the realm of the commissioned officer. The public record establishes that in the mid-1990s, "hacking" was largely perceived as a fringe activity conducted by unaffiliated individuals or small groups. Eisen Jr. sought to strip the activity of its counter-cultural associations and rebrand it as a legitimate instrument of state power.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

June 22, 1995

The timing of this paper is not a coincidence. The record dates Eisen Jr.'s submission to June 22, 1995. This places the work in the center of a concentrated effort by the intelligence community to operationalize the digital domain. During this same window, the NSA was producing a steady stream of technical guidance in its Cryptolog publications, specifically Volumes 21 and 22, which were released between January 1995 and January 1996.

There is a direct line between the technical specifications in the Cryptolog series and the doctrinal framing provided by Eisen Jr. at Newport. While the NSA provided the "how"—the cryptologic and technical methods of network exploitation—Eisen Jr. provided the "why" and the "who." He translated the capabilities of the intelligence agency into a language that a Naval commander could use to justify an offensive operation. The Naval War College provided the intellectual cover for the NSA's technical reach.

NSA's Shadow Syllabus

The record states that Eisen Jr. "specifies a number of netwar options for commanders." However, the description is silent on what those options actually were. It does not list a single target, a single protocol, or a single legal trigger for the use of these tools. This gap is where the real history lives.

The desk's reading is that this paper functioned as a socialization tool to prepare conventional military commanders for clandestine capabilities already operationalized by the NSA. The Naval War College was not inventing "netwar options"; it was introducing the officer corps to a menu of services already available from the intelligence community. By framing these options in an unclassified paper, the military was normalizing the idea of network attacks before the legal and ethical frameworks for such attacks had been publicly debated.

If this file is shaped the way it looks, the absence of specific targets in the unclassified record implies that the operational application of "netwar" was managed via classified annexes separate from the doctrinal theory. The unclassified paper established the legitimacy of the tool; the classified annexes established the victims. This created a dangerous distance between the commander who ordered a "netwar option" and the reality of the disruption caused on the other end of the wire.

The Bridge and the Basement

The pattern suggests a missing architectural conflict regarding the chain of command between intelligence collectors and operational executors. In 1995, the tools of network warfare were primarily the domain of SIGINT agencies. Eisen Jr.'s insistence that commanders themselves "needed to employ" these tools points to a struggle for control. The Navy did not want to be a mere customer of the NSA; it wanted the authority to launch its own digital strikes.

This tension reveals the irony of the "not just for hackers" narrative. The military was not just stealing tools from hackers; it was attempting to steal tools from its own intelligence agencies to bring them under tactical command. The rhetoric of the "hacker" was a convenient foil, a public-facing narrative designed to transition the perception of cyber-operations from fringe activity to legitimate statecraft, masking an internal turf war over who held the keys to the keyboard.

The desk's reading is that the unclassified record serves as a mask for a much more aggressive transition. The transition from "hackers" to "commanders" was not a natural evolution of technology, but a deliberate policy of weaponization. The Naval War College provided the theoretical justification for the Navy to act as an offensive cyber force, ensuring that by the time the public realized the internet was a battlefield, the military had already mapped the terrain and identified the targets.

A full release of the 「netwar options」 mentioned by Eisen Jr. would show that the military's "defensive" posture was a secondary concern. The focus was on the attack. The still-withheld pages are protecting the identity of the early targets and the specific vulnerabilities that were exploited to prove the concept. The pattern established here—of normalizing a weapon in an unclassified setting while hiding its application in a classified one—is the same pattern the government has used for every major leap in clandestine warfare. The cost of this socialization was the permanent loss of network trust, a price paid by every civilian user who assumed the internet was a tool for connection rather than a vector for state-sponsored attrition.

Eisen Jr. and the 1995 Shift to State-Sponsored Netwar

Not Just For Hackers

June 22, 1995

NSA's Shadow Syllabus

The Bridge and the Basement

Sources