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265 ePilogue the art oF War and Wiki War Steve Bucci wants to save the world. Bucci works for IBM.1 Once the world’s largest manufacturers of computers, today IBM is a very different kind of company . When IBM began to build personal computers it licensed software from a small company called Microsoft. IBM did not bother to acquire the newfangled operating system or the company. IBM thought all the money was in hardware. It was wrong. IBM is still here, though. In fact, it is a thriving corporation. Today IBM is mostly a services company and they provide a lot of services. There are two lessons in the IBM story. One is that IBM is still around because it recognized the online world as a domain of competition. Rather than give up, IBM changed its business model and survived—and thrived. The second lesson IBM took away is that if the company wanted to stay in business it needed to stay ahead of the competition, and the competition is not just other companies. Today IBM’s competition is anyone who wants to do harm online, anyone who would degrade the capacity of people to freely use the Internet. This is an important battle for Big Blue, as the company is sometimes known, because IBM is now in the business of serving the Internet. One of the many kinds of services IBM provides is one that protects services online , services they want to sell. For all these reasons, IBM has a serious interest in people taking cyber competition seriously. To help the Internet fight back against its enemies, Big Blue hired Steve Bucci. Bucci is an unusual employee. “I don’t have to sell anything ,” he says. Bucci is IBM’s cyber-warrior evangelist. It is his job to convince the rest of the world to pick up arms and fight for its rightful place in cyberspace. There is a reason why Bucci is the right warrior for the job even though he acknowl- 266 epilogue edges that he is no expert on information technology. (“I have no technical skills,” he says.) IBM wanted Steve Bucci because he thinks like the enemy. “I spent twenty-eight years in the army,” he says. “I spent a lot more time being the threat than defending against it. I was the threat.” Bucci graduated from the same school as Tony Burgess and Nate Allen, just a lot earlier: he was a member of the West Point class of 1977. At first glance a Military Academy education seemed an unlikely preparation for a career as cyber warrior (though James V. Kimsey, the cofounder of AOL, graduated in the West Point class of 1962). When Bucci arrived at West Point as a plebe he was issued a slide rule. The next year they gave him a firstgeneration Texas Instruments calculator. The only computers were large, clunky, gray metal boxes housed in the basement of what once had been the academy horse-riding hall. After graduation Bucci wound up in the US Army Special Forces, the elite combat troops called the Green Berets. He was taught to think and act like his adversaries, to fight with little or no support, often dependent on his own ingenuity, stamina, courage, and grit to get the job done. For almost three decades Bucci was a real-life Lawrence of Arabia, leading deployments to eastern Africa, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. In July 2001, he got the toughest combat assignment anyone could imagine: he was appointed military assistant to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. In the Pentagon the assistant to the secretary was anything but a gofer. Bucci described the difference to a reporter: “In the Department of Defense,” he explains, “there is a network of military assistants. Executive assistants serve military generals, and military officers serve civilians.” Bucci is one of two military assistants to the secretary ; the other, a three-star general, is Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant . “Military assistants are the human grease that keep the Department of Defense and Joint Staff working,” he said. “The duties are not the same as those of an aide. Our job is to let our bosses do their jobs correctly and effectively.”2 This job was a different kind of war. Bucci had to talk, pretend to listen, pay attention, cajole, plead, reason, argue, and negotiate with lots of people. It was the closest one could come to getting a graduate degree in working with other agencies...

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