As it is emerging in Defense Department thinking, information warfare is an attack on an adversary's entire information, command and control, and, indeed, decision-making system.
Net war is information war waged largely through communications systems.
The 1991 Gulf War exhibited it via the Coalition's attack on the whole spectrum of Saddam Hussein's information, propaganda, command and control, etc. All this has obvious implications for command and control warfare against an adversary. Governments which rely for their legitimacy on insulating their societies from reality look particularly vulnerable to information war. Sound strategy, then, employs info war as an offensive element of operations, designed to disrupt or end an adversary's communications and decision making. Stein cautions, however, that democratic societies may be particularly vulnerable to attack by adversaries using information war, especially its components net war and cyberwar.