The American military has not been used to defend the U.S. mainland since 1812, when the United States instigated a war with Britain by invading Canada. It has not been used even to defend American territories since the less-than-effective defense of Pearl Harbor in 1941 (Hawaii did not become a state until 18 years later) and ensuing fighting in even more remote island possessions: The Philippines, Guam, Wake Island and the Midway Atoll.
During the U.S.'s first war in Europe, initially in France and later in Soviet Russia from 1917-1919, Washington called its armed forces what they were. Expeditionary.
In the war waged by the U.S. and NATO against Yugoslavia in 1999 and in the invasion of Iraq four years later the two countries' power, broadcasting and telecommunications networks were targeted for disabling and destruction. In the case of Yugoslavia graphite bombs were used to shut down the nation's electrical power grid.
Recent rumors that the Stuxnet computer virus was used to attack Iran's civilian nuclear power plant at Bushehr provide an example of how the capabilities CYBERCOM is developing for its offensive, its wartime, contingencies could be employed. In a world increasingly dependent on information technology, cruise missiles and graphite bombs have been superseded by cyber attacks.
In addition to the Pentagon's Prompt Global Strike project [5] for launching intercontinental ballistic and hypersonic cruise missile strikes anywhere in the world within 60 minutes, with the interval to shrink to a fraction of that time in the future, and with the development of super stealthy strategic bombers able to evade radar and air defenses and penetrate deep into the interior of targeted countries, a global cyber warfare capability would render the world defenseless in the face of American blackmail. And attacks. The foreign equivalents of the Pentagon's Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) system could be neutralized.
Not only would Iran be vulnerable, but Russia and China as well.
The September-October edition of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, contains an article by Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn called "Defending a New Domain: The Pentagon's Cyberstrategy" in which he announced that "the Pentagon has built layered and robust defenses around military networks and inaugurated the new U.S. Cyber Command to integrate cyberdefense operations across the military," [6] and where he spelled out the five components of the Pentagon's cyber warfare strategy:
- Cyber must be recognized as a warfare domain equal to land, sea, and air;
- Any defensive posture must go beyond "good hygiene" to include sophisticated and accurate operations that allow rapid response;
- Cyber defenses must reach beyond the department's dot-mil world into commercial networks, as governed by Homeland Security;
- Cyber defenses must be pursued with international allies for an effective "shared warning" of threats; and
- The Defense Department must help to maintain and leverage U.S. technological dominance and improve the acquisitions process to keep up with the speed and agility of the information technology industry. [7]
The Defense Department is due to release a cyber strategy document this autumn, synchronized with the full operationalization of CYBERCOM and ahead of the NATO summit in Portugal on November 19-20.
On August 28 the Washington Post ran a feature entitled "Pentagon considers preemptive strikes as part of cyber-defense strategy" which detailed the following:
The Defense Department is working on "an aggressive approach" to cyber operations which "includes preemptive actions such as knocking out parts of an adversary's computer network overseas."
According to Pentagon budget documents, it is developing a full range of weapons capabilities to permit "attack and exploitation of adversary information systems" that will "deceive, deny, disrupt, degrade and destroy" information and information systems.
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