Earlier this month Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy James Miller was cited as maintaining that "The Pentagon would consider a military response in the case of a cyber attack against the United States." He was quoted as proposing a direct military reaction to computer attacks, stating "we need to think about the potential for responses that are not limited to the cyber domain." [10]
Placing computer security, including in the civilian sector, under a military command is yet another step in the direction of militarizing the treatment of what are properly criminal or even merely proprietary and commercial matters. And preparing responses of a decidedly non-virtual nature in return.
The Pentagon and the National Security Agency will not be alone in the endeavor to establish and operate the world's first national cyber warfare command. As usual, Washington is receiving unconditional support from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the military bloc it initiated in 1949 and has extended throughout Europe and, operationally, into Asia, Africa and the Middle East over the last eleven years.
NATO not only provides the U.S. with 27 additional voices and votes in the United Nations and as many countries through which to transit and in which to base troops and military equipment, it also - through its Article 5 mutual military assistance provision - allows for American military deployments and creates the pretext for armed confrontation in alleged defense of other member states. Troops from all 28 NATO members and over 20 partner states are embroiled in the nearly nine-year war in Afghanistan because Article 5 was first invoked in September of 2001.
Stating that "The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all," Article 5 is in large part the foundation of and the impetus for the Pentagon's Cyber Command.
The clamor for a cyber warfare capacity began among leading American and NATO officials during and immediately after attacks on computer systems in Estonia in late April and early May of 2007. The small country, a neighbor of Russia which had been inducted into NATO three years earlier, accused Russian hackers of the attacks on both government and private networks, and the charge was echoed in the West with the additional insinuation that the government of then Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind the campaign.
Three years later the accusations have not been substantiated, but they have served their purpose nonetheless: NATO dispatched cyber warfare experts to Estonia shortly after the events of 2007 and on May 14, 2008 the military bloc established what it calls the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCD COE) in the nation's capital of Tallinn.
The bloc's Article 5 has been repeatedly - and given its nature ominously - evoked in reference to alleged cyber crimes and attacks, and Estonia has been portrayed as both the model victim of such assaults and the rallying point for a global cyber warfare response to them.
From the genesis of the drive for U.S.-NATO cyber warfare operations Russia has been the clearly implied if not always openly acknowledged target.
In an August 2008 column in the influential Wall Street Journal entitled "Russia's Aggression Is a Challenge to World Order," two leading U.S. senators, Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, called for "reinvigorating NATO as a military alliance, not just a political one. Contingency planning for the defense of all member states against conventional and unconventional attack, including cyber warfare, needs to be revived. The credibility of Article Five of the NATO Charter - that an attack against one really can and will be treated as an attack against all - needs to be bolstered." [11]
This January U.S.-based Google accused Chinese hackers of "sophisticated cyberattacks" and since then Beijing has joined Moscow as the most frequently cited antagonist in future cyber conflict scenarios, intimately linked to comparable disputes in space over military and civilian satellites.
The British House of Lords issued a report in mid-March of this year that explicitly asserted "Britain needs to work more closely with Nato to fend off 'cyber warfare' on critical national infrastructure from former cold war enemies such as Russia and China," and which "highlight[ed] the dangers of attacks on the internet, banking and mobile phone networks by the Russians in Estonia three years ago." [12]
A few days before NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, while promoting the military bloc's new Strategic Concept in nominally non-aligned Finland, reiterated that although Article 5 military defense of the Alliance's 28 members' territory remains NATO's chief function, it isn't sufficient to "line up soldiers and tanks and military equipment along the borders," as the bloc needs "to address the threat at its roots, and it might be in cyber space," adding that an "enemy might appear everywhere in cyberspace." [13]
A year earlier Rasmussen's predecessor as head of the Western military alliance, the Netherlands' Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, foreshadowed NATO's preparations for its 21st century Strategic Concept, unveiled by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her self-styled Group of Experts at NATO headquarters this May 17, in stating "we need to take a broader approach and gradually consider the notion of collective security, rather than strictly collective defence." [14]
To expand the North Atlantic bloc's missions internationally, the distinction between military threats and a multitude of self-identified security concerns needs to be blurred.
The litany of non-military excuses for NATO interventions throughout the world includes frequently intangible, unverifiable and highly subjective factors like perceived missile threats, climate change, demographic shifts and dislocations, and "storms and floodings" amid "a myriad of determined and deadly threats" as Lord Peter Levene, chairman of Lloyd's of London, characterized NATO's current challenges at a conference his firm co-organized with the military bloc last October 1. [15]
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