John Threat

The Financial Times reports that the USA is currently placing it’s defense  of cyberspace completely under  military command.

Of course, there is the old adage that the best defense is a good offense. This is a highly abused term is appropriate here in the sense that having situational awareness and parity  while engaging in information warfare means having an advanced offense already in play.

Already controlling the battleground ahead of time is key and there are some tactical advantages in that the USA has in exporting various technologies and encryption  and having access to several global companies’ network traffic availible for their sigint operations. Sitting on the data streams is the most powerful tool in finding, tracking and stopping attacks.

However for the most part there is a lack of offensive capability on the USA’s part for several reasons that the militarization of these capabilities will compromise in the short term as the program tries to align itself with the policy emanating from the  administration’s  cabinet posts that oversee cyberwar strategy.  Bob Gourley, the former chief technology officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency let’s it slip in this quote – “We have U.S. warriors in cyberspace that are deployed overseas and live in adversary networks.” Unfortunately this doesn’t extend to some key countries that are listed as major adversaries who have free reign over our networks.

Based on the challenges for assembling an effective force for offense and training pipeline, while China currently enjoys several advantages over the USA in information warfare and cyber intelligence – the likely outcome will be an eventually outsourcing of offensive projects for the military to private trusted contractors , some of which have agency investments.

It’ll be interesting to see what companies and various military wings (NAVY, MARINES, AIR FORCE)  evolve to take up this emerging space and what will be stored on their computers.