(c) GettyON OCTOBER 1, just beyond the Beltway inside Fort Meade, a four-star general became the first head of America's new Cyber Command. Subordinate to General Keith Alexander are the Tenth Fleet and the Twenty-Fourth Air Force. The fleet has no ships, and the air-force unit has neither aircraft nor missiles. Their weapons are ones and zeroes. Their battlefield is cyberspace.
The mission of Cyber Command is to protect the U.S. military's networks and to be ready to launch offensive cyber attacks on a potential enemy. Those offensive cyber attacks have the potential to reach out from cyberspace into the physical dimension, causing giant electrical generators to shred themselves, trains to derail, high-tension power-transmission lines to burn, gas pipelines to explode, aircraft to crash, weapons to malfunction, funds to disappear and enemy units to walk into ambushes. Welcome to warfare in the twenty-first century.
We have become accustomed to the pilots of Predator and Reaper drones driving a few miles to their homes in Virginia and dinner with their kids after having "flown" aircraft all day on the other side of the globe, firing deadly Hellfire missiles into houses of terrorists in Pakistan. That looks like war as PlayStation: death by joystick, no risk of being shot down, no chance of capture. Now, with cyber war, we have another means of launching attacks on the other side of the world, this time with only a keyboard. In Vietnam and Iraq, U.S. pilots were shot down while attempting to bomb enemy air-defense missiles. Now, a cyber warrior might simply shut off an air-defense network or cause missiles to explode on their launch rails, not by using a laser-guided missile, but by activating a logic bomb. Cyber war could well mean fewer casualties, less physical destruction. Surely then, it is a good idea.
PERHAPS NOT. Much like sixty years ago when we first began to deal with strategic nuclear weapons, we have neither outlined a clear strategy nor had an open debate about how best to deal with this new capability and this new threat. As former-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara discovered, without a real strategy for the use of strategic nuclear weapons, we risked annihilation of both ourselves and our enemies. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) had a simple plan: the United States would perceive when the Soviet Union was getting ready to attack us and then SAC would go first, launching all of its weapons against all of its possible targets in the Soviet Union, China and the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. Horrified by that idea, McNamara commissioned work that developed a strategy of deterrence, including withholding attacks on cities, controlling escalation, minimizing crisis instability and initiating nuclear-arms control. Much of the development of that strategy was done in public, in speeches by then-President John F. Kennedy and McNamara, and in books by academics such as Herman Kahn, founder of the Hudson Institute, and MIT professor William Kaufmann. This is exactly the kind of discussion we need to have today. For it is not an overstatement to say that the body of work on atomic strategy initiated in the Kennedy administration probably prevented a nuclear war in which hundreds of millions may have died.
We sit at a similar historical moment. War fighting is forever changed. Though it will never produce the kind of death toll of nuclear weapons, we can see echoes of these same risks and challenges in today's newest cyber-war battlefield. We've developed a plethora of gee-whiz technological capabilities in the past few years, but cyber war is a wholly new form of combat, the implications of which we do not yet fully understand. Its inherent nature rewards countries that act swiftly and encourages escalation.
AS IN the 1960s, the speed of war is rapidly accelerating. Then, long-range missiles could launch from the prairie of Wyoming and hit Moscow in only thirty-five minutes. Strikes in cyber war move at a rate approaching the speed of light. And this speed favors a strategy of preemption, which means the chances that people can become trigger-happy are high. This, in turn, makes cyber war all the more likely. If a cyber-war commander does not attack quickly, his network may be destroyed first. If a commander does not preempt an enemy, he may find that the target nation has suddenly raised new defenses or even disconnected from the worldwide Internet. There seems to be a premium in cyber war to making the first move.
