April 6th, 2008
USAF ready for cyber offensive
ZDNet UK has an exclusive interview with LTGEN Robert Elder Jr., who said that the Air Force Cyber Command is set to become operatational Oct. 1.
Cyber Command will not just fight off “cyber” attacks from foreign countries (read “China”) and terrorist groups but will go on the offensive, Elder said.
Offensive cyberattacks in network warfare make kinetic attacks more effective, (for example) if we take out an adversary’s integrated defense systems or weapons systems,” Elder said. “This is exploiting cyber to achieve our objectives.”
“Terrorists and criminals are doing the same thing. We depend so heavily as a military on the use of cyber, we have to be cautious about it,” Elder said. “Cyber gives us a huge advantage, but adversaries look at our capabilities and see areas they can undermine. We need to protect our asymmetric advantage–on the one hand by having people further exploit cyber, and on the other by having mission assurance.”
That news comes in the context of comments made by former US cybersecurity czar Richard Clark to Foreign Policy (via Ars Technica):
What is happening every day is quite devastating, even though it doesn’t have a kinetic impact and there are no body bags,” Clark told Foreign Policy. “What’s happening every day is that all of our information is being stolen. So, we pay billions of dollars for research and development, both in the government and the private sector, for engineering, for pharmaceuticals, for bioengineering, genetic stuff—all sorts of proprietary, valuable information that is the result of spending a lot of money on R&D—and all that information gets stolen for one one-thousandth of the cost that it took to develop it.”
Ars also points out that the cyber command is to be run in a slightly updated way:
We’ve asked [the command] to become virtual,” Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne told government officials in remarks that were reported in AFCYBER’s online news outlet. “In other words, we’ve said, we don’t want you to be a standard … command as you might see from the Napoleonic era. …We asked them to look [into commercial] companies [to] see how they operate and minimize the headquarters. … [Many of our units are] already located in the various states around the country, so our first inclination is to leave those in place.”
