Posted on Jan 3, 2014

Could we as a Nation stomach the consequences of an offensive cyber war?

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I ask this as I'm not a cyber-warrior, but someone trying to lean what I can of the next war. Lately we've been hearing a lot about "cyber" this and "cyber" that. A lot has focused on how to defend the Nation and military formations from cyber attack. But would we be able to respond in kind? <div><br></div><div>As much as we like to think of the military network as secure, a good portion of our net traffic is on civilian infrastructure, to say nothing of our contractors' networks or those of our enemies. We haven't really taken the fight to the civilian populations since maybe the bombing of Germany in WWII or Rolling Thunder, as precise munitions have made civilian casualties unacceptable. With a potential cyber component of war being waged on shared civil-military networks, I imagine civilian impacts would be unavoidable. Could we as a Nation accept the social and political ramifications of such a battlefield involving civilian targets?</div><div><br></div><div>An example of a cyber attack I heard online from cyber expert Peter Singer was someone theoretically hacking KBR's barcode reader so they deliver toilet paper to the military where bullets are needed instead. Could we muster the will to pull off something like that, where we go after a civilian organization to achieve military goals? It seems to me the traditional lines blur here.</div>

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Posted 11 y ago

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Responses: 6

CPT (Join to see)

Posted 11 y ago

What we as a nation can stomach is based on what we as a nation see on the evening news. A cyber war would be a non-issue in my opinion because there would be no civilian bodies for the media to sensationalize.

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CPT (Join to see)

11 y

You make a good point 1LT(P) Dubyoski. Cyber war doesn't bleed and technical stories make for poor headlines in the news. Cyber war is hard to simplify for a common civilian audience that knows almost nothing about it besides hackers getting their debit card info from Target. The cheesy code graphics in the news stories don't help much either. But ethical questions could be raised if the military uses cyber weapons indiscriminately against civilian targets. What if we targeted wikileaks or another country's stock exchange? I think something like that could cause about as much controversey as what the NSA is going through right now.

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CPT (Join to see)

11 y

Fair point. Also, darn Target...still waiting on my replacement credit card...

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SFC James Baber

Edited 11 y ago

Posted 11 y ago

Sir,

This is nothing new, James Clapper former General, the Director of National Intelligence during his yearly analysis report to Congress has listed Cyber terrorism within his report and the 2013 report has Cyber as the number one priority for national security. We are very vulnerable from Russia and China being our number one threats, while Syria, Iran and North Korea have struck our infrastructure in the past whether it was financial, business, government or military it has been an increasing issue for quite few years,

We have military equipment with counterfeit Chinese chips in them that could be utilized to stop the equipment from properly functioning if we were to ever go to war with china or one of its interests. We are very vulnerable at this current stage.

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LTC (Join to see)

11 y

Oh, I agree wholeheartedly on the vulnerabilities. I wonder though if we have the heart to take the cyber fight back to the offense, knowing we'd catch civilians in our retaliation. I'm genuinely clueless how that would play out on the world media stage.

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SFC James Baber

11 y

We have the capabilities, but there are times that the collateral damage is justifiable and a necessity when dealing with terrorism, we have been the standard bearer for so long if we ever do anything that causes any collateral damage we are eviscerated by the global media and other country's leaders. But if it is done to us, no big deal in everybody's eyes, a prime example the Abu Gharab scandal, while I am not saying I condone what the Soldiers did in that case, I don't feel it was justified for them to be convicted and sent to prison and losing everything they had as a military career and other benefits. They were scapegoats for the leadership that basically told them to use whatever method to "soften them up" and many of what they did was recommended by the MI and CIA leadership. But when insurgents were cutting off the heads of captured innocent civilians and posting it on the Internet, no one within the Muslim world or the countries that vilified the guards from the prison had anything but encouragement for the insurgents.

I am a strong advocate for if it will save American lives than it is worth the collateral damage if it occurs, if it not a favorable approval then we don't need to be putting our noses in everyone around the world's business, because to be the world's police as many want us to be from across the globe and our own government at times than there will be issues and you can't make everyone happy.

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SSG William Patton

11 y

I have mixed feelings on this issue. I like the idea of being left alone in the world, but that is wishful thinking. With that said, rather than wait for an enemy to attack us, it is better to give than receive, even if it means collateral damage.

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LTC (Join to see)

11 y

The question here becomes defining the line between collateral damage and intentional targeting of civilians (networks, but with other consequences) in order to reach a military objective. It's a really fuzzy border here, and unfortunately nuance doesn't play well on 10 second sound bytes on the news.

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Maj Walter Kilar

Posted 11 y ago

Yes, the nation can stomach the consequences. We are always at war, but the phase of war is what turns our stomachs. Depending on your level of involvement with cyber, we are currently in phase 0 or phase 1 of cyber war. Offensive counter cyber, cyber attack, and cyber network attack would not be employed in isolation, but would be executed in parallel with warfare via sea, land, and air. Sure, there may be some crackpot general that might propose employing cyber attack without kinetic combat of any type, but the lessons of warfare would again prove that no single element of warfare can be successful without the other pieces of the puzzle.

If you are referring to conducting cyber-operational preparation of the environment and counter network exploitation--the stuff that looks rather sexy in movies, those kind of activities are heavily regulated by law and Title 50 of the US Code. I know that with the NSA making its way into the news that it appears as if C-OPE and CNE are abound and we should all be looking for white vans outside our bedroom windows, but this simply is not the case. The NSA, for the most part, is not reading your Facebook posts with pictures of what you ate for dinner last night any more than the Army is going around shooting harmless civilians in Afghanistan. Do not mistake the actions of a few as representative the whole organization. Even with one judge declaring NSA's actions illegal, there were other judges that disagreed.

Can America stomach the consequences? It has to this point. America will stomach "cyber war" less as the media improperly portrays it, and as much as the layman does not understand it. (Granted, the topic of "cyber" is confusing unless you have a lot of free time to read the doctrine.)

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Could we as a Nation stomach the consequences of an offensive cyber war?

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