Military's Top Cyber Official Defends More Aggressive Stance

Thank you for the great share brother SSG Robert Mark Odom

There is a war that's been going on in cyber for a very long time. I've been fighting it for most of my professional career. What people do not conceptionalize is that there is a foreign threat invading our system here in the US. They are stealing secrets and technology, launching information operations, and preparing the battlefield, should we get into a physical war with any of those given state actors.

Since people cannot conceptionalize this properly, we continue to rely on our law enforcement agencies mostly to detect, track and respond to cyber threats. While they should absolutely be involved, what's missing is the authorization to apply more significant military resources on these issues when they are suspected to be of foreign influence (and by that I don't mean where the cyber attack launches from).

Currently there are laws which prevent the military from conducting military operations within the US barring specific circumstances such as insurrection or enemy invasion. Well, in a sense from a cyber perspective, our enemies are operating in this country and in some ways they are very successful. I believe a lot of the divisiveness is being enabled and even propagated by malicious state actors to turn this country against itself. I know they are also breaking into our technology centers stealing our innovations and using these leaps in technology against us. Finally, I know they are also breaking into our critical infrastructures in hope to prepare these resources for cyber attack to create fear, confusion, and panic in this country.

Gen Nakasone is absolutely right in that we need to be able to do more. Already President Trump has cleared the path for cyber to do so much more than is has in the past and while we are taking more of the fight to countries like Iran, Russia, and China, we need to be able to do more. More specifically, our laws need to be restructured to enable our active duty military forces to operate within US owned cyberspace against our foreign enemies.

I recently posted a video on the hunt forward mission (one I am highly familiar with). This is a great way to project our cyber forces forward (from a defensive cyber operations perspective) and disrupt the activities of the malicious state actors operating in our partner nations. The point here is to make our enemy's job harder, force them to use more resources, and ultimately improve relations and information/intelligence sharing with our partners.