Former Commander of NATO (and current Dean of the Fletcher School) Admiral (USN Ret.) James Stavridis has published an Op-Ed in the Boston Globe advocating for the creation of a US Military “Cyber Force” in parallel to the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard. He makes a potent analogy to the evolving state of US Government policy towards the commercial and military use of air power, and pointedly claims that the policy community on cyber is still on the level that the FAA was at Kitty Hawk.
Now, given that computing technology has had a good fifty years to develop, I would object somewhat on the kitty hawk analogy; we are much further along than that. However, the use of “cyber” as a budget padding measure by each armed service and government agency has certainly resulted in a system that could hardly be described as functional. Without any guiding vision or overarching command structure, military cyber operations will continue to be disjointed and poorly articulated. I would counter with an analogy of my own, the position of Billy Mitchell after the First World War in attempting to get the established military command structure to respond to the changes that were bearing down on them. Let us hope there is not a Pearl Harbor event to vindicate our views.
Dan Gifford – MCySec Media Manager