Pentagon preparing for cyber conflicts
Jim Wolf, Reuters  Published: Monday, February 01, 2010

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Defense Department is putting cyberspace on a par with land, sea, air and space as a potential conflict zone, and developing new ways to operate there, a top-level Pentagon's strategy review said Monday.

"Cyberspace is now as relevant a domain for DoD activities as the naturally occurring domains of land, sea, air and space," said the study, required once every four years by Congress. DoD is short for Department of Defense.

President Barack Obama's administration will continue to explore the implications of cyberspace's "unique attributes" for policies on operations within it, said the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review.

The growing emphasis on cyber operations coincides with stated U.S. concerns about "Internet Freedom." After Google Inc complained last month of cyber attacks it said originated in China, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "Countries or individuals that engage in cyber attacks should face consequences and international condemnation."

"By reinforcing that message, we can create norms of behavior among states and encourage respect for the global networked commons," she added in a policy statement on Jan. 21.

The defense review was released in tandem with Obama's fiscal 2011 budget request to Congress. It said the Pentagon was building a cadre of cyber experts to defend the more than 15,000 different computer networks it operates across 4,000 military installations worldwide.

With as many as seven million computers and telecommunications tools in use in 88 countries running thousands of warfighting and support programs, the department's potential vulnerabilities are "staggering," the document said. The Pentagon also is developing the latest technologies to let U.S. forces operate in cyberspace under such conditions as "congested and degraded environments," the Pentagon said.

"We're positioning ourselves in order to be able to conduct [cyber] attack" in addition to defense, Vice Admiral Steve Stanley, the Joint Chiefs of Staff's director for force structure, resources and assessment, told a Pentagon briefing on the new study.

Robert Hale, the Pentagon's chief financial officer, said US$104 million had been added to the 2011 budget request as part of growing cyber preparations. He said he did not know the total amount being spent by the Pentagon.

In June, Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered the creation of the military's first headquarters to mesh Pentagon efforts in emerging cyber battlefield and computer-network security arenas.

The new U.S. Cyber Command is being set up under the Strategic Command to better coordinate the defense, protection and operation of the department's networks.

It also will prepare to "conduct full spectrum cyberspace military operations" when directed, and play a leading role in knitting such operations into operational and contingency planning, the new strategy document said.

The department must be prepared to react "nearly instantaneously if we are to effectively limit the damage that the most sophisticated types of attacks can inflict," the study said.

The U.S. government already has perhaps the world's most powerful and sophisticated offensive cyberattack capability, although it remains highly classified, said Jack Goldsmith, a member of a 2009 National Academies' committee that authored a report titled "Technology, Policy, Law, and Ethics Regarding U.S. Acquisition and Use of Cyberattack Capabilities."

The Pentagon's National Security Agency, for instance, is not only the world's most powerful code-breaker and eavesdropper , he wrote in a Washington Post guest column Monday, but "is also in the business of breaking into and extracting data from offshore enemy computer systems and of engaging in computer attacks that, in the NSA's words, ‘disrupt, deny, degrade, or destroy the information' found in these systems,"

© Thomson Reuters 2010