Been thinking allot about cyberwar and the orgy of funds raining down upon the tribes of defense contractors and I got to wondering, why fight a war you can't win.
Now try to follow me: the US made it a central part of our national strategy to own the skies, I think the last soldier to die from an air to ground strike was in the Korean conflict. So we spent the funds, developed the tech, trained the pilots and can now pretty much own the sky above any country we want to. We decided that we didn't want any competition in the air and wanted to take away that option from any military.
So cyberwar: we are going to attempt to do the same things, spend the funds, develop the tech, do the training, etc. and we'll own the net. BUT of course the net is this large amorphous blob of foreign governments, public and private entities that don't like to take direction from a central source. In effect we can never own the sky. In this case the lessons learned of 'rule the skys' doesn't work and never will because you can never bound the problem of cyberwar. So what to do?
Don't fight a cyberwar by making sure no one else can either.
Most cyberwar exploits weaknesses in existing technologies (servers not protected, patches not installed, bad security, bad archtecture (internet issues), etc.), so turn that technology that deters cyberwar into a commidity for all to use, make it better and move on.
It's a bit counterintuitive but if you can't bound the problem then you will be constantly in the mode of 'wack a mole' hiting this and that group of nitwits or worse state sponsored folks looking to disrupt things. Or the ole Pearl Harbour attack, etc. This would entail pushing open source software, making it better and publishing it for all (yes including the baddies) to use.
So don't fight this war you can't win or at least make it really hard to see any results fast. Over time the systems should get better so that you can trace back a cyber attack and then drop a bomb on them since we own the sky.
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