Forget the Space Force! Trump needs to create a Cyber Force, says think tank The US Space Force won't be the only new military branch Donald Trump has created if forthcoming recommendations from a group of retired military and civilian leadership end up being adopted. They want the President to form a US "Cyber Force" too. Public policy think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies, …
But not even half of their wacko consipiracy theories were wrong.
Incidentally, if you want to block the NSA/CIA/US Army/Navy/Air Force and US defense contractors from hacking your systems, block inbound access from Azure, AWS, GCP, and the addresses assigned to the US government. Or better yet, rate limit them to 1kb/s.
America needs a Subterranean Force.
Otherwise the enemy will be able to burrow under land and sea into the very heart of America undetected.
The greatest threats are obviously from Mexican and Canadian military drilling rigs, but I'm sure the Russians, Chinese and French will be secretly constructing giant mechanical moles with devastating weaponry capable of burrowing under the ocean.
You may look across the border and see no Canadian tanks and think all is well, but deep beneath your feet virgin American soil may be being violated by an underground mountie brigade intent on conquest and subjugation.
Air, space, and cyber is not enough. Act now or face a future labouring under the yoke of enforced politeness.
You forgot to mention the 1967 documentary about precisely that subject.
US Patriots: keep your ears to the ground!*
* and definitely don't look up!
If you consider what it is that we would expect of your "average" cyber-warrior, it quickly becomes clear that they all need top secret clearance. I'm having a very hard time understanding what exactly we want cyberwarriors to do that would fall outside the purview of the NSA?
It may be that scaling the NSA up enough would be challenging. I bigger problem would be interdepartmental communications.
Claptrap314,
The NSA is an intelligence gathering agency, rather than a military one. I presume it has offensive cyber capabilities - which might well have a more military focus - and it's not like intelligence gathering isn't a military thing too. There's a lot of overlap. Which is why these organisations tend to end up in a rat's nest of competing and overlapping responsibilies and internal departmental infighting.
However the military world is changing. There are a lot more drones, there are a lot more integrated systems based on networks - quite a lot of the lastest military thinging involves forming ad hoc networks to merge sensor information on-the-fly (literally when planes and drones are involved) in order to be able to find and hit targets more quickly. All of that is incredibly vulnerable to cyber-attack. As well as traditional electronic warfare.
Obviously this is both a threat and an opportunity. i.e. stopping it being done to you, and also doing it to the enemy.
As an example, look at Israel's operation Orchard / Outside the Box from 2007. This was an air attack on a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor, possibly as part of a nuclear weapons program. Syria had a complex integrated air defence system, which unaccountably switched off during the attack. That could have been the result of a cyber-attack or a physical attack - or even some combination of the two. But it's the sort of thing you need to plan for, as a military. And having all the computer skills in the civilian intelligence sector would lead to inter-departmental fun-and-games.
Not that I'm arguing you need a cyber force, or a space force for that matter. Just that as things change, you'll probably need to look at organisational structures.
The intelligence gathering might be the (second) goal of the NSA, but the reason they are separate from the CIA is that their means are specialized. Offensive cyber tooling is naturally their domain.
BTW, their first goal is (supposed to be) securing US communications (broadly). Because it was well understood, even when the agency was formed, that good defense requires deep knowledge of offense.
(rough quote, sorry:)
He said, "we don't let anyone work on cypto systems until they have 'earned their bones' breaking them for a decade."
That excluded me. I ventured, "not many people can do that".
"Indeed," he said with a smile. "And it makes our job so much easier"
Good point. They're your experts on computers and how to secure them and break them.
But what they're not experts on is the tactical use of computers during combat. So you've either got to second them a whole bunch of seasoned troops in order to develop those skills or you've got to spread the NSA's knowledge and tools to the combat arms of the forces - in order for them to be militarily useful. Which in effect could be creating a "cyber force" - under the NSA. But the NSA don't have the leadership experience of combat for this to be a good idea.
Or you could go along with what you've got now, where the Navy, Army and Air Force all have their own cyber units - which gives them the organic capabilities they need (assuming they currently do have the required capabilities) - at the cost of a lot of duplication (and extra expense).
Third choice is to create a new military branch. But here you have the downside that they have to be embedded in the operations of each of the other branches - so you gain some cost efficiency - but add inter-service rivalry and complexity of command and logistics to your field units.
Of those 3 choices, the NSA being in charge is almost certainly the worst.
Ah, but you have to find those golf courses first. Which is surely done by looking them up online.
The alternative would be to upgrade the Army Corps of Engineers, in order to be able to deploy a fully operational golf course on any appropriately flatish section of land you choose. In which case we could have the prospect of the parachute deployed golf course engineering regiment. Although this will probably require an air-mobile bulldozer unit.
And, believe it and like it or not, things have moved on by more than was never even previously imagined possible before and as was shared on Boxing Day, 2011 ........ 111226 Change the World, Occupy CyberIntelAIgent Space
