Most warfare throughout the two centuries of the industrial era centered on one principal strategic objective: the physical occupation of territory. The possibility of occupying territory, or the threat of becoming occupied, forced many nations to amass large standing armies, to maintain navies, and to build aircraft in hopes of achieving battlefield superiority against their adversaries.
Several pivotal events over the last three decades have been gradually changing that paradigm, shifting nation-states from the industrial era of warfare into the cyber defense era of warfare. One of these events was when cyberspace was classified by the United States government as being strategically important to national security. With that classification, cyberspace became the fifth domain of war, comparable to the domains of land, sea, air, and space. The geopolitical events that were the tipping points that catapulted us from the industrial defense era to one of cyber defense, were the campaign-level cyber attacks launched against Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008. Global militaries are scrambling to understand their own capabilities, their adversaries’ capabilities, and the new multidimensional, multidirectional and multilayered battlespace of cyberspace.
The U.S. armed forces have been grappling with these issues for years, but only recently established the U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) to start addressing our national defense and economic survivability in cyberspace. The operational mission of the command is to coordinate U.S. operations in cyber network defense and cyber network attacks. The command is linked to the National Security Agency, which has a well established history of contributing to the nation’s intelligence collection efforts (e.g. Signals intelligence (SIGINT) and technological advancements (e.g. cryptography) in the digital age...