Integrating the IC’s cybersecurity mission

Information warfare is not new, nor is the fact that our cyber insecurity has been growing for nearly four decades. In the 1980s, US cyber capabilities were called information warfare, communications counter-measures, electronic warfare, propaganda, information operations, etc. Using such activities to disrupt, degrade, deny, or destroy could produce strategic effects on the adversary. Russian military theorists called it information confrontation in a technical and psychological manner.

In the early 1990s, I worked on a net assessment of information warfare requested by Secretary of Defense William Perry and conducted by the Office of Net Assessment under Andrew Marshall. The study compared US capabilities vis-a-vis our competitors, acknowledging that the United States needed to understand whether we had a comparative advantage. At that time, the community of military and intelligence personnel working these issues was quite small. What emerged from that study and subsequent efforts was the fact that as the United States digitized more of its critical infrastructures and military capabilities, it would become more vulnerable.