The consequences of cyber offensive activities may be difficult to predict or control, with vital infrastructure like power supplies and water treatment plants all possibly at stake. Shadowing each of these actions-and underpinning the whole book-is an early computer scientist’s prescient warning that anything the US does could also happen to the US, where technological networks are more prevalent than anywhere else. Among the US’ varied targets were the Soviet Union’s command and control networks, Haiti’s air defense system (by way of its commercial phone network) in 1994, and the computers of Iraqi insurgents in 2007, in order to lure them to their deaths.
As such networks expanded globally, the US pioneered electronic countermeasures designed to intercept, disrupt, or sever communications links. This network was the first of its kind, and contained many unintentional but inherent vulnerabilities that would later be passed on to the Internet. As the journalist Fred Kaplan documents in his recent book, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, covert cyber tools have played a part in wars around the world for decades.ĭark Territory traces the beginnings of cyber warfare to the US military’s creation of a digital communication network, ARPANET. But while the Pentagon may be breaking new ground by publicly discussing a cyber offensive operation, this isn’t the first time it has deployed one. He was describing in the most explosive terms yet the new combat operations in the Pentagon’s campaign against ISIS, following previous statements from Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and President Obama.
We have never done that before,” or so said the US deputy secretary of defense Robert O.
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