Hi Ironhorse,

Quote Originally Posted by Ironhorse View Post
The information domain is mission critical across all services and most ops. We can no more give all of Cyber to the Air Force (or let them take it ), than we can give all FP to the Army or all beaches to the Marine Corps or all C2 to guys named Sparky. Hell, we don't even give the Air Force all the air or the Navy the water. And IO, whatever that is , is much more than Cyber.
That is an excellent point! I think it would be a very good exercise to break down the different forms of "cyberwarfare" into what Abbott called "Tasks" (think of that more as operations types). In general, we would have something like
  • Offensive capabilities
    • Standard (e.g. script attacks, viruses, agents, etc.)
    • PSYOPS
  • Defensive capabilities
    • Firewalls, blocking strategies, etc.
    • Anti-spyware, anti-virus, cleaning, encryption, etc.
    • IO
  • Tracking
    • Spiders, bots, agents
    • "Special ops" (think about the hunt for Kevin Mitnick)
  • Intelligence gathering
    • Site identification & Monitoring
    • User identification, etc.
    • Decryption
  • R&D
Selil should add / modify this since he's the expert <grin>. However, even with such a limited a list, you can see that the type of mindset required is really quite different from most military groups (hence my comments about SF). If the USAF were serious, then they should hire back Jerry Pournelle to advise them aided and abbeted by William Gibson, Selil and yours truly .

Marc