Philip Ewing, Politico: The Pentagon's new cyber attack plan: 'Blunt force trauma'

The Pentagon wants cyber weapons that can inflict “blunt force trauma.”

That’s one vision that Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh has laid out for the next phase of military cyber operations — and in a rare occurrence in the cyber realm, he elaborated with examples.

“How do you make an enemy air defense system go completely blank in the first minute of the conflict?” Welsh asked reporters last week. “How do you make a [surface to air missile] radar show a thousand false targets that all look real so you don’t know where the real package is in the middle of that? How do you keep enemy surface to surface missiles from ever launching — or [fly] halfway to their target and then turn around and go home?”

The military services devote a lot of effort to defending their networks against cyberattacks and supporting the intelligence community, he said, but so far not enough pursuing cyber weapons they could wield the way they now deploy fighter squadrons or infantry battalions.

WNU Editor: What this means is that the Pentagon is shifting from a purely defensive posture to an offensive one .... and from my point of view this makes it sense .... why spend billions on stealth technology when you can accomplish the same thing by disabling their communications/electronics/radars/etc. . But I suspect that they have a long way to go before being able to implement any form of strategy or cyber weaponry.