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31 May 2010 By Rick Rozoff
On May 21 U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
announced the activation of the Pentagon’s first
computer command. And the world’s first comprehensive,
multi-service military cyber operation.
U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), initially approved
on June 23, 2009, attained the status of what the
Pentagon calls initial operations capability eleven
months afterward. It is to be fully operational later
this year.
CYBERCOM is based at Fort Meade, Maryland, which
also is home to the National Security Agency (NSA).
The head of the NSA and the related Central Security
Service is Keith Alexander, U.S. Army lieutenant
general on the morning of May 21 but promoted to
four-star general before the formal launching of Cyber
Command later in the day so as to become its
commander.
The U.S. Senate confirmed Alexander for his new
position on May 7. In written testimony presented to
Congress earlier, he stated that in addition to the
defense of computer systems and networks, “the cyber
command would be prepared to wage offensive operations
as well….” [1] Two days before his confirmation the
Associated Press reported that Alexander “said the
U.S. is determined to lead the global effort to use
computer technology to deter or defeat enemies.” [2]
The conjunction “and” would serve the purpose better
than “or.”
The day Alexander assumed his new command Deputy
Defense Secretary William Lynn “called the
establishment of U.S. Cyber Command at Fort Meade,
Md., today a milestone in the United States being able
to conduct full-spectrum operations in a new domain,”
adding that the “cyber domain…is as important as the
land, sea, air and space domains to the U.S. military,
and protecting military networks is crucial to the
Defense Department’s success on the battlefield.” [3]
The Pentagon’s second-in-charge is not the only
person to refer to cyber warfare as the world’s fifth
battleground after those of land, sea, air and space,
nor to link the first with the other four.
Indeed, the Defense Department’s Quadrennial
Defense Review released earlier this year focuses on
“a broader range of military responsibilities,
including defending space and cyberspace,” [4] and the
Pentagon’s space operations are now grouped with cyber
warfare as the new Cyber Command is subsumed under
U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), which is in
charge of the militarization of space as well as the
global interceptor missile project, information
warfare and related missions.
In its own words, “USSTRATCOM combines the synergy
of the U.S. legacy nuclear command and control mission
with responsibility for space operations; global
strike; Defense Department information operations;
global missile defense; and global command, control,
communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance
and reconnaissance (C4ISR), and combating weapons of
mass destruction.” [5]
“U.S. CYBERCOM is a sub-unified command under U.S.
Strategic Command, of Offutt Air Force Base in
Nebraska. But it will be run out of the
super-secretive communications-gathering National
Security Agency in Fort Meade, Md.” [6]
Three months ago U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff
General Norton Schwartz addressed a conference of the
Air Force Association, but he “did not mention
fighters, special operations or mobility,” instead
concentrating on space and cyberspace. “We have an
enduring need for robust space and cyberspace
capabilities,” he told the audience.
The Air Force Times provided background information
regarding Schwartz’s comments and connected the role
of space and cyber warfare: “Space and cyberspace
missions were brought together last year, when the
service moved many of its communications and computer
missions into Space Command and created the 24th Air
Force to be the service’s in-house ‘cyber command.’
“At the same time, Space Command’s nuclear missile
role was transferred to the new Global Strike
Command.” [7]
The 24th Air Force will be joined by the Army
Forces Cyber Command and the 10th Fleet and Marine
Forces Cyber Command (representing the four main
branches of the U.S. armed forces) in providing the
first 1,000 personnel for the new multi-service Cyber
Command.
The day that CYBERCOM was launched, the Pentagon
announced that “The U.S. Army will consolidate 21,000
soldiers in its cyber warfare units under a new
unified command led by a three-star general.” Army
Forces Cyber Command, ARFORCYBER, “will be fully
operational by October at Fort Belvoir, Va., a
sprawling base south of Washington,” and will achieve
“unprecedented unity of effort and synchronization of
Army forces operating within the cyber domain.” In
the words of the Army’s chief cyber commander, Major
General Steven Smith, his service is “trying to
understand what a cyber warrior should be, and how
they should be trained.” [8]
A few days before the Air Force revealed that since
last November it has transferred at least 30,000
troops from communications and electronics assignments
to “the front lines of cyber warfare.” [9]
Earlier this month Deputy Under Secretary of
Defense for Policy James Miller was cited as
maintaining that “The Pentagon would consider a
military response in the case of a cyber attack
against the United States.” He was quoted as proposing
a direct military reaction to computer attacks,
stating “we need to think about the potential for
responses that are not limited to the cyber domain.”
[10]
Placing computer security, including in the
civilian sector, under a military command is yet
another step in the direction of militarizing the
treatment of what are properly criminal or even merely
proprietary and commercial matters. And preparing
responses of a decidedly non-virtual nature in return.
The Pentagon and the National Security Agency will
not be alone in the endeavor to establish and operate
the world’s first national cyber warfare command. As
usual, Washington is receiving unconditional support
from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the
military bloc it initiated in 1949 and has extended
throughout Europe and, operationally, into Asia,
Africa and the Middle East over the last eleven years.
NATO not only provides the U.S. with 27 additional
voices and votes in the United Nations and as many
countries through which to transit and in which to
base troops and military equipment, it also – through
its Article 5 mutual military assistance provision –
allows for American military deployments and creates
the pretext for armed confrontation in alleged defense
of other member states. Troops from all 28 NATO
members and over 20 partner states are embroiled in
the nearly nine-year war in Afghanistan because
Article 5 was first invoked in September of 2001.
Stating that “The Parties agree that an armed
attack against one or more of them in Europe or North
America shall be considered an attack against them
all,” Article 5 is in large part the foundation of and
the impetus for the Pentagon’s Cyber Command.
The clamor for a cyber warfare capacity began among
leading American and NATO officials during and
immediately after attacks on computer systems in
Estonia in late April and early May of 2007. The small
country, a neighbor of Russia which had been inducted
into NATO three years earlier, accused Russian hackers
of the attacks on both government and private
networks, and the charge was echoed in the West with
the additional insinuation that the government of then
Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind the
campaign.
Three years later the accusations have not been
substantiated, but they have served their purpose
nonetheless: NATO dispatched cyber warfare experts to
Estonia shortly after the events of 2007 and on May
14, 2008 the military bloc established what it calls
the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCD
COE) in the nation’s capital of Tallinn.
The bloc’s Article 5 has been repeatedly – and
given its nature ominously – evoked in reference to
alleged cyber crimes and attacks, and Estonia has been
portrayed as both the model victim of such assaults
and the rallying point for a global cyber warfare
response to them.
From the genesis of the drive for U.S.-NATO cyber
warfare operations Russia has been the clearly implied
if not always openly acknowledged target.
In an August 2008 column in the influential Wall
Street Journal entitled “Russia’s Aggression Is a
Challenge to World Order,” two leading U.S. senators,
Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, called for
“reinvigorating NATO as a military alliance, not just
a political one. Contingency planning for the defense
of all member states against conventional and
unconventional attack, including cyber warfare, needs
to be revived. The credibility of Article Five of the
NATO Charter – that an attack against one really can
and will be treated as an attack against all – needs
to be bolstered.” [11]
This January U.S.-based Google accused Chinese hackers
of “sophisticated cyberattacks” and since then Beijing
has joined Moscow as the most frequently cited
antagonist in future cyber conflict scenarios,
intimately linked to comparable disputes in space over
military and civilian satellites.
The British House of Lords issued a report in
mid-March of this year that explicitly asserted
“Britain needs to work more closely with Nato to fend
off ‘cyber warfare’ on critical national
infrastructure from former cold war enemies such as
Russia and China,” and which “highlight[ed] the
dangers of attacks on the internet, banking and mobile
phone networks by the Russians in Estonia three years
ago.” [12]
A few days before NATO Secretary General Anders
Fogh Rasmussen, while promoting the military bloc’s
new Strategic Concept in nominally non-aligned
Finland, reiterated that although Article 5 military
defense of the Alliance’s 28 members’ territory
remains NATO’s chief function, it isn’t sufficient to
“line up soldiers and tanks and military equipment
along the borders,” as the bloc needs “to address the
threat at its roots, and it might be in cyber space,”
adding that an “enemy might appear everywhere in
cyberspace.” [13]
A year earlier Rasmussen’s predecessor as head of
the Western military alliance, the Netherlands’ Jaap
de Hoop Scheffer, foreshadowed NATO’s preparations for
its 21st century Strategic Concept, unveiled by former
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her
self-styled Group of Experts at NATO headquarters this
May 17, in stating “we need to take a broader approach
and gradually consider the notion of collective
security, rather than strictly collective defence.”
[14]
To expand the North Atlantic bloc’s missions
internationally, the distinction between military
threats and a multitude of self-identified security
concerns needs to be blurred.
The litany of non-military excuses for NATO
interventions throughout the world includes frequently
intangible, unverifiable and highly subjective factors
like perceived missile threats, climate change,
demographic shifts and dislocations, and “storms and
floodings” amid “a myriad of determined and deadly
threats” as Lord Peter Levene, chairman of Lloyd’s of
London, characterized NATO’s current challenges at a
conference his firm co-organized with the military
bloc last October 1. [15]
Arguably by their very nature, cyber security
issues are among the most amorphous, nebulous and
ethereal threats that can be devised (and concocted)
and as such are characterized by near universal
applicability and the effective impossibility of being
disproven. An indispensable arrow in the Pentagon’s
and NATO’s collective quiver, then.
In the speech cited above, former NATO chief Jaap
de Hoop Scheffer specifically addressed the matter of
cyber security, demanding that NATO “should consider
drawing on the unique capabilities that already exist
in our military and look to build on them. They could,
for example, form a rapid response service to support
Allies and perhaps even partners in the event of an
attack. And given the vital role that space and
satellites now play within our cyber networks, should
we not also start to follow activities in space more
closely and consider the implications for our
security?” [16]
In June of last year U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo
Daalder, former National Security Council staffer
currently on loan from the Brookings Institution, also
tested the waters on whether the Alliance’s Article 5
war clause should be activated in response to “energy
strangulation” or “a cyber or bio attack of unknown
origin.” [17]
“Energy strangulation” – that is, the accusation of
energy cutoffs to Europe – is inevitably coupled with
charges of cyber attacks in Europe and both are in
exclusive reference to Russia. For example, in
Scheffer’s recommendation of last year on the
application of NATO’s Article 5 for cyber and space
use he added this:
“The disruption of a country’s energy supply can
destroy the economic and social fabric of a country in
a way that resembles a war – yet without a single shot
being fired. It is therefore vital that NATO defines
what added value it can bring, for example in terms of
protecting critical infrastructure or securing
chokepoints through which supply lines run.” [18]
In her May 17 remarks to NATO’s North Atlantic
Council on the new Strategic Concept, Madeleine
Albright stated that “NATO must maintain a flexible
mix of military capabilities, including conventional,
nuclear, and missile defense” and laid stress on “the
primacy of Article 5,” which stipulates that “the
Alliance must continue to treat collective defense as
its core purpose.”
Among threats justifying the activation of Article
5 are “cyber assaults and attacks on energy
infrastructure and supply lines.” [19] Her group’s
report demands that NATO “accelerate efforts to
respond to the danger of cyber-attacks by protecting
its own communications and command systems, helping
allies to improve their ability to prevent and recover
from attacks, and developing an array of cyber-defense
capabilities aimed at effective detection and
deterrence.” [20]
Anticipating the Pentagon’s William Lynn by two
months, NATO’s Director of Policy Planning Jamie Shea
said that “120 countries currently have or are
developing offensive cyber attack capabilities, which
is now viewed as the fifth dimension of warfare after
space, sea, land and air….”
On March 22 “Shea said there are people in the
strategic community who say cyber attacks now will
serve the same role in initiating hostilities as air
campaigns played in the 20th century.” [21]
Shortly after this year’s presidential election in
Ukraine, the country became the first non-NATO member
to be recruited for cyber defense cooperation with the
North Atlantic military bloc. “On 11-12 February 2010,
cyber defence experts from Ukraine, NATO and Allied
countries participated in the first NATO-Ukraine
Expert Staff Talks on Cyber Defence in Kyiv.” [22]
NATO’s pioneer project in this area, though,
remains its cyber warfare center in Estonia. The
operation’s experts “second-guess potential
adversaries, gazing into what they dub the ‘fifth
battlespace’, after land, sea, air and space.”
Colonel Ilmar Tamm, the top Estonian military
official at the site, was quoted late last month
claiming “Definitely from the cyber-space perspective,
I think we’ve gone further than we imagined in science
fiction.” [23]
Estonian Defence Minister Jaak Aaviksoo spoke with
Agence France-Presse about events in 2007 and the
present, saying “It clearly heralded the beginning of
a new era….It had all the characteristics of
cyber-crime growing into a national security threat.
It was a qualitative change, and that clicked in very
many heads. Cyber-security, cyber-defence and
cyber-offence are here to stay. This is a fact of
life.” [24]
On April 23, the second day of a NATO foreign
ministers meeting in the Estonian capital, a
memorandum of understanding was signed which “creates
a legal framework for cyber defence cooperation
between NATO and Estonia. It will facilitate the
exchange of information and provide means for create a
mechanism for assistance in case of cyber attacks.
“The agreement was signed on behalf of NATO by Amb.
Claudio Bisogniero, Deputy Secretary General….” [25]
The individual who personifies the organic and
inextricable connection between the Pentagon and NATO
is the one who simultaneously heads up U.S. European
Command and is NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe,
from General Dwight Eisenhower in 1951 to Admiral
James Stavridis currently.
On February 2 of this year Stavridis said that
because of “attacks on computer networks in Estonia,
Georgia, Latvia and Lithuania in the past several
years,” although he didn’t offer either specifics on
or substantiation for the claim, “the definition of
protections for NATO members should be expanded.”
The four countries identified as victims leave no
doubt as to who Stavridis views as the perpetrator.
Addressing an Armed Forces Communications and
Electronics Association conference and speaking of
NATO’s Article 5, he said that the “likelihood that
the next conflict will start with a cyber attack
rather than a physical attack highlights the
importance of changing the treaty’s definitions.” [26]
Employing a line of reasoning that he has repeated
in the interim, he said: “In NATO we need to talk
about what defines an attack. In a country like
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, all NATO members, what
defines an attack? I believe it is more likely that an
attack will come not off a bomb rack on an aircraft,
but as electrons moving down a fiber optic cable. So
this is a very real and germane part of this challenge
that we face in the cyber war.”
NATO’s top military commander was also paraphrased as
saying that “NATO has taken the first step toward
making cyber warfare combat an international effort by
standing up the Cooperative Cyber Defence Center of
Excellence in 2008 in Estonia, but facing cyber
threats will require cooperation among U.S. government
agencies, and between governments and industry as
well.” [27]
In early May Stavridis delivered a speech in Paris
in which he again highlighted “new threats facing NATO
from cyber space” in relation to “NATO’s role in
combating these threats, in particular Article 5
operations and collective defence.” [28]
On May 19 he appeared as the guest of honor at a
special Commanders Series event at the Atlantic
Council [29] in Washington, D.C., where he was
introduced by Madeleine Albright two days after she
had presented her Group of Experts report on NATO’s
21st century global Strategic Concept in Brussels.
Stavridis boasted that NATO nations have a combined
gross domestic product of $31 trillion, have over two
million men and women under arms, and “130,000
soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines on
missions on three different continents.” The above
despite the fact that “No nation has ever attacked a
NATO nation.” [30]
His presentation was accompanied by slides and his
comments included: “I think that Secretary Albright’s
paper hits this exactly right. We must, as an
alliance, begin to think coherently about cyber. We
find here the flags of four states that have been
involved in cyber intrusions. [Presumably the four
former Soviet states he identified in February.] I
think it’s important that as an alliance, we begin to
come to grips with what is a cyber attack.
“We need centers that can focus on it; we need
procedures to provide defensive means in this world of
cyber.” [31]
Cyber defense and its inevitable correlate, cyber
warfare, are integral components of Pentagon and NATO
warfighting doctrine, embodied as such in the U.S.’s
new Quadrennial Defense Review and in NATO’s latest
Strategic Concept to be formally adopted at the bloc’s
summit in Lisbon, Portugal this November.
Cyber warfare as an element of military operations
in the other four spheres – land, air, sea and space,
especially in the last – and in its own right. With
the most advanced computer networks in the world and
the most capable corps of cyber specialists in all
realms, the world’s military superpower has launched
the first military cyber command.
1) Agence France-Presse, May 12, 2010
2) Associated Press, May 5, 2009
3) U.S. Department of Defense, May 21, 2010
4) Financial Times, January 31, 2010
5) U.S. Strategic Command
http://www.stratcom.mil/about
6) Stars and Stripes, May 22, 2010
7) Air Force Times, February 19, 2010
8) Stars and Stripes, May 22, 2010
9) Air Force Times, May 19, 2010
10) Agence France-Presse, May 12, 2010
11) Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2008
12) The Telegraph, March 18, 2010
13) Agence France-Presse, March 4, 2010
14) North Atlantic Treaty Organization, March 11, 2009
15) Thousand Deadly Threats: Third Millennium NATO,
Western Businesses Collude
On New Global Doctrine
Stop NATO, October 2, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/thousand-deadly-threats-third-millennium-nato-western-businesses-collude-on-new-global-doctrine
16) North Atlantic Treaty Organization, March 11, 2009
17) Defense News, June 8, 2009
18) North Atlantic Treaty Organization, March 11, 2009
19) North Atlantic Treaty Organization, May 17, 2010
20) Aviation Week, May 18, 2010
21) Defense News, March 23, 2010
22) North Atlantic Treaty Organization, February 22,
2010
23) Agence France-Presse, April 24, 2010
24) Ibid
25) North Atlantic Treaty Organization, April 23,
2010
26) Defense News, February 2, 2010
27) Ibid
28) North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe
May 7, 2010
29) Atlantic Council: Securing The 21st Century For
NATO
Stop NATO, April 30, 2010
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/05/01/atlantic-council-securing-the-21st-century-for-nato
30) Atlantic Council, May 19, 2010
31) Ibid
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