Via TPM, just in time for Memorial Day, the Pentagon is already ratcheting up its justification of the next round of decade-long, speciously planned exportation of Jebus, freedom, and democracy:
The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.
The Pentagon's first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country's military.
In part, the Pentagon intends its plan as a warning to potential adversaries of the consequences of attacking the U.S. in this way. "If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks," said a military official.
It's probably just a coincidence that the origin of cyber attacks are often difficult to determine, prone to misdirection, and without allegiance or connection to a given nation. Sounds strangely like our current wars of choice, does it not? Uniform-less combatants that we pursue until the ends of the earth in pursuit of Absolute Safety utilizing a grossly overmatched military force with a 20th century strategy that costs a fuckton of money - hackers quickly become tomorrow's terrorist.
This shift in policy is obviously not aimed at any two-bit hacker with a Dell and a cursory knowledge of Trojan horses. But it's a reaffirmation of our continued insistence on using American military power as a response to pretty much anything. And you are going to love the yard stick for how this will be applied:
The report will also spark a debate over a range of sensitive issues the Pentagon left unaddressed, including whether the U.S. can ever be certain about an attack's origin, and how to define when computer sabotage is serious enough to constitute an act of war. These questions have already been a topic of dispute within the military.
One idea gaining momentum at the Pentagon is the notion of "equivalence." If a cyber attack produces the death, damage, destruction or high-level disruption that a traditional military attack would cause, then it would be a candidate for a "use of force" consideration, which could merit retaliation.
So in other words, use of force will be commensurate with the damage which the cyber attack caused. And in case you haven't been paying attention, we are not particularly adept at measured, 'equivalent' responses. A single terrorist attack that killed 3,000 American citizens gave way to two wars that continue to this day almost a decade after the fact, not to mention the trillions of dollars we have pissed into the wind, the complete erosion of our moral character through indefinite detention and torture, and the ways in which average Americans now accept the persistent extraconstitutional intrusions into their privacy, civil liberties and even the very act of boarding a fucking airplane. And that list goes on and on - it is by no means conclusive, but just a small list of the number of insanities we allowed 9/11 to entrench in American policy.
The DoD is just gearing up for the 21st century and beyond. If we ever get out of Afghanistan and Iraq, we are going to need another hopeless military conflict to softly caress our national trigger finger and something else on which to spend our $800 billion defense budget. The cyber attack policy is just the framework for that.
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