The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

by David E. Sanger

It was an instinct born of more than a decade of counterterrorism operations, where the United States learned that the best way to take on al Qaeda or ISIS was by destroying them at their bases and in their living rooms. But in cyber it amounts to an admission that our defenses at home are wildly insufficient and that the only way to win is to respond to every perceived threat. As with many of Trump’s new strategies, taken to its logical extreme this approach carries enormous risks of miscalculation and escalation. To pull it off, the United States would have to scrap the requirement that the president authorize every destructive cyberattack. Cyber operations would begin to look more like evening raids conducted by Special Operations Forces. The problem is that when other countries adopt the same strategy, as inevitably they will, the chances rise dramatically that cyberattacks will accelerate and could trigger a shooting war, or worse.