Carter wrote a blistering assessment of how the cyber operations had played out. “I was largely disappointed in Cyber Command’s effectiveness against ISIS,” he wrote in late 2017, in a remarkably candid account. “It never really produced any effective cyberweapons or techniques. When Cybercom did produce something useful, the intelligence community tended to delay or try to prevent its use, claiming cyber operations would hinder intelligence collection. This would be understandable if we had been getting a steady stream of actionable intel, but we weren’t.” “In
