In the 1990s, the Pentagon’s military budgets were chopped by a third, with cyber being the one exception. Congress continued to approve vague “cybersecurity” budgets, without much grasp of how dollars funneled into offense or defense or even what cyber conflict necessarily entailed. Policymakers’ thinking on cyber conflict was, as former commander of U.S. Strategic Command James Ellis put it, “like the Rio Grande, a mile wide and an inch deep.” But inside each agency, officials were learning that the best zero-days netted the best intelligence, which in turn translated to bigger cyber budgets
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