This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

With Stuxnet under way in June 2009, the Obama administration created a dedicated Cyber Command at the Pentagon for offensive cyberattacks. More hacking—not better defenses—was the Pentagon’s response to the Russian attacks on its own classified networks. The success of Stuxnet, however short-lived, meant there was no going back. By 2012 the U.S.’s three-year-old Cyber Command’s annual budget had tripled from $2.7 billion to $7 billion (plus another $7 billion for cyberactivities across the Pentagon), while its ranks swelled from nine hundred dedicated personnel to four thousand, and eventually fourteen thousand by 2020. Starting in 2012, Obama ordered his senior intelligence officials to produce a list of foreign targets—“systems, processes and infrastructures”—for cyberattack, according to classified directives leaked by Snowden the following year. It is not clear whether the command planned to attack those targets, or if the Pentagon was just “preparing the battlefield,” but the directive made evident that attacking those targets could provide “unique and unconventional” ways “to advance national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging.”