Cyberwar: The Next Threat to National Security & What to Do About It

by Richard A. Clarke

If the U.S. cannot deter others with its secret cyber weapons, is it possible that the U.S. itself may be deterred by the threat from other nations’ cyber warriors? In other words, are we today self-deterred from conventional military operations because of our cyber war vulnerabilities? If a crisis developed in the South China Sea, as in the exercise described above, I doubt that today anyone around the table in the Situation Room would say to the President, “You better not send those aircraft carriers to get China to back down in that oil dispute. If you do that, Mr. President, Beijing could launch a cyber attack to crash our stock market, ground our airlines, halt our trains, and plunge our cities into a sustained blackout. There is nothing we have today that could stop them, sir.” Somebody should say that, because, of course, it’s true. But would they? Very unlikely. The most senior American military officer just learned less than two years ago that his operational network could probably be taken down by a cyber attack. The Obama White House did not get around for a year to appointing a “cyber czar.” America’s warriors think of technology as the ace up their sleeves, something that lets their aircraft and ships and tanks operate better than any in the world. It comes hard to most of the U.S. military to think of technology as something that another nation could use effectively against us, especially when that technology is some geek’s computer code and not a stealthy fi...