Defending America in cyberspace.

• Author: Alexander, Keith B.

President Barack Obama has identified cybersecurity threats as among the most serious challenges facing our nation. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel noted in April that cyberattacks "have grown into a defining security challenge." And former secretary of defense Leon Panetta told an audience in 2012 that distributed denial-of-service attacks have already hit U.S. financial institutions. Describing this as "a pre-9/11 moment," he explained that "the threat we face is already here." The president and two defense secretaries have thus acknowledged publicly that we as a society are extraordinarily vulnerable. We rely on highly interdependent networks that are insecure, sensitive to interruption and lacking in resiliency. Our nation's government, military, scientific, commercial and entertainment sectors all operate on the same networks as our adversaries. America is continually under siege in cyberspace, and the volume, complexity and potential impact of these assaults are steadily increasing.

Yet even as it confronts mounting threats, the United States also possesses a significant historical opportunity to deter them. America has built something unique in cyberspace--an evolving set of capabilities and activities that have not yet reached their collective potential. We have learned through two decades of trial and error that operationalizing our cyberdefenses by linking them to intelligence and information-assurance capabilities is not only the best but also the only viable response to growing threats. Our capabilities give us the power to change the narrative by making our networks more secure--and ensuring that cyberspace itself becomes a safer place for commerce, social interaction and the provision of public services. We want to take this opportunity to put these developments in historical context, and then explain why we as a nation must continue to build a cyberenterprise capable of guarding our critical infrastructure and population. We can and must do this while always protecting civil liberties, personal privacy and American values.

We now rely on social structures that barely existed 150 years ago. The order and functioning of modern societies, economies and militaries depend upon tight coordination of logistics and operations. Reliability of timing and flow has become indispensable for modern nations and their armed forces. This synchronization rests upon an infrastructure that allows communication, transport, finance, commerce, power and utilities to serve policy makers, managers, commanders and ordinary citizens in an efficient and reliable (i.e., unbroken) manner. Efficiency and dependability make realistic planning and effective operations possible across a whole society. Such intricate ties in the mesh of infrastructure systems also constitute a lucrative target for an attacker and a significant vulnerability for modern societies. Disrupt the synchronization, and the whole system of systems becomes unreliable--thus diminishing the nation's power and influence.

This unprecedented degree of exposure to systemic dislocation was first anticipated over a century ago when British cabinet ministers and business leaders contemplated the potential for disruption to their entire economy if French armored cruisers even temporarily interrupted the empire's overseas trade. The perceived peril to British society prompted the Royal Navy's intelligence office to begin gathering data for the strategic assessment of risk and vulnerability. That effort convinced decision makers that Britain was vulnerable to disruption of its commerce and to sabotage of its war-fighting capabilities. At the same time, Royal Navy planners recognized opportunities to exploit Germany's systemic vulnerability to economic disruption. This would require the coordination of a range of institutions and capabilities: financial services, international communications, shipping, energy, diplomacy, and naval and intelligence activities meshed into what historian Nicholas Lambert aptly describes as an "Armageddon" strategy.

London approved use of this collection of levers as a weapon against Germany in 1912, but when war came soon afterward British leaders quickly recoiled from the plan under economic and diplomatic pressure. Britain's economic-warfare measures were proving to be shockingly effective. At the outset of war in 1914 a global financial panic affected world

trade on a scale like that of 1929. Britain's strategy swiftly exacerbated the crisis. Citizen and business confidence in economic institutions collapsed. Traders withdrew from markets. World trade ebbed. Commodity exchanges closed their doors. Banks recalled loans, and...