"It's very, very hard to compete for resources ... You have to be able to make that case," Lieutenant General John Hyten, vice commander of Air Force Space Command, told a cyber conference in Colorado Springs (Reuters).
The US is not, however, new to cyber weaponry. Stuxnet is generally considered to have been the first genuine cyber weapon, and is believed to have been a joint development between the US and Israel. Subsequent ‘weapons’ such as Duqu and Flame were discovered and believed to have come from the same stable – and then there’s the shadowy Wiper.
Last summer the Air Force posted a Broad Agency Announcement inviting papers “focusing on Cyberspace Warfare Operations.” Topics of interest included “Cyberspace Warfare Attack,” which was defined as the “employment of cyberspace capabilities to destroy, deny, degrade, disrupt, deceive, corrupt, or usurp the adversaries ability to use the cyberspace domain for his advantage.” Clearly, then, cyberspace is already treated as a potential theater of war.
Now Hyten has introduced a new sense of urgency. He pointed out that the Air Force spent decades in making the case that space-based assets are important for modern warfare, but that cybersecurity could not wait that long. "We have to do this quickly. We cannot wait. If we just let decades go by, the threat will pass us screaming by," he said. The extent of that urgency can be seen in a planned expansion of the Air Force cyber workforce, currently around 6000, by a further 1200 people – including 900 military personnel.
Details of the six Air Force cyber tools that are now defined as cyber weapons have, unsurprisingly, not been disclosed.