Washington is widening the laws of armed conflict to keep up with a changing world in which hackers attacking, say, a nuclear reactor or mass-transit system can pose as grave a threat to U.S. security as a hostile country's military, unclassified portions of a U.S. Defense Department report expected to become public next month indicated.
The new understanding includes cyberweapons in the broadened definition of armed attacks against the United States.
"If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks," a U.S. military official told The Wall Street Journal, which disclosed the Pentagon report Tuesday.
The report is a significant step toward the militarization of cyberspace, with huge implications for international law, analysts said. It follows the White House's May 16 release of an International Strategy for Cyberspace report signed by U.S. President Barack Obama that said, "When warranted, the United States will respond to hostile acts in cyberspace as we would any other threat to our country."
Washington reserved the right "to use all necessary means," including military, "to defend our nation, our allies, our partners and our interests," the May 16 report said.
In a May 29, 2009, speech, Obama called the U.S. digital infrastructure a "strategic national asset" whose protection would, "from now on," be considered "a national security priority."
U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine's September-October 2010 issue that "as a doctrinal matter, the Pentagon has formally recognized cyberspace as a new domain in warfare ... [which] has become just as critical to military operations as land, sea, air, and space."
The new Pentagon report leaves unaddressed how Washington could be certain about an attack's origin, since attacks are usually difficult to trace, making it often impossible to determine who is behind them, the Journal said. In addition, it doesn't define when computer sabotage is serious enough to constitute an act of war.
An idea gaining momentum at the Pentagon is the notion of "equivalence," the Journal said. If a cyberattack produces the death, damage, destruction or high-level disruption that a traditional military attack would cause, then it could lead to a "use of force" retaliation, the newspaper said, explaining the equivalence notion.
The Pentagon has set its sights particularly on China and Russia as potential sources of state-sponsored cyberwarfare, analysts said.
Other countries claiming cyberwarfare apparatus include Israel and North Korea, The Economist reported July 1, 2010. Iran boasted of having the world's second-largest cyberarmy, the magazine said.
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