The New Air Force Mission?

mvnicosia asks: "The US Air Force has released its new mission statement, which reads 'The mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests -- to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace.' With the recent rows over US Internet governance, what do you think is the impact of a US government overtly practicing cyberspace warfare? And what are the US's legal limitations?"

Comments

We need a new branch of the military.

[Johnny Mozzarella]

Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Cyber Guard

Each branch is going to end up having it's own "Cyberspace" division duplicating the efforts of other branches and wasting taxpayer dollars.
I just hope we don't have a cyber-civil war with the branches trying to out hack each other.

While we are at it, why not redefine the mission of the US Coast Guard to "Border Guard". Give them the resources they need to defend all our Borders.

Information Warfare

[dustinbarbour]

The Department of Defense realizes that information warfare is a serious business. During Gulf War II we had computers constantly dialing damn near every phone number in Baghdad which overloaded their phone system and forced them to constantly bring it down and back up. The system was practically unusable. The internet has become the communications medium of choice for most everything these days and the Air Force knows this. Thus they realize that they're gonna need a strong ability to conduct warfare in cyberspace if they wish to have every possible advantage when the bullets and bombs start flying. Nothing more, nothing less.

I don't understand why someone would have a problem with that. What? You're not patriotic?

Re:The Answer....

[budgenator]

The Air Force has had specialised a unit for about twenty years that deals with cyberwarfare, at least the computer/network security aspects of cyberwarfare.
Neither the technical capabilities nor institutional culture of the Air Force really lend themselves to this mission. Given the mega-tonnage of stratigic nuclear weapons in the Air Force invetory, the entire world hopes you are wrong about that.