Military Appoints General To Direct Cyber Warfare

An anonymous reader writes news from The Guardian, excerpting: "The US military has appointed its first senior general to direct cyber warfare – despite fears that the move marks another stage in the militarisation of cyberspace. The newly promoted four-star general, Keith Alexander, takes charge of the Pentagon's ambitious and controversial new Cyber Command, designed to conduct virtual combat across the world's computer networks. He was appointed on Friday afternoon in a low-key ceremony at Fort Meade, in Maryland."

Comments

"militarisation of cyberspace"?

[Vinegar Joe]

I guess someone has never heard of DARPA.

http://www.darpa.mil/

Re:"militarisation of cyberspace"?

[caladine]

Besides DARPA, the very idea of "despite fears that the move marks another stage in the militarisation of cyberspace" assumes that other countries haven't already taken this step, just not quite as publicly. In my mind, it just means that the US government is actually taking a serious threat... seriously.

Remember you are .mil and to .mil you shall return

[optikos]

What goes around comes around. The ARPAnet was military. Now perhaps it may become so once again. (With apologies to Ash Wednesday in the Catholic Church for the subject line.)

More Important Than Alexander's Qualifications

[DarkKnightRadick]

Right now, it doesn't matter. He apparently knows how to use people who know more than he does. To me he proved that when he took out the honeytrap site (stupid move, but whatever).

From TFA:

The difficulties facing the new command were underlined in March by former CIA director Michael V Hayden, who said that the Saudi operation had demonstrated that cyber warfare techniques were evolving so rapidly that they were now outpacing the government's ability to develop coherent policies to guide its use.

"Cyber was moving so fast that we were always in danger of building up precedent before we built up policy," Hayden said.

This is the key point. Unfortunately the Federal government is SUPPOSED to move slow. The unfortunate part of that is something like cyberwarfare will always outstrip even the ability of a state government (with the assumption being that state government is meant to move quicker to respond directly to the needs of it's people) to make policy governing its use.

Soooooo....*shrugs*

I'm kind of torn on this. Let the government grind slowly away at policy like it should, or enable them to make snap, on-the-fly decisions with far-reaching ramifications. No matter what you choose, it's the wrong answer.

Re:Qualifications

[Anonymous Coward]

I sure hope this "Cyber Warfare" General knows something about computers, because consultants, and especially computer consultants are very high priced.

I don't imagine, even if the good General "knows something about computers" that he's going to be spending time running around and making sure everyone's printer working fine.

I sure how he knows how to organize an outfit.

Re:Qualifications

[Glonoinha]

At that level you are assigned high level goals (like making sure Google doesn' t get hacked by the Chinese.)
Your job is to put good level middle level managers in place to hit a chunk of those individual goals.
The job of those managers is to put good low level managers in place to manage the implementation of the details of one of those goals singly.
The job of the low level managers is to hire you and I to actually do the work, to keep us motivated to deliver that single goal.
The job of you and I : actually care about the details and get it done.

Actual domain knowledge about the minutiae doesn't hurt, but it doesn't really help either.
That said, I think they'd be a lot better off with Thresh - he has a proven record of just pwning on the cyberwarrior field.