Why The US Will Lose a Cyber War

An anonymous reader writes "There's not another nation in the world that can wage kinetic warfare as effectively as the United States, and that's probably at the heart of the reason why the United States will lose a war fought in cyberspace, leading cyber security analyst Jeffrey Carr writes."

Re:No, it's because the U.S. has the most to lose

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why, if the US is blatently attacked, they will respond with troops and bombs instead of cyber retaliation.

Cyber attack is already a routine reality; it's not some kind of looming futuristic threat. And yet the troops aren't being deployed and the bombs not being dropped, because no one knows how to do that and where to bomb.

I would envision a typical response to be either cutting off the Internet connections from an attacking country (by physically destroying the cables with air strikes)

This countermeasure definitely isn't viable, because the main mode of cyber attack is insurgency. The first step of cyber attack is to have your adversary attack itself. The US isn't going to cut off access to itself. Indeed, persuading the US to do that, could in fact be the very goal of the attacker, so your suggested defense is in fact surrender.

i.e. The purpose of the president's "Internet kill switch" to destroy the US economy, in the event that the US economy is threatened. It's pretty damn funny, almost right out of Dr. Strangelove.

Re:It just works like that

[cavreader]

China has increased it's import of food by a factor of 5 from the US just over the past 6 years. On the other hand China makes nothing the US can not produce domestically or import from other emerging countries who can also pay their employees a dollar a day to create cheap products. China has also started reporting trade deficits and inflation is driving their export prices up past the point where their currency manipulations can control. Doing anything to really piss off the US would threaten 30% of their current export market while the US might see a slight increase in prices for imported goods.

We won't lose the war, we'll lose the first battle

[divisionbyzero]

And then in typical American reactive manner we'll dump a bunch of money into cybersecurity and thereby create the military-IT complex...

Re:It just works like that

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the same new aircraft carrier that has far inferior planes on it and doesn't stand a chance against even sub-standard submarines?

Besides, this era is way different than before. The US has the capacity to blow up the planet several times over, something the Roman/British/Ottoman/etc Empires never had. Perhaps the US's glory years are over, but mutually assured destruction is still nothing to laugh at.

Besides, I don't know why everyone seems to be rooting for China. The Chinese government treats people worse than animals, has a horrendous human rights record. If anything, there should be a call to neuter it before we get to WWIII.