Pentagon Promising to Unleash Cyber Campaigns if Needed

WASHINGTON — U.S. military leaders are starting to unveil the updated Defense Department cyber strategy, calling for troops to “campaign in and through cyberspace” in order to defend the country.

The Pentagon on Friday announced it shared a classified version of its 2023 Cyber Strategy with Congress earlier this week and promised to produce an unclassified summary of the new strategy in the coming months.

The new cyber strategy updates the previous one, issued in 2018, and “is informed by years of real-world experience of significant [Defense Department] cyberspace operations,” according to a Pentagon statement.

Those operations include 47 deployments to 22 countries by U.S. Cyber Command “hunt forward teams,” most recently to Latvia and Albania.

Hunt forward teams also played a role in securing the 2020 presidential election.

U.S. officials have likewise been learning from Russia’s attempts to use cyberattacks as part of its invasion of Ukraine.

“The department will maximize its cyber capabilities in support of integrated deterrence, employing cyberspace operations in concert with other instruments of national power,” the Defense Department said Friday in a separate, unclassified fact sheet.

It also warned that U.S. military cyber teams “will campaign in and through cyberspace below the level of armed conflict to reinforce deterrence and frustrate adversaries.”

In line with previous statements and congressional testimony from top Pentagon officials, the new cyber strategy lists China as the main threat.

“The People’s Republic of China (PRC) represents the department’s pacing challenge,” according to the strategy fact sheet. “The PRC has made significant investments in military cyber capabilities and empowered a number of proxy organizations to pursue malicious cyber activities against the United States.”

Earlier this month, the director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, warned that China would very likely turn to cyberspace should tensions between Beijing and Washington boil into something more.

“In the event of a conflict with the U.S., we will almost certainly see China use aggressive cyber operations against our critical infrastructure and almost certainly be able to disrupt critical infrastructure,” Jen Easterly told a forum organized by the Special Competitive Studies Project.