Deborah S. Karagosian

Megabyte Will Always Get Through Deborah S. Karagosian

The purpose of this monograph is to describe the future road ahead for the US Cyber community in light of the recent technical and strategic developments in the state of cyber warfare. The paper began with a realization that cyber attacks have now become weaponized, and have the ability to command computer-guided machines to destroy themselves. In effect, kinetic strikes are now possible through the means of cyber attacks. Cyber attacks have therefore become kinetic in nature. Moreover, a history of such attacks has indicated the offense is significantly more powerful than the defense, and that there have been numerous examples where attacks easily and decisively defeated defensive schemes. However, the American cyber community is not unified, has no common doctrine, budget, educational or recruiting infrastructure. The method used was to break the community down into its component parts, discuss what characteristics made cyber warfare unique, then seek like organizations. Once those organizations were identified, and analysis of what made those organizations successful was made. Conclusions were drawn and those conclusions became recommended future activities for the cyber community. An analysis of the US cyber community determined that it was a technical organization, dependent on a small number of highly skilled personnel. It had a future that could see it as a decisive role player in future conflicts, but had an insignificant past. It had to struggle for funding dollars, and theorists and doctrine writers had difficulty identifying a road ahead. This community had great resemblance to the current cyber community in China, and the US Army Air Corps in the WWI - WWII interwar period. An analysis of those organizations determined several historical facts. Domains where technology was growing at a rapid rate brought several challenges as to how to maximize the organized systematic growth of the organization. Budgets were always a contentious issue, especially when