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Follow Brits’ WWII example: Keep cyber command’s profile low

The addition of a third medium — cyberspace — to the Air Force mission, along with the fanfare accompanying start-up of a new cyber command, is sharp contrast to the secrecy shrouding a past cyber success story of our closest ally.

British cyber operations — codename ‘Ultra’ — greatly contributed to the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. Yet few Brits knew anything about it. In nondescript buildings about 50 miles northwest of London, Bletchley Park housed the famous code-breaking center known as Station X. Thousands worked there nonstop to decode, decipher, and crack the German Enigma codes.

Nearby townspeople remained clueless as to what went on inside the buildings. More importantly, the German high command had no idea they had been “hacked” and believed their codes unbreakable. Historians credit Enigma’s code breakers as vital to the Allies’ victory and believe they shortened the war and saved many lives. Bletchley Park offers teaching points for our current cyberspace ventures.

In contrast, today’s Air Force launch into cyberspace has been conspicuous. Announcing intentions to enter cyberspace in a big way, the Air Force has already told the world where its new command will be located, how it might be organized, who its first commanders are, what they’ve thought about, and even why draft cyber war doctrine reads the way it does.

Plans also call for the new cyber command to someday be a four-star major command, presumably on par with Air Combat Command, Air Mobility Command or Space Command. It’s hard to envision a cyber MajCom of comparable size, and even tougher if cyber ops must be agile, cutting-edge and responsive, yet low-observable to potential enemies. Put in perspective, the average manpower of these three air and space MajComs is nearly 66,000.

For peak effectiveness, wouldn’t it be wise to stay below the bad guys’ proverbial radar? Unlike conventional air power, there is no up-front deterrent value to bulked-up U.S. cyber capability — offensive or defensive — to those who would harm the U.S. via cyberspace.

As a truly modern national security concern, cyberspace is also naturally a joint mission, if not a broader interagency one. Cyber issues interest every government agency. That makes it less clear where the impetus for the Air Force to take such a prominent role in cyberspace originated, particularly when cyberspace infrastructure covers such traditionally nonmilitary areas as banking systems, power grids and communication networks.

The U.S. fights wars jointly, and each service contributes uniquely capable forces to the joint force commander. In cyberspace, “joint” may be redefined to encompass all major U.S. government agencies that, in all likelihood, are already established there. Right now, others could view the Air Force initiative as reinforcement for closer teaming with other agencies already in cyberspace, and raise red flags about attracting future hostile attention with the flurry of public declarations, pronouncements and openness.

Instead, maybe cyberspace should be the blackest of the black world. The Air Force has a history of keeping important projects low profile, revealing their existence only after they’ve successfully done their jobs. Americans and the world finally learned the F-117 stealth fighter existed after their initial air strikes in the early stages of the Panama invasion in 1989. Similarly, Americans were awed when their first look at a B-2 stealth bomber was a flying operational model in the early 1990s.

So far, the Air Force launch into cyberspace has been public and conspicuous, seemingly trained more on opinion leaders inside the Washington Beltway than on cyberspace enemies. If the U.S. must defend itself in cyberspace, our enemies should never know what hit them.

The writer is an Air Force colonel assigned to the State Department. His e-mail address is krisinger1@cox.net. These views are his own.