Preventing cyberspace gap

In the movie “Dr. Strangelove,” a Soviet “doomsday” weapon is about to be irreversibly activated by an errand U.S. nuclear bomb dropped from a B-52. Dr. Strangelove proposes that a small number of American survivors could live out the resulting 100-year long nuclear winter in the nation’s mineshafts. There, using hydroponics and nuclear energy, life could be maintained, with every man encouraged to have a relationship with up to a dozen women in order to increase the birth rate eventually emerge from the mineshaft to repopulate the country. The ever-suspicious General Buck Turgidson, however, points out to the president that this solution may be flawed, since the Soviets, impelled by their expansionist policy, would probably try to tunnel into and take over American mineshaft-space, giving the communists the room to breed more prodigiously than the Americans, in the end overwhelming them with greater numbers when they emerge from underground after the nuclear winter ends. Turgidson passionately declares that America “cannot allow a Mineshaft gap!”

On a more serious level, Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne last week said that the United States would not allow for a cyberspace gap to open (well, he did not actually say “cyberspace gap,” but rather spoke of the need for the United States to achieve and maintain “Cyberspace dominance.” Speaking to the Precision Strike Association, the secretary also spoke of the “information mosaic” and the future of precision strike. Wynne, reflecting on the evolution of these issues, noted how in the Second World War it took 1,500 B-17s dropping 9,000 bombs to destroy a given target, but today one B-2 Spirit bomber can strike eighty different targets on a single mission.

He also posed pointed questions to the audience concerning these issues and their future in military operations. “These future technologies all share a common backbone: they assume that we have Cyberspace dominance, making Cyberspace a center of gravity to protect and exploit,” he said. “This is why Air Force Chief of Staff General (T. Michael) Moseley and I are standing up a Cyberspace Command, devoted to exploiting this domain.”

-read more at this Precision Strike Digest report; and read more about the association at its Web site