Air Force Cyberspace Command— ooh-rah!

“It’s all-out cyberwar toe-to-toe with the Russkies!”

In 2008, the US military will start to fund a new Air Force “Cyberspace” Command (which will essentially attempt to create an ability for the US to wage warfare within civilian information infrastructures). As is typical with most post-conventional military efforts, the new command will sport:
A huge budget (in tens of billions of dollars) and a massive uniformed/private bureaucracy (tens of thousands of “cyberwarriors”). Standard DoD scaling rules apply — as in a gaggle of personnel drawn from multiple organizations and companies with a patina of training in “cyberwarfare.”

The Air Force (apparently strangers to the term “blowback”) is spending tens of billions of dollars to turn U.S. servicemen into international cybercriminals!

This new Command’s ability to wage cyberwarfare will be judged based on its success in three areas:
Real-world experience and rapid (open source) innovation. Most, if not all, of this experience and innovation in cyberwarfare is gained through criminal activity. Innovation is a product of rapid cycles of competition with software vendors and computer security companies.
Massive self-replication. Think in term of small teams (the smarter, the better) designing software that seizes control of tens of millions of computer systems through various forms of infection.
Deniability. Nearly all of the successful operations conducted in offensive cyberwarfare will require deniability. Post-attack forensics must not point back to a government since these wars/battles will be fought in peacetime . . .

Given these requirements, this new Command will likely fail (and badly). To provide contrast, the Russian Business Network (the RBN is a computer criminal syndicate responsible for an estimated 60% of online criminal activity), gets top marks in all of these areas.

I mean, like, wow.

D’you think this stands a snowball’s chance in hell?