The Pentagon wants cyber weapons that can inflict “blunt force trauma.”

By PHILIP EWING

4/18/15

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That’s one vision that Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh has laid out for the next phase of military cyber operations — and in a rare occurrence in the cyber realm, he elaborated with examples.

“How do you make an enemy air defense system go completely blank in the first minute of the conflict?” Welsh asked reporters last week. “How do you make a [surface to air missile] radar show a thousand false targets that all look real so you don’t know where the real package is in the middle of that? How do you keep enemy surface to surface missiles from ever launching — or [fly] halfway to their target and then turn around and go home?”

The military services devote a lot of effort to defending their networks against cyberattacks and supporting the intelligence community, he said, but so far not enough pursuing cyber weapons they could wield the way they now deploy fighter squadrons or infantry battalions.

“We haven’t thought of the domain in terms of our core missions robustly enough, and so that’s the focus we have right now,” Welsh said. “I’ve been calling it ‘Big Cyber.’ How does the Air Force get into big Air Force cyber stuff? … How do you create airpower through the cyber domain?”