Military should be deployed to combat cyber attacks, new head of Army says

Dominic Nicholls 

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The military should be deployed to combat cyber attacks, the new head of the army has said. In his first speech since being appointed to the role, General Mark Carleton-Smith described how the modern battlefield had expanded rapidly, and is "no longer bound by the laws of physics.”  Opening the Land Warfare Conference, hosted by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), General Carleton-Smith added that “revolution is the new evolution” and warned “existential threats occur at the speed of the internet". The new Chief of the General Staff used his inaugural speech to warn of the growing evidence that the cyber domain is being used to undermine Western societies and democratic processes. 

He suggested military forces should be employed as part of a national response to a crisis earlier than they have traditionally been considered, warning: “War and victory are no longer helpful as a lens through which to consider the employment of military force.

“Success will depend on operating across multiple domains, jointly, cross-government and multi-nationally.

“Our ability to manoeuvre in the Information and Cyber domains is already being tested, and will increasingly influence how we will modernise, train and fight our armies into the future.”

Responding to General Carleton-Smith's comments, Lord Hague, a former Foreign Secretary and the current Chairman of RUSI, called for NATO to develop an “Article 5B” to counter hostile action in cyberspace. 

Article 5, the fundamental principle which underpins NATO, says that an attack on one member state is considered an attack on all. 

Lord Hague's proposal would see this expanded to explicitly cover cyber attacks. 

The former Conservative leader added that by the country that leads the world in Artificial Intelligence technology by 2040 will be as powerful as the country that led in nuclear weapons research in 1940, and that in the future there are likely to be military operations in support of a social media campaign, rather than the other way round. 

Lord Hague also described the "misunderstanding" between the West and Russia in his comments, but stopped short of directly criticising Moscow.

“There has been a vast misunderstanding between the West and Russia," in recent years, he said. Whilst the expansion eastwards of Euro-Atlantic institutions and democracy seemed natural in the West, it was perceived as a threat in Russia; “a country that has been invaded many times in its history,” he noted. 

He feared the West has fragmented in recent years, with nationalism and populism on the rise and was concerned that the recent G7 summit showed "the greatest disarray in our lifetimes" where countries were "dumbfounded" by how to deal with President Trump.