Weaknesses in cyber civilian infrastructure and private businesses “present a significant vulnerability to our nation,” and require new cyber legislation, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this week.
Vulnerabilities in the private sector make the United States act on a level playing field in the cyber domain but “as the senior military officer of the most powerful military on the planet, I like to have the playing field tilted to my advantage,” he said in an interview with DoD News, the Pentagon’s official media outlet, while in Rome at a two-nation European tour focused on threats to American and European security.
Photo: DoD.
Dempsey highlighted the need for cyber legislation to allow for information sharing between the government and private sector. “We haven’t done enough–that’s not just internal to the military. We haven’t done enough as a nation.”
Over 20 countries have military units focused on using cyber in warfare. Dempsey is concerned that adversaries will try to exploit susceptibilities in critical civilian infrastructure, as a softer target than the U.S. military.
Even the strongest military cyber defense can be threatened by a weak link elsewhere because the U.S. military depends on commercial networks, he added. While the military has good authorities and capabilities for defense, Dempsey said, “the vulnerability of the rest of America is a vulnerability of ours, and that’s what we have to reconcile.”