That new war: The digital one

The Pentagon is scratching its head as it frantically looks for ways to deal with the increasing threat of cyberattacks. Earlier this month, officials gathered to simulate a cyberattack that could paralyze the nation's power grids, its communications systems or its financial network. They failed to come up with a sure-fire answer on how to protect critical U.S. infrastructures, according to an article in the New York Times.

A real cyberattack played out recently at Google, and there have been plenty of angry charges and countercharges that China was involved. Still, there has been no diplomatic way to resolve this issue. Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton directly warned potential attackers that such attacks would not be ignored.

"States, terrorists and those who would act as their proxies must know that the United States will protect our networks," she said. "Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society."

The real question, though, is how the U.S. would respond to a cyberattack. The Pentagon's war players don't have the answers yet.

"We are now in the phase that we found ourselves in during the early 1950s, after the Soviets got the bomb," Joseph Nye, a professor at the Kennedy School at Harvard, told the newspaper. "It won't have the same shape as nuclear deterrence, but what you heard Secretary Clinton doing was beginning to explain that we can create some high costs for attackers."

For more on cyber warfare:
- see this New York Times article
- check out this article on national security failures

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