U.S. Military Wants to Exert Influence Over Private Cyber Infrastructure

Tim Greene writes on NetworkWorld:

The U.S. military wants to exert more influence over the protection of power grids, transportation networks and financial network systems, a Pentagon official says in a broad-ranging essay published in Foreign Affairs.

To do so the Pentagon is urging that its defense expertise be put in play beyond the .mil domain to include .gov and .com and wants policy makers to figure out how best to do that.

The reasons are that the military relies on these networks to deal with suppliers and that these networks could become military targets, says William J. Lynn III, undersecretary of defense, in the essay called "Defending a New Domain."

"Protecting those networks and the networks that undergird critical U.S. infrastructure must be part of Washington's national security and homeland defense missions," Lynn says.

Because the military relies on these networks, the expertise it has developed should be made available to them, he says, but he doesn't describe exactly how that would happen in practice.

More here.

Note: Considering how the U.S. Military can't even protect it's own networks against well-known USB malware, I find this suggestion laughable. - ferg