One of the president’s top defense advisors, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey highlighted the precarious nature of the nation’s cybersecurity posture after meeting with European officials this week.
Dempsey pointed to the sophistication of hackers and other adversaries, as well as infrastructure weaknesses in the private and civilian government sectors.
“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 during an interview with DoD News. “I’d like the enemy to play uphill and us to play downhill.”
While DoD networks boast some of the strongest security available, civilian critical infrastructure and private sector companies present a weak spot in national security.
“We have authorities and capabilities that allow us to do a pretty good job of defending ourselves,” Dempsey said of military networks. “But the vulnerability of the rest of America is a vulnerability of ours and that’s what we have to reconcile.”
In September, outgoing House Intelligence Committee Chair Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said the U.S. was not prepared to go on the cyber offensive for the same reason: private sector networks aren’t ready for the backlash.
“The Russians can flip a switch and their Internet goes down; the Chinese can flip a switch and their Internet goes down. We don’t do that, nor do we want to do that, nor should we do that,” Rogers said during a cybersecurity event hosted by The Washington Post. “But again that exposes these 85 percent of private-sector networks and puts them at the whim of nation-state capability in cyber, and this trend is very, very concerning.”
“In cyber, we have competitors, and we have competitors who maybe aren’t as constrained by legal systems and freedoms as we are,” Dempsey said. “It’s going to be challenging to navigate this race.”
