Can America Win a Cyber War???

Not with the present "leadership", which is intent upon having it's own way or else sinking the ship.

Herman Cain would not be so namby-pamby.

 

Cain will never have the opportunity.

Yes, we could win such a war without Cain.

 

In an all out cyber war, the Chinese would destroy us.

 

Here's the thing about a cyber-war...we can blow up their servers...

Also, I'm reluctant to trust any news or commentary coming from AOL. Just sayin...

 

It is government and financial secrecy that enables this sort of activity.

 

False, it's war...what is it good for?

 

I love your negativism, Cain and his supporters love to hear, "It can't be done."

Politicians have been saying it for years, it's time to prove them wrong.

 

The story is about foreign countries physically destroying satellite ground stations and cables, NOT about hacking into systems or performing denial of service attacks.

In that context, I guess the answer would be "I don't know." Are satellite ground facilities guarded by troops? Are there patriot missile batteries posted outside of them?

If the war was about hacking into systems and disrupting services I'd have to go along with Matt and say the Chinese would own us.

 

From the op

 

From the OP:

Space experts have long argued that the biggest threat to satellites isn't jamming or something like the Chinese anti-satellite test but an attack on a satellite ground station, which would destroy the ability to gather and distribute satellite data and take a great deal of time and money to replace. Cyber experts note that the Internet relies on crucial switching centers. Destroying those or some of the main clusters of cables that carry Internet traffic could cripple network access.

 

Physical attacks against facilities will only slow things down.

Take out the computer system for logistics? Then we'll go back to doing it with paper and pencil. It'll be a lot slower, but it'll still get done.

Take out the stop lights? There will initially be a few accidents; then someone will step up and start directing traffic at the intersections.

Kill power to a section of the city? Shucks, we have that now with brown-outs and black-outs; sure, there are deaths, but we continue on.

Cyber warfare is more of an "intel" kind of thing (as in, "intelligence"; i.e., spying). You want to really mess up the logistics systems? Hack in and change order numbers for critical parts. Either change the order from 100 to 1, critically shorting the agency who needs the parts; or change a non-critical order from 100 to 10,000, tying up the transportation system trying to get the 9,900 unnecessary parts to someone who doesn't need them.

Why do we need to control lights & power? To aid in physical strikes. Taking down power grids by themselves does nothing. Black out all the lights in an area, except for the one building we want bombed, allowing the planes a clear target.

Traffic lights? Only if we're trying to snarl up a response to something we're doing, or cause a diversion from what we're actually doing. Besides, traffic lights don't count for much in most of the places where we're doing physical operations.

The real danger of "cyber warfare" is all the data stored electronically--and just about everything is. Thus, "cyber spying" (intelligence gathering) is more of a threat than any kinetic/non-kinetic effects you can get from cyber attacks. Get into the system quietly, get everything you can, and get back out without getting caught. Go through the data, find out what they're doing, what they have, etc. Follows Sun Tzu's first rule: Know the enemy.

 

From the beginning of the op