Daily Archives: May 16, 2008

Boy I stumbled badly on a recent blog post. While I find the whole area of cyber-warfare to be fascinating, I did not mean to propose the AFCYBER actually create a botnet of civilian volunteer’s computers. It’s an intriguing idea, but ultimately not a practical one.

In my opinion the military creating its own offensive botnet would be a silly waste of money and resources. Even if we are attacked by a botnet controlled by a hostile government, there is little point or chance of retaliating in kind. If such attack is launched, the attackers would do so in way that the origin was in doubt (at least publicly). The US military does not have that luxury.

If a hostile government was brazen enough to openly wage cyber war on the US, the retaliation would be conventional and overwhelming.  Or put another way, a carrier group is a much better deterrent than an anemic lot of obsolete computers.