General Anthony Tata (former Deputy Commanding General of US forces in Afghanistan) laid out his concerns regarding America’s helplessness in a determined enemy’s cyber war inflicted on us, particularly the threat from the People’s Republic of China.

In the cyber warfare domain, many experts believe America faces a “Sputnik moment” as China plans to exceed US artificial intelligence capabilities by 2030.
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China’s deliberate plan to accelerate artificial intelligence capabilities by 2020, catch up to the US by 2025, and surpass the US by 2030 is disconcerting in its forthrightness. China seems to have had its own “Sputnik” moment and has now developed its own project to become the world leader in artificial intelligence.

A critical difference between the Soviet Union’s “Sputnik moment” in near-earth orbit and the PRC’s “Sputnik moment” in artificial intelligence (and in cyber war capabilities generally), though, is that the Soviets’ moment heralded weapons to come, whereas the PRC’s moment will represent a weapon in being.

Beyond that, the pace of development and the pace of action once deployed are such that there is little time to catch up with the PRC (I think our lead is much smaller, if it exists at all today, than Tata does).  The pace of action in the long runup to cyber war is not a matter of building out systems and deploying them, we race to build out and deploy our systems, and everybody yells, “King’s X.”  Software doesn’t take weeks or months or years to deploy—it takes seconds.  And we know that the PRC (and Russia) have been deploying malware in our systems against a future use; we keep finding such.

Nor is use a matter of launching missiles and several minutes later we respond with our counter-missile missiles and our own offensive launches.  The launch of cyber weapons results in instantaneous paralysis of our detection systems, our weapons systems—both physical and cyber—our communications systems, our life-maintaining infrastructure systems.

Keep in mind, too, that this is an area where Alphabet and its Google subordinate entity have refused absolutely to help our own DoD work to develop capabilities, even purely defensive ones, in this area—at the same time that it’s actively helping the PRC to develop AI capabilities along with citizen-monitoring capabilities (which extends in a moment to monitoring foreign soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines wherever they may be).

President Xi Jinping’s Warring State won’t hesitate once he has the weapons.

Cyber—in all its forms, recognized today and unrecognized before tomorrow—is an area of national security in which we cannot afford to lag, ever.  This is an area of national security in which we can’t even afford to have a small lead, ever.

President Donald Trump has decided to bring our troops home from Syria, asserting that the Daesh has been defeated.  It is, after all a season of homecomings and military families across America are being reunited for the holidays.  With this…victory…our troops can come home with their heads held high.

Never mind that the Daesh still have a presence on the Syria-Iraq border.

It’s another half-measure withdrawal, and aside from many in Congress who recognize this, so do some of our putative allies.  But they expose their own half-measure goal in the matter.  Here’s France’s Defense Minister Florence Parly, for example:

…acknowledged that the group had been significantly weakened, she said the battle was not over.
“Islamic State has not been wiped from the map, nor have its roots elsewhere. The last pockets of this terrorist organization must be defeated militarily once and for all,” Parly said on Twitter.

But this also is a half measure.  It’s not enough to defeat the Daesh militarily. It must be crushed politically and psychologically, also.

And that requires, as Trump did correctly assert, those putative allies’ more active participation in the problem.  But it also, unfortunately, requires our own continued participation.

Your moves to strengthen your ability to defend yourselves will be met by us with greater force.  So says Russian President Vladimir Putin.

If the US puts intermediate-range missiles in Europe, Russia will take countermeasures, Putin said at his end-of-year press conference. He warned the “threshold” for the use of nuclear weapons was getting lower.

And this:

In a wide-ranging press conference, Mr Putin also blamed the US for triggering a new arms race and raising the threat of a nuclear war, slamming Washington for abandoning Cold War-era missile treaties even as he boasted of Moscow’s plans to develop new weapons.
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Russia, whose military budget is only about a 10th of that of the US….

No contradiction there. Bring it. Repeat your predecessor nation’s arms race performance.