You can’t pick up a newspaper or view a cable news program without hearing about cyber, whether cyberattacks, cyber defense, offensive cyber, cybersecurity, cyber threat, cyber Pearl Harbor, etc. You might think this issue just popped up the last few years. But all the armed services have been thinking about cyber for a number of years, in fact DEPSECDEF John Hamre originally used the term “cyber Pearl Harbor” in the 1990s, SECDEF Leon Panetta repeated it in 2012. The Navy in particular has been thinking about cyber for a long time. The origins of the military’s emphasis on cyber and cybersecurity can be traced back to at least 1996, when Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General John M. Shalikashvili, U.S. Army, released Joint Vision (JV) 2010. This seminal publication championed “Full Spectrum Dominance” as the “…key characteristic we seek for our Armed Forces in the 21st century.”
The U.S. Navy’s Evolving Cyber/Cybersecurity Story