"Your best defense is a good offense," Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday. "So, you're going to have to have offensive capabilities, likewise, in space and cyberspace, in order to make sure that our national interests are preserved. There's a lot of work to be done in these areas."
Those remarks hinted at the oft-invisible contest that could decide the fate of millions, especially if Beijing attempts to invade Taiwan and the U.S.-China rivalry turns violent. A daily barrage of cyberattacks from China, Russia, and lower-profile hostile or criminal actors has forced U.S. Officials to broaden their perceptions of threats taking shape in cyberspace. It has also driven a philosophical shift in American cyber operations.
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"We're in competition every day," announced Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, the National Security Agency director and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, who followed Milley at the forum as he defined the "persistent engagement" doctrine that his team has followed since 2018. "We had a new strategy that announced, "Hey, we're gonna operate outside the United States, and we're gonna look for adversaries that might be trying to do us harm, and we're not going to just watch anymore. And I think that that was a pretty big watershed event."
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Nakasone confirmed that a recent ransomware attack on an energy pipeline made him recognize a new category of national security threats that he had seen previously as "criminal activity" for a law enforcement agency to address.
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"So, one of the things that we have done at both the agency and the command is we've conducted a surge," he stated. "We bring our best people together ... the really good thinkers [about] how do you get after folks that are doing this? How do you get after, you know, the capabilities that they're producing? How do you get after the flow of money? Those are all things that we have done over the past, really, three months."
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U.S. officials have "made a lot of progress" off the back of that innovation, but Milley underscored that the cyberattacks occur on a titanic scale.
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"Every single day, our nation is literally being hacked, penetrated, [a target of] espionage, intelligence operations going on all in cyberspace," Milley told NBC News' Lester Holt. "It happens millions of times a day."
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