Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 120

achieving efficiency by creating an independent cyber
service must wait until funds are available. Those defense
resources will likely become available when cyberspace
proves its viability as a warfighting domain during the
next major U.S. conflict.

Conclusion
The United States needs an independent military
service focused on cyberspace but will likely wait until
the next major conflict to establish it. The current
DOD approach to cyberspace, where existing armed
services donate personnel of varying experience for
USCYBERCOM to knit together, is fraught with
inefficiencies. Establishment of the Cyber Force would
allow the cyberwarrior community to thrive, and it
would unburden the existing armed services from
the distraction of cyberspace. The United States’ next
major conflict will allow cyberwarriors to demonstrate
the importance of their domain and will provide the
military with the resources to support a major bureaucratic overhaul.

The prediction that it will take another conflict to
establish a cyber force is merely an assumption based
on the likely course of events. Inspired leadership may
hasten the formation of the new military service.
Clausewitz compares war to a wrestling match,
noting that a wrestler’s “immediate aim is to throw his
opponent in order to make him incapable of further
resistance [original emphasis].”7 He observes that
if one wrestler uses all his might to pin his opponent, the pinned belligerent may not ever have the
opportunity to muster his total strength. Due to its
isolation by two oceans, the United States has historically been afforded the opportunity to muster its
military strength before committing to war. However,
oceans mean little in cyberspace, and, unprepared, the
United States may suffer tremendous damage in the
initial cyberspace attacks of the next major war. Wise
defense leaders will begin moving the military toward
establishment of the U.S. Cyber Force to achieve
superior focus and efficiencies before the next conflict
rather than after it.

Biography
Maj. Matt Graham is an U.S. Army strategist assigned to the Joint Staff Directorate for Joint Force Development. He
holds a master’s degree in public administration from the George Washington University and a BS from the U.S. Air
Force Academy in computer science. His previous assignments include tours in Alaska, Germany, Washington, D.C.,
Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Notes
1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations: A Selected Edition, ed. Kathryn Sutherland
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 12–14.
2. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the
Leap … and Others Don’t (New York: Harper Collins Publishers,
2001), 94–96.
3. Scheherazade Rehman, “Estonian’s Lessons in Cyberwarfare,” U.S. News and World Report website, 14
January 2013, accessed 22 August 2014, http://www.
usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2013/01/14/
estonia-shows-how-to-build-a-defense-against-cyberwarfare.

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4. E. Lincoln Bonner III, “Cyber Power in 21st-Century Joint
Warfare,” Joint Force Quarterly 74 (2014): 102.
5. Michael Riley, “How Russian Hackers Stole the Nasdaq,”
Bloomberg Business website, 17 July 2014, accessed 4 March
2016, http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-07-17/
how-russian-hackers-stole-the-nasdaq.
6. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael E.
Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1989), 75–76.
7. Ibid., 75.

May-June 2016  MILITARY REVIEW