The headline kind of says it all. This country is in dire need of a cyber security West Point.
I think war has permanently changed in the last few years. Nation states and bad actors have realized it makes absolutely no sense to invest in physical weapons and soldiers when a well-executed cyber attack can do twice the damage with a sliver of the cost. I'm a tech geek, but I also acknowledge that building our entire country's infrastructure on top of 1s and 0s is a house of cards.
We just passed the 20th anniversary of 9/11, and that begs the unfortunate question, "What will the next big attack be?" I would bet it's a massive cyber attack. I always heard terrorists targeted the World Trade Center because that was the symbolic center of our economy. Today, that center of our economy is no longer centralized, as contradictory as that sounds. The center is the internet, without which our economy doesn't function for a solitary moment, and the enemy knows this.
This all feels very "airport before TSA"-esque (or at least what I imagine that felt like). If we want to prevent a massive cyber attack like this from happening, we absolutely need to start training high-caliber military personnel to fight this digital battle. It sounds somewhat ridiculous, but the face of the American soldier might not have a camo helmet and uniform in 50 years. He or she might instead have a PhD in computer science.
Is all of this a little extreme? Probably. But am I directionally correct? I honestly think so.
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