Here’s something I haven’t seen posited before.
Putin doesn’t know what our cyber-warfare capabilities are. He wants to know. What better way to try to find out than fire a cyber-shot across our bow and hope we do retaliate.
What would hold us back, say, from shutting down power to a million population city like Волгоград for a few hours? Here’s why I think we don’t want to do this.
If we did, Russia would know we could do it, and figure out how we did it, and then they would take steps to protect themselves.
We certainly wouldn’t want to hint at, let alone demonstrate, what we could do to their military infrastructure — communications, satellites, etc. I assume it is a lot, in fact I think the cyber-war would take days, not even weeks or months.
I believe we have a huge superiority in cyber-war capability thanks to massive post-911 spending, including on building this huge top secret data center in Utah.
What Russian spies can learn about us online has to give them pause, to say the least. Our true capabilities must be far more difficult for them to determine since this information ranks with the most protected top of the top secret information.
They already match us in most military technology, only held back in development by their economy not supporting, for example, modernizing their navy. We’ve all seen their one pathetic aircraft carrier.
If all they can do with cyber-technology is hacks that, as Trump said, could be done by some 400 pound kid in his bedroom, they are probably a decade behind what we can do.