The Pentagon is expanding its cyber war against Islamic State computer networks, senior defense officials said Monday as they claimed to have seized the momentum in the 18-month-old fight against the jihadists.
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Carter and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are providing more details on how the U.S.is using computer-based attacks as part of the military operations against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
“This is to make them lose confidence in their networks, to overload their networks so that they can not function, and do all those things that disrupt their ability to control their forces and to control their population and their economy” said Mr. Carter.
US officials told The Associated Press last week that the military had launched a far more aggressive cyber campaign against the group.
“We don’t want the enemy to know when, where and how we’re conducting cyberoperations”, he said.
“These are strikes that are conducted in the war zone using cyber essentially as a weapon of war”, Defense Secretary Ash Carter told NPR on Sunday. Against Isis, the USA is using cyber weapons as a method of warfare alongside the airstrikes, indigenous force training and special operations raids that characterize the U.S. campaign in Iraq and Syria. The operations, led from US Cyber Command at Ford Meade, Maryland, have now been stepped up by high-level government players.
Cyberoffense doctrine remains secret, but Carter has spoken about the need to mobilize Cyber Command against Islamic State because the group has grown increasingly sophisticated at using social media and other Internet platforms to recruit and radicalize followers around the world. “I’m talking about attacking the ability of someone sitting in Raqqa to command and control ISIL forces outside of Raqqa or to talk to Mosul”, he said, using the administration’s preferred acronym for ISIS and referring to ISIS’s Syrian and Iraqi capitals.
The officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the operation, said teams operating from Fort Meade, which is between Baltimore and Washington, identified and jammed Islamic State online-communication networks during the battle.
Carter and Dunford, the Pentagon’s top civilian and uniformed officials, both suggested the attacks were aimed at overloading the militants’ networks. “We don’t want them to have information that will allow them to adapt over time”, Dunford said.
Cyber is an “important new capability”, he said.
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“Both in terms of the cyber capability, as the secretary spoke about, as well as operations to cut the line of communications and begin to go after some of the targets in and around Mosul, those operations have already started”. “Over the past year, organisations and companies across a range of industries have asked how they might contribute to efforts to counter radicalisation and recruitment activities by [IS] and other violent extremists”, said Marc Raimondi, the Justice Department’s national security spokesman, as reported by The New York Times. “And frankly, we don’t want them to know the difference”.
