Would we recognize an act of cyber war?

If an enemy wrecks, say, eight of your battleships and kills more than 2,400 of your troops in hours of coordinated attacks, you’d probably take that as an act of war. Franklin Roosevelt certainly did when Japanese imperial forces rained down destruction on the Navy’s Pacific Fleet.

Pearl Harbor was marked by many qualities — bravery, ineptitude, surprise and mystery. But above all, it  had clarity. No doubt about who attacked whom. Big red dots on the Zeros left no doubt.

Today, a kinetic attack on a naval or any other installation would likely come from something other than a nation state. The last few have been ambiguous in terms of ultimate origin — 9/11 and the U.S.S. Cole, for instance. Russian and Chinese fighter aircraft regularly buzz U.S. Navy ships and planes. Iran seized a small Navy boat, but deigned to let the sailors go a day later. Such acts might be belligerent or warlike, but you don’t start a shooting or bombing war over them.

A cyber attack can do real damage to both computer systems and infrastructure controlled by computer, which is most of it. But its ultimate origin would be hard to trace. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the apparent originating server really is the source. Or whether an attack originating in, say, China was the work of or endorsed by the Chinese government.

That, I believe, would be the difficult part of fulfilling requirements of a bill now in the Senate, should it become law. Sponsored by Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), it would make the administration define what constitutes a cyber act of war. Rounds tells me he was disconcerted in a recent hearing, where military brass said they weren’t certain how they’d react to a warlike cyber attack, for instance, one that caused physical damage to an electrical generating plant.

Rounds says the administration, and specifically not Congress, should rightly come up with this definition, using the best thinking from around the government.

A definition of an act of war doesn’t dictate a specific response. The Navy, at least, might have been tempted to sink the entire Iranian navy after the temporary seizure of two riverine boats. That probably wouldn’t have been the wisest  course of action. Similarly, responses to a cyber attack leave a range of options, including physical kinetic. Rounds’ concern is that the government be ready ahead of time, before an attack could do too much harm.

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