In the whirlwind of political news over the past few weeks, it’s perhaps not surprising that one of the biggest events to happen this year didn’t get the coverage it might have received.
The CrowdStrike debacle is a story that everyone in Washington and across the country should be telling, but it isn’t: Too many are writing it off as just an accident or a mistake. “A big inconvenience” All of these things were certainly to blame, and according to the companies responsible, it wasn’t a cyberattack and had nothing to do with any malicious activity.
So this was an accident, not what we would call an act of war, but let me be very clear: we now have a very good idea of what the next war will look like.
Eighty years ago, our grandparents and great-grandparents dropped bombs on Nazi Germany on an almost daily basis. Later, we bombed Tokyo with incendiary bombs and dropped two atomic bombs. Of course, we did so to win World War II, but more specifically, we did so to deny the Axis powers the ability to manufacture the materials they needed to fight — tanks, planes, guns, fuel, food — and to discourage their people from fighting.
Today we don’t need bombers or aircraft carriers for any of these purposes — in fact, we don’t even need governments.
The day CrowdStrike broke, I was driving from Milwaukee to Chicago. I stopped to get gas, and there was a sign that said the gas station didn’t take credit cards. The station only took cash. But if you don’t have cash on you (and how many of us carry enough cash these days to fill up at a gas station?), you have to wait. You sit and wait. And you wait until the gas station is fixed or someone comes to pick you up.
How different is the outcome of running out of gas from if someone blew up an oil refinery with a bomb? Sure, the recent outage was brief, but what if they hadn’t?
We got a hint of what it might be like One of the East Coast’s major gas pipelines was hacked in 2021There were gasoline lines, shortages and price hikes.
Today’s world is so dependent on the internet that almost everything we do is somehow vulnerable to external malicious actors. The CrowdStrike outage affected gas stations and hospitals. The school was closed By cyber attacks Drinking water comes out of the tap and the toilet is flushedwas targeted.
An enemy could shut down the country in one of two ways. But bombing it back to the 19th century would be expensive, time-consuming, and risk a brutal response. Why not achieve the exact same objective through cyberwarfare, from a safe distance literally anywhere in the world?
Cyber is a central component of modern asymmetric warfare. It is cheap and brutally effective. Asymmetric warfare in the 1980s was $200,000 Exocet missile sinks $50 million British warship It’s the same as the Falklands War. Today, it might take a $2,000 laptop to hack into a satellite system and turn an $11 billion aircraft carrier into a hunk of metal. It might not be as dramatic, but the end result would be strikingly similar.
It is axiomatic that throughout history, great powers are always fighting the last war, not the next one. France fell into that trap in the 1930s, building the Maginot Line to prevent a repeat of the dynamics of World War I. And it made sense when it was conceived and built. But when war broke out just a few years later, it was very different from 1914. Trucks, tanks, and planes changed the situation. And the Nazis bypassed and crossed the Maginot Line.
The US faced a similar situation in Vietnam, where its World War II experience proved less useful in dealing with guerrilla warfare than expected.
This does not mean that the US is ignoring cyber threats. Of course, both the Pentagon and Congress are aware of the risks we face. But when it comes to defense, Washington still talks in terms of operational Navy surface ships and fighter jets. It also talks about “defense expenditures as a percentage of GDP.” These are essential to projecting power, for example, in the Pacific. But what would we do if China, in response to future belligerent warnings about Taiwan, simply threatened to wipe everyone’s 401(k) records? All the money in the world spent on weapons would not protect us from such an eventuality.
The CrowdStrike incident should serve as a warning not only to policymakers and strategists, but to ordinary Americans: In technology, what happens by accident can also happen by design, and we cannot afford to be fighting the wars of the past.
Mick Mulvaney is a former congressman from South Carolina and NewsNation contributor who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and White House chief of staff under President Donald Trump.
