Wired: Alas, the most dangerous implication of Arquilla’s concept — to an American audience, anyway — didn’t make it into the dead-tree edition of the magazine. In print, Arquilla’s idea is applied to three scenarios: defusing South Asia, disconnecting Al Qaeda, and restraining Russia. In a fourth and final scenario, U.S. armed forces are readying an invasion force. Arquilla’s response: Hack America before it happens.
No military is more networked – and therefore more vulnerable to an online first strike – than America’s. For Arquilla, that’s not a problem. He asks: “Wouldn’t it have been nice to have some cyber deterrence in March 2003, before the invasion of Iraq?”