Thoughts on New Air Force Mission

Slashdot alerted me to the new US Air Force mission statement, which reads:

"The mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests -- to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace. "

The mission used to be "to defend the United States and protect its interests through air and space power."

When I served we made the "transition" from an air force to a so-called aerospace force. It was an important step to recognize that space would be another arena for combat. Now the new mission statement has added cyberspace to the list of arenas in which the Air Force will fight.

The Air Force has been fighting in cyberspace for decades. The battle became especially interesting in the early 1990s when we decided to deploy ASIM sensors to monitor networks. ASIM, or Automated Security Incident Measurement, was a network-based IDS built on Todd Heberlein's Network Security Monitor (NSM). NSM was the first network-based IDS. Prior to NSM, intrusion detection was done by watching activity on hosts.

I am gratified to see the Air Force step up to the plate and declare that it will have a formal operational cyberspace responsibility. This recognition might help units tasked with performing this mission receive the resources they need to win in cyberspace.

"Nothing can stop the US Air Force!" :)