From: Lawfare
Today, the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy. This piece will address one narrow element of the document: cybersecurity. It’s a hot topic, but compared to North Korea’s nuclear-tipped missile program, Iran’s destabilizing activities in the Middle East, China’s muscle-flexing across almost all domains of statecraft, and Russia’s growing role as a spoiler around the world, I thought the National Security Strategy wouldn’t have much to say about cybersecurity. I was wrong.
The administration should be given relatively high marks for the document’s cybersecurity components—especially for recognizing the breadth of the threat and that it’s going to take more than the help desk to fix it. Admittedly, that’s a pretty low bar. But National Security Strategy documents are not known as documents where big policy innovation occurs. Instead, the best you can usually do is articulate the broad contours of the main threats to national security coupled with some rough themes about what the government will do to make things better. Here, the administration does not isolate “the cyber” to the sidelines; instead, by talking about cyber issues throughout the document, the administration shows an understanding that cyberspace is a critical part to practically every aspect of national security.
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