Cyber Warfare

the real military networks should be well-prepared for cyberattacks, cept for maybe a few geniuses, you get that once in a while. even the hardware required by military has its own special standards, so hacking a military target is nothin like hacking a civie computer. but its more worthwhile to attack civie targets. i doubt the US would want to pull the plug on China just on the basis that there are possible cyber attacks. when push comes to shove, you never know where the attacks are really coming from. and really disconnecting internet service with China will cost the everyone way too much for anyone to bare.

The threat from cyber warfare is to the civilian infrastructure, and a lot of that is necessary to support the military. If, for example, the air traffic control system is disrupted along with the electrical grid, you haven't penetrated military computer networks, but you have managed to degrade the ability of the military to fight, plus it degrades the military production infrastructure the military relies on. Done on a large enough scale, you can cripple a nation during an attack, making the response slower and less well coordinated. That might give an enemy just the edge in combat. It's another weapon to use, that is certain.

While using hacking as a "kinetic weapon", i.e. using it to eliminate enemy capabilities by breaking the electrical grid or something like that, is important, I think that cyber warfare is more useful on a day to day basis as an intelligence gathering tool. As we saw in the video at the top of the thread, unknown adversaries have gained vast amounts of information about US military operations by hacking into our networks.

DDOS isn't really a very advanced technique. I had knowledge of DDOS attacks conducted against Iranian regime propaganda sites and they were nothing complicated at all. Obviously there are different levels of sophistication, but the basic concept is quite simple and easy to defend against (in theory at least).