In the lead up to American-fronted strikes on Libya last March, the Obama administration seriously considered waging cyberattacks to impair the Qaddafi government's integrated air-defense system, which threatened allied airstrikes, The New York Times reports.The option was furiously debated. Administration and military officials ultimately pulled the plug for fear of setting a precedent for other nations – China or Russia, namely – to mount similar hacks of their own (which the U.S. would most likely consider acts of war, of course, “meriting a military response”); because they questioned whether there was sufficient time to carry out “digital reconnaissance and write the attack code”; and because of the unresolved debate as to whether or not the president was positioned to greenlight a cyber offensive without first running it past Congress.The proposals were canned before reaching top political rungs at the White House, and yet were "seriously considered," one senior Defense Department official told the Times, "because they could cripple Libya's air defense and lower the risk to pilots. But it just didn't pan out." If it had, officials stressed, the attack code would've been manageable, contained within the confines of Libya's networks without leaking out in a mess of collateral digital damage.Technique specifics remain classified, but according to the Times' half-dozen senior military sources – who were all closely tied to the deliberations and, not surprisingly, spoke only on condition of anonymity – the U.S. would've infiltrated firewalls of the Libyan regime's computer infrastructure, the idea being to dissect military communication links and block early-warning radars from netting information to then relay to missile batteries targeting NATO aircraft.Weeks later, with Osama bin Laden now in the crosshairs, the U.S. again weighed the potential of the new hack warfare, only on far smaller scales.True, in both Libya and Pakistan the military opted for trusty standbys — cruise missiles, drones, conventional aircraft, and radar-evading Black Hawk helicopters — and increasingly rare boots-on-the-ground might because, well, you just don’t wield sophisticated digital weaponry all willy nilly, one Obama administration official briefed on the discussions explained to the Times. Cyber capabilities “are still like the Ferrari that you keep in the garage and only take out for the big race and not just for a run around town,” the official said, “unless nothing else can get you there.”That the U.S. is now routinely entertaining the slick, swift, muscled option for the big race to the horizon, however, is troublesome. "We don't want to be the ones who break the glass on this new kind of warfare," James Andrew Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, warned.And simply knowing there is a Ferrari, or entire caravans of Ferraris, in American garages at home and abroad certainly doesn’t do much to absolve the U.S. of having been involved with the coding or dispersion of the infamous Stuxnet worm, something the Pentagon refuses to deny.So it’s unclear whether the U.S. wants to be cleared of any blame for attempting to shut down Iranian nuclear facilities two years ago. But aborted plans to blind Qaddafi’s radars remind the world that maybe the U.S. has already proved it’s got the fastest ride on the block.Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv.
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