The US Air Force (USAF) is setting up a command centre to be responsible for conducting offensive and defensive military operations in cyberspace.

The unit ­ known as Afcyber ­ will be fully up and running by the end of this year, with 30,000 staff headed by former Pentagon chief information officer Major General William Lord.

The centre is emblematic of a significant change to the role of the air force, according to former Major Bruce Jenkins of the USAF.

“The aim is to bring space and air-based assets to bear on cyber warfare in any way possible, which represents a dramatic shift in thinking,” he said.

At this stage, plans for the Afcyber centre include three main elements:

- Assessment of US defence systems’ vulnerability to electronic attack, and improvements to their resilience.

- Co-ordination with the physical armed forces to attack enemies with a presence in cyberspace.

- $10m-worth (£5m) of annual funding for the largest ever research centre looking at software application weak points.

The role of cyberspace in military operations is growing, as are concerns about the
potential of electronic threats, Howard Schmidt, former special adviser to the White House, told Computing.

“Many countries have set up organisations that deal with cyber security at a nation state level ­ they have created national strategies and engaged private industry to do more to protect critical systems that run the critical infrastructure,” he said.

The first inkling of the scale of the threat came with the Nimda virus attacks on US government systems exactly a week after the 11 September terrorist strikes. The White House never identified the origin of the virus, but alerted officials to the dangers.

And as developed countries move national infrastructures such as banking and communications systems online, vulnerability to cyber attack is exponentially increased.

The difficulty is that counter-espionage ­ the traditional weapon against terrorist organisations as well as hostile nation states ­ is not easy to carry out on the internet.

“A country’s systems face so many different types of threat, and it is so hard to work out where they originate from, that defending against them can be very difficult,” said Schmidt.

Perpetrators are hard to find and hard to identify. Large botnets, for example ­ which are networked groups of zombie computers ­ can be run by an individual, a criminal organisation or a nation state.

The US does have cyber non-aggression treaties with its allies, as well as legislation aimed at preventing electronic espionage for economic purposes.

But an organisation can simply deny its role, said Schmidt.

“There are a lot of things out there that prohibit cyber attacks,” he said. “The problem is finding out and proving who is really doing it.”

What about the UK?

The US is not the only country establishing a military command centre for cyber warfare. Canada and Australia have similar programmes. But in the UK, the job is spread around civilian organisations.

The security services carry out intelligence operations in cyberspace. And the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure advises businesses. But as the threat grows, firms are increasingly unhappy.

After last month’s MI5 warnings that the Chinese army could be spying on UK firms, chief security officers described the government’s response as “not fit for purpose” and “like neighbourhood watch”.