U.S. Points to Election Disruption

Unless you stopped reading newspapers yesterday you have seen a number of news reports about the Russians trying to interfere with the U.S. Elections next month.  Most of them say the same thing, that the U.S. Intelligence Community has pointed the finger at the Russians because "only something directed from senior leaders" could have produced this result.  These people must not have read Wikileaks very often, where people contributing material are certainly not the higher-ups of any government.  None-the-less, let's give them their due - they have pointed a finger at someone and attributed the theft of information for political purposes, to the Russians.

Attribution is the first step in retaliation.  The Intelligence Community likely knows a good bit more than it is saying about these events, since attribution requires more than just a statement of belief.  The Director of National Intelligence told a Congressional panel that it required knowledge of the physical location of the attack, who was behind it, and something of how it was carried out.  That generally takes time, but we don't have much before the election.  This brings up the most important aspect of national policy - we don't have a deterrence strategy that deters anyone from attacking us.

Attribution is too late here.  Deterrence is prevention of an attack, knowing the consequences will be severe enough to give pause to our adversaries.  Neither the Chinese nor the Russians are deterred by the threat of sanctions or retaliation in kind.  By the time we could retaliate, the election would be over.  This is, of course, because our government does not have a credible deterrence strategy that warns the countries doing this sort of thing before they do it.  That requires planning beyond next Tuesday and some idea of what cyber deterrence really means, a credible threat.  Neither country believes we have one.  I talked to some people that really believe we could have a deterrence strategy but lack the political will to do anything.  That is a National Security Council problem.  Where are they?