“The U.S. military does not have the trained personnel or the legal authorities it needs to respond to a computer-based attack on America or its allies, and a crisis would quickly strain the force, the Pentagon’s cyber commander said.
Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the Defense Department’s Cyber Command, told Congress on Wednesday that he would give the military a grade of ‘C’ in its ability to protect Pentagon networks, but said things are much better than they were a few years ago and continue to improve.
‘We are finding that we do not have the capacity to do everything we need to accomplish. To put it bluntly, we are very thin, and a crisis would quickly stress our cyber forces,’ Alexander said. ‘We cannot afford to allow cyberspace to be a sanctuary where real and potential adversaries can marshal forces and capabilities to use against us and our allies. This is not a hypothetical danger.'”
