U.S. debating usage of cyberarms in Syria
WASHINGTON — Not long after the uprising in Syria turned bloody late in the spring of 2011, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency developed a battle plan that featured a sophisticated cyberattack on the Syrian military and President Bashar al Assad’s command structure.
The Syrian military’s ability to launch airstrikes was a particular target, along with missile produc- tion facilities. “It would essentially turn the lights out for Assad,” said one former official familiar with the planning.
For U.S. President Barack Obama, who has been adamantly opposed to direct U.S. intervention in a worsening crisis in Syria, such methods would seem to be an obvious, low-cost, low-casualty alternative. But after briefings on variants of the plans, most of which are part of traditional strikes as well, he has so far turned them down.
Syria was not a place where he saw strategic value in U.S. intervention, and even such covert attacks — of the kind he had ordered against Iran during the first two years of his presidency — involved a variety of risks.
The Obama administration has been engaged in a largely secret debate about whether cyberarms
should be used like ordinary weapons, whether they should be rarely used covert tools, or whether they ought to be reserved for extraordinarily rare use against the most sophisticated, hard-toreach targets.
And looming over the issue is the question of retaliation: whether such an attack on Syria’s air power, its electric grid or its leadership would prompt Syrian, Iranian or Russian retaliation in the United States.
It is a question Obama has never spoken about publicly. He has put the use of such weapons largely into the hands of the NSA, which operates under the laws guiding covert action. As a result, there is little of the public discussion that accompanied the arguments over nuclear weapons in the 1950s and ’60s, or the kind of roiling argument over the use of drones, another classified program that Obama has begun to discuss publicly only in the past 18 months.
But to many inside the administration, who insisted on anonymity when speaking about discussions on one of the United States’ most highly classified abilities, Syria puts the issue back on the table. Obama’s National Security Council met Thursday to explore what one official called “old and new options.”
Caitlin Hayden, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, declined to discuss “the details of our interagency deliberations” about Syria.
“But we have been clear that there are a range of tools we have at our disposal to protect our national security, including cyber,” she said, noting that in 2012 “the president signed a classified presidential directive relating to cyberoperations that establishes principles and processes so that cybertools are integrated with the full array of national security tools.”
The directive, she said, “enables us to be flexible, while also exercising restraint in dealing with the threats we face. It continues to be our policy that we shall undertake the least action necessary to mitigate threats.”
One of the central issues is whether such a strike on Syria would be seen as a justified humanitarian intervention, less likely to cause civilian casualties than airstrikes, or whether it would only embolden U.S. adversaries who have themselves been debating how to use the new weapons.
Jason Healey, the director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, argues that it is “worth doing to show that cyberoperations are not evil witchcraft but can be humanitarian.”
But others caution whether that would really be the perception.
“Here in the U.S. we tend to view a cyberattack as a de-escalation — it’s less damaging than airstrikes,” said Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has recently published a book titled Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know. “But elsewhere in the world it may well be viewed as opening up a new realm of warfare.”