Space Force war request marks budgetary first

1SG (Join to see) I agree with everything beyond your first sentence. Standing up a Space Force against a primarily Chinese threat in that domain is similar to what we experienced with Russia throughout the Cold War. Today, though, China is already waging war in the Cyber domain, where our operators are in contact daily. IP espionage is ongoing, and we don't have the policy or manpower to be effective there yet. It's a pretty serious paradigm shift that's largely invisible to the public eye. Even the recent breach into Equifax no longer holds the front page.

1SG (Join to see) Sorry, I didn't even respond to your primary question. On the budget vs. war funds, I can see where you're coming from. We absolutely should be conducting these force stand-up activities deliberately, rather than through emergent crisis funding. The trouble with our current DoD PPB&E process is that anything faster than 2+ years is a crisis. We can't expect an archaic, broken, bureaucratically-laden, FAR-based 2-year cycle to keep up with today's commercial tech innovation pace.

Col Casey "Radio" G. - There's war and there's "war".
This is more akin to clandestine operations than overt statecraft. The Chinese intend to acquire capabilities and information via cyber and intel means as opposed to developing it themselves. More cost-effective this way. They use it as a shaping operation.
The Russians, on the other hand use Cyber and intel platforms for statecraft, largely in I&I, Deception (Maskirovka) and Information Operations. It is integral to their policies as a Decisive Operation.
I have little doubt that we also have offensive cyber operations, although from my vantage point we seem to be more interested in garnering SIGINT and developing ways to damage infrastructure and hardware.

Exactly. Requesting for this while Trump takes money from the Pentagon budget for military equipment to build the border wall.