Lifting the Veil: Cyber Insight for the Conventional Warfighter

In 2011, retired Air Force General Michael Hayden asserted that rarely has anything been so important and so talked about with less clarity and less apparent understanding than cyber. Today, little has changed from a conventional warfighter’s perspective.

A wide array of objectives encompasses the term “cyber,” but the focus here will go toward the most practical application to the conventional warfighter—cyber effect operations (CEOs). One definition of CEO is a cyber operation with an aim to disrupt, deny, degrade, and/or destroy a target device, system, or network.1 This is likely the type of operation most people envision when they hear the term cyber; a computer hacker from across the globe disabling an adversary’s device.