“When the Urgency of Time and Circumstances Clearly Does Not Permit...”: Predelegation in Nuclear and Cyber Scenarios

摘要: The speed with which a devastating cyber attack could strike the US means there may be insufficient time for the traditional politicalmilitary decision-making process to work. During the Cold War, the US faced a similar challenge in the nuclear domain. To meet this challenge, the nuclear command and control system granted a small number of senior military commanders a “predelegation” of authority to use nuclear weapons in the event of a sudden, catastrophic national security crisis. We review the lessons learned from nuclear predelegation and apply them to the cyber domain. We conclude that the cyber command and control system may need to consider similar predelegation measures in order to defend against some forms of hostile cyber attack. However, there are inherent risks in this policy that are also analogous to the ones confronted in the nuclear era. Counterintuitively, defending the nation against cyber attacks may demand patience rather than predelegation.