Pentagon Unveils Bold New Cyber Strategy to Counter Digital Threats by 2025
The U.S. Defense Department is crafting a new cyber strategy that will better align with the Trump administration's plans to more aggressively combat digital adversaries, a senior official said on Tuesday.
"We have a solemn duty to ensure our joint force is equipped to dominate across the spectrum of conflict within the highly contested cyber domain," Katie Sutton, assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, told a House Armed Services subcommittee.
The last DOD-wide strategy was produced in 2023. The new strategy, which Sutton anticipated will be completed this summer, would arrive months after the White House issued its long-awaited National Cyber Strategy.
That document stated in black-and-white terms the administration's intent to use the full range of U.S. government cyber capabilities - both defensive and offensive - to weaken adversaries and increase the consequences of their actions.
Sutton said that blueprint "provides pretty consistent guidance of where we need to go."
One of the department's primary goals for the new roadmap is to also take the "higher level guidelines" laid out in the previously released national security and national defense strategies and detail what they mean for digital warfare.
"We're taking all of those and really making it an integrated approach that's going to be a very bold transformation of how we think about cyberspace," she told lawmakers.
"We're working it very quickly."
Sutton described the forthcoming approach as a "pivot" that would be guided by three "core" priorities.
She said the first is to integrate cyber across all domains of warfare - something Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has pushed for and publicly noted in recent military campaigns in Iran and Venezuela.
Second, the U.S. "must gain strategic advantage below the level of armed conflict."
"We'll deny our adversaries freedom of movement," according to Sutton, using language that directly echoes the recent cyber strategy.
Lastly, the approach will organize the military's digital warfighting forces, she said, citing the ongoing revamp dubbed "Cyber Command 2.0," that's meant to modernize the way DOD builds and develops cyber warriors and talent.
"To achieve these priorities, we are leveraging the engine of American industry, harnessing the speed and innovation of the private sector to protect the cyber domain that powers our national security, our economic prosperity and the American way of life," Sutton said.
