The Kremlin has succeeded in using cyberwar tactics to “stir discord in the West” and threatened the foundations of democracy in confusing ways that are hard to counter, the head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command told a congressional panel Tuesday.
“The idea is to make Western electorates distrust all news outlets and ultimately one another,” NSA Director Adm. Michael Rogers told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “This threatens the foundations of democracy, making it difficult to discern Moscow’s intentions and to craft common measures for countering Russia’s aggressive actions.”
Adm. Rogers will retire this spring after an almost four-year tenure as NSA chief. During Tuesday’s hearing, the committee said it will hold confirmation hearings later this week to consider President Trump’s nominee to replace Adm. Rogers — head of Army Cyber Command, Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone.
At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing earlier this month, Adm. Rogers joined the heads of the CIA, FBI and two other spy agencies to warn Capitol Hill that the Kremlin’s success meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has embolden them to target the 2018 U.S. midterms elections.
Tuesday’s Armed Service’s committee hearing was intended to survey the overall U.S. Cyber Command mission and its approximately $640 million fiscal 2018 budget — but the Russia theme dominated instead with Democrats at times grilling Adm. Rogers on what they called failures across the U.S. government to battle the Kremlin.
When the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, asked if Adm. Rogers had been directed by Mr. Trump, through the secretary of defense, to more forcefully counter Moscow’s cyber intentions, Adm. Rogers said he had not. He also admitted that the Russians “have not paid a price that is sufficient to change their behavior.”
But the NSA director defended himself and his agency, disagreeing with the notion that the U.S. was “sitting back and waiting” for the next attack.
Sen. Martin Heinrich asked about a lack of a coherent cyber doctrine that cuts across all U.S. government agencies.
“Why don’t we have one yet?” the New Mexico Democrat asked.
Adm. Rogers answered that there were “ongoing efforts” to align strategy, but conceded that “we clearly have not put ourselves where we need to be.”
The hearing took on a personal tone when Sen. Tim Kaine, who was Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the 2016 presidential race, dropped his voice, shook his head slowly and said: “We have lost the first real cyberwar that our country has been in. The U.S. government failed to protect the U.S. democracy.”
Mr. Kaine then wondered aloud about the source of the failure.
“Was it imagination, will, policy, structural, personal, leadership, investment?” the Virginia Democrat asked.
Adm. Rogers responded somewhat philosophically that what the U.S. faced was a failure to shift from the industrial age to the digital age in terms of protecting critical infrastructure. He also noted that Washington “underestimated the adversary [Russia].”
“We did not anticipate the sustained level of aggressive behavior we have seen,” he said, adding that for the country to better address future cyberthreats, it would have think in new ways that “cut across more lines” than the government is used to considering.
The committee chairman, Sen. Jim Inhofe, noted that while major cyber obstacles remained, he said Adm. Rogers needed to be applauded for making remarkable progress as head of U.S. Cyber Command and “taking what was a very niche war-fighting concept and establishing around it a full-fledged war-fighting command.”
But the Oklahoma Republican also warned, “The committee remains concerned about a hollow cyberforce due to the lack of priority across the services to deliver the required tools and capabilities and personnel. … We can’t just wait for a major cyberattack and then try to get this thing right.”
• Dan Boylan can be reached at dboylan@washingtontimes.com.
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