| Summary/Abstract |
In June of 2019, the New York Times reported that the United States was “stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin.” 1 The reporters accused the United States of planting malware within Russian critical infrastructure under new authorities granted by the White House to the Department of Defense (DoD) for offensive cyber operations. According to the article, the acts were part of a new US strategy to use cyber operations to signal capabilities and therefore deter further Russian incursions into US critical infrastructure, 2 indicating that strategic cyber attacks—those that create immediate physical violence to large segments of civilian population or attacks that affect a state’s ability to control its nuclear forces—were now credible arrows in the US foreign policy quiver against Russia.
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