McClatchy has an interesting article this afternoon discussing the U.S. military’s activities mobilizing to find ways to use the Internet to conduct war. It was, of course, an inevitability. And of course, as a wise person recently wrote, dictatorships call their armies armies, whereas democracies always use the ruse of “defense:”

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 11/26/2007 | Into the wild new yonder: U.S. prepares for cyber-wars

The blueprint for the military is the “2006 National Military Strategy for Cyberspace Operations,” a classified document that includes both defensive and offensive measures, according to officials and analysts. Likely offensive tactics include disabling an enemy’s command-and-control networks, destroying data or dispatching false information to weapons networks, often as part of a larger attack with air power and other traditional weaponry.

What new devilry will come of this is, for now, an open question. Certainly like all covert operations, the question will be answered when opportunities present themselves. And my sense is that, with Russian leader Vladimir Putin making dangerous moves and Condi Rice (an expert in Russian affairs under Bush the First) and the helm of the state department, a fair amount of the attention is aimed squarely at the activities of the Kremlin.