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Abstract: Information in the Global Digital Industrial Economic Age is viewed as a strategic resource. This article focus on the establishment of cyber armies within the World Wide Web, commonly known as the Grid, with the emphases on an unseen military cyber power and/or civilian force within the cyber domain that has the ability to launch cyber-attacks and collect information in order to gain strategic military advantage on a national level. Selected cyber armies are compared to portray the impact of such armies on the citizen. The article also gives a view of a proposed generic structure for cyber in the military to defend and protect the cyber sovereignty and presents a proposed view on how a cyber army can be integrated within a military force. In addition, the article highlights the strategic benefits and strategic advantage to the military and will give a military perspective on the implementation of a cyber army as a proposed model.
Keywords: cyber army, cyber warfare, cyber offensive and defensive capability, cyber defence
1. Introduction
Cyber sovereignty for a nation is of a high priority due to information being a strategic resource. Denial of Service (DOS) attacks will hamper telecommunication, industry, economy, government and the military. Cybersecurity for a nation is important to ensure for the safety of a nation's critical infrastructure and to ensure that information based processes are not compromised. A nation has to maintain its cyber sovereignty by protecting itself from a cyber-onslaught by an adversary nation, cyber terrorism and cyber-crime. The status quo for a nation is to maintain cyber peace both internally and with its allies. The military has an objective to protect and defend against a cyber-attack from an adversary nation and to launch offensive cyber-attacks in times of war. This is to gain a comparative and sizable initiative within the battle space to ensure own forces freedom of action and eventual victory.
In many academic papers and books, "cyber warfare" with respect to the military has been associated within the realm of the Information Warfare (IW) domain, broadly seen as the fifth dimension of warfare that takes place inside the info sphere (Lonsdale 2004), (Welsh 2014). The definition of cyber warfare however, has been widely discussed; and for the purpose...