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Cyber-defenders know what to prepare themselves for because the United States has used the kinds of weapons that now target the Pentagon, federal agencies, and American corporations. They are designed to steal information, disrupt communications, and commandeer computer systems. The U.S. is forming a cyberwar plan based largely on the experience of intelligence agencies and military operations. It is still in nascent stages, but it is likely to support the conduct of conventional war for generations to come. Some believe it may even become the dominant force.

Military officers describe cyberspace as the fifth domain of war, after land, sea, air, and space. But cyberspace is unique in one important respect -- it's the only battlefield created by humans.

"We have invented this, and it cuts across those other four," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Harry Raduege, who ran the Defense Information Systems Agency from 2000 to 2005.

The U.S. conducted its first focused experiments with cyberattacks during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, when it intervened to stop the slaughter of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. An information operations cell was set up as part of the bombing campaign. The cell's mission was to penetrate the Serbian national air defense system, published accounts and knowledgeable officials said, and to make fake signals representing aircraft show up on Serbian screens. The false signals would have confused the Serbian response to the invasion and perhaps destroyed commanders' confidence in their own defenses.

According to a high-level military briefing that Federal Computer Week obtained in 1999, the cyber-operation "could have halved the length of the [air] campaign." Although "all the tools were in place ... only a few were used." The briefing concluded that the cyber-cell had "great people," but they were from the "wrong communities" and "too junior" to have much effect on the overall campaign. The cyber-soldiers were young outsiders, fighting a new kind of warfare that, even the briefing acknowledged, was "not yet understood."

Only four years after the war in Yugoslavia, planners again held off on releasing a potentially virulent weapon against Iraq. In the plan to disable the Iraqi banking network in advance of the U.S. invasion, the Pentagon determined that it might also bring down French banks and that the contagion could spread to the United States.

"It turns out that their computer systems extend well outside Iraq," a senior Air Force official told Aviation Week & Space Technology in March 2003. "We're also finding out that Iraq didn't do a good job of partitioning between the military and civilian networks. Their telephone and Internet operations are all intertwined. Planners thought it would be easy to get into the military through the telephone system, but it's all mixed in with the civilian [traffic]. It's a mess." This official said that to penetrate the military systems, the United States would risk what planners began calling "collateral computer network attack damage."

In this historical analogy, experts have embraced a Cold War deterrent to prevent the cyber-Armageddon that military and intelligence officials have been warning about -- mutually assured destruction.

Presumably, China has no interest in crippling Wall Street, because it owns much of it. Russia should be reluctant to launch a cyberattack on the United States because, unlike Estonia or Georgia, the U.S. could fashion a response involving massive conventional force. The United States has already learned that it makes no sense to knock out an enemy's infrastructure if it disables an ally's, and possibly America's own. If nations begin attacking one another's power grids and banks, they will quickly exchange bombs and bullets. Presumably, U.S. war planners know that. And it may be the most compelling reason to keep their cyber-weapons sharp but use them sparingly.

What does the scenario look like?

Let’s take a virtual country as the target.