I thought that was rather interesting.

I listened to Marcus J. Ranum (CEO of Tenable, makers of Nessus) Hack in the Box talk about Cyberwar is Bullsh*t (google for details, it is NSFW so I won't post a link). Where he made case that it is not a viable attack mechanism. He also posted a follow up in the Tenable Blog about his thoughts on the subject (http://blog.tenablesecurity.com/2009/02/afterbites-cyberwar-hypewatch.html).

I personally feel that this has been a long time in coming. I can't believe that this type of thing wasn't already going on surreptitiously in multiple agencies in most governments. I don't know about the actually attack mechanism since an attack would kill your uplink, but the espionage piece has got to be there.

After reading the blog posting at http://blog.tenablesecurity.com/2009/02/afterbites-cyberwar-hypewatch.html, I have to say I disagree completely with Ranum's feelings on so-called "cyber warfare".

Completely forgetting about the covert aspects that everyone must believe are ongoing, having an overt capability provides some strategic advantage.  The overt ability will never be as damaging (as far as I'm concerned) as the covert capability, but if you need to execute an attributable attack you have to have something to attribute it to.  I think that's a key point missing from the post and it really the prime "value added" point of the capability.