Soldier: 'I'd prefer cyberwar over a real war'

Rob Rosenberger, Vmyths co-founder
Friday, 14 December 2001 WHITE HOUSE FEARMONGERS don't get the kind of email I get. Oh, sure, they hear from high-ranking military personnel just like I do — but my correspondents don't take psychotropics.

I would gladly throw away the entire Internet just to reinstall three dead soldiers as easily as we reinstall a dead operating system.

A ranking enlisted member wrote me the other day. He works in something called "special forces," aka the low-tech human version of a deadly computer virus. This guy's military email account implies he pushes paper these days, but I'll bet big money he "earned a beret" somewhere along the line. He requested anonymity for obvious reasons:

Being an "SF" [special forces] guy myself, I can tell you that the SF team that got blown up by one of our own "smart bombs" would have much preferred a CYBER-attack of ANY sort rather [than] 2000lbs of military high explosives. CTRL-ALT-DEL won't bring our dead back to life, and a firewall hasn't stopped a truck-bomb (or pirated airliner) yet, to my knowledge.

What more can I add to this man's observation? I, too, mourn every soldier who marches eternal point; I, too, mourn every sailor on eternal patrol. I would gladly throw away the entire Internet just to reinstall the USS Cole as easily as we reinstall an operating system. Remember this man's observation the next time a psychotropic gov't official claims "we're at cyberwar."