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And I thought General Ripper was dead. This is bonkers …

The world has abandoned a fortress mentality in the real world, and we need to move beyond it in cyberspace. America needs a network that can project power by building an af.mil robot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic. America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack.

Carpet bombing as a deterrent? Infowar with a 3GW mentality? That’s USAF Col. Charles W. Williamson III in Armed Forces Journal.

Updated: Kevin Poulsen at Threat Level is equally unimpressed:

Basically, Col. Williamson has noticed that there are bad guys in the swimming pool, and his solution is to piss in their general direction. That’s the kind of behavior that rightly gets you kicked out of the pool and sent home for the summer.

Updated: Jon Stokes at Ars Technica has rather more time for the idea, albeit with reservations, and adds the following:

So while the article presents the military botnet idea mainly as a proposal for something that the Air Force should consider, one gets the feeling on reading it that this is more of a “speak now, or forever hold your peace” type moment for anyone in the public who objects to the idea…

“The biggest challenge will be political,” writes Williamson. “How does the US explain to its best friends that we had to shut down their computers? The best remedy for this is prevention. The US and its allies need to engage in a robust joint endeavor to improve net defense and intelligence to minimize this risk.”

Well, absolutely. Fighting DDoS with DDoS sounds a bit Old Testament to me. Let’s hope Williamson and his colleagues at AFCYBER can come up with schemes more sophisticated than require further analogies of the carpet-bombing variety. We really don’t need Napalm Pilots, for example.