When the Air Force formed Air Force Space Command in 1982, it marked formal recognition that space was a distinct operating arena. The first commander, Gen. James V. Hartinger, said, “Space is a place. ... It is a theater of operations, and it was just a matter of time until we treated it as such.”
Meanwhile, around that same time, sci-fi author William Gibson published a novel entitled Neuromancer, a work that gave the world a strange new term—“cyberspace.” The book didn’t call cyberspace “a place” but a “consensual hallucination” of billions of humans. Few military men gave it much thought.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, though, it’s deja vu all over again. The Air Force has come to recognize cyberspace, like “regular” space, as an arena of human activity—including armed activity. It is, to reprise Hartinger, a theater of operations.
“This is probably the only warfighting domain in which we have peer competitors,” said Keys of ACC. “We have to stay ahead of them.”
