A strong offense can decrease cyberattacks on critical infrastructure

I have to wonder if the authors of this unfortunate piece actually understand anything at all about cyber security and cyber warfare. Cyber attacks are all about exploiting vulnerabilities. Any defense necessarily hinges on deep knowledge of vulnerabilities and how they might be exploited. Such knowledge is absolutely essential in formulating defenses, but it's exactly the same knowledge that's essential in formulating attacks. If we have any defensive capability worthy of the name, you can take it as given that we have a corresponding offensive capability. Talking about the two as if they were independent is nonsense.

That suggests that the article is more about posturing than it is about cybersecurity. The authors appear to admire the (to me) appalling Bush doctrine of "preemptive warfare" -- the claimed right of the US to attack other countries not on the basis of what they've done, but on the basis of what the administration thinks they might do if we don't attack first. The doctrine that gave us our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Those have worked out so well, haven't they? So now these folks would have us launching cyberattacks against countries from which somebody thinks hostile hackers reside. Wonderful! Just wonderful!