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U.S. Air Force Appoints First Cyber General

by Tim Stevens on January 3, 2008 at 12:09 PM

Air Force Appoints First CYBER GeneralBy the sounds of our headline, you might think that the U.S. Air Force is extending an olive branch to those workers made of silicon and steel (a.k.a. robots) by promoting its first cyborg general. The truth, however, is slightly less exciting. Lt. Gen. Robert Elder Jr., the new Cyber General, is flesh and blood like the rest of us, and earns that sinister-sounding title by taking command of the new Air Force Cyber Command, a branch of the military forces dedicated entirely to cyber warfare.

The AFCYBER force will include a suite of electronics-monitoring-and-jamming aircraft and over 20,000 personnel. At this point, we don't have too many specifics on the new force's specific role, which seems to range from electronics espionage to possibly engaging in specific acts of cyber warfare (such as those perpetrated against Estonia this past summer -- though hopefully we'll be a little more selective about whose servers we start knocking offline.)

From Defense Tech

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Tags: Air Force, AirForce, CYBER, Cyber Warfare, CyberWarfare, military tech, MilitaryTech

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