Pentagon Prepares Options for Trump to Use Cyberattacks, Space Weapons Against ISIS

Cyber Warfare May Aim to Shut Down 'Terrorist' Websites

by Jason Ditz, 

According to Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein, the Pentagon’s leadership is hard at work coming up with options for President-elect Donald Trump to expand the ISIS war, focusing in particular on the use of “secret cyber-warfare and space weapons.”

The US military has some ability to carry out cyber-attacks to knock out individual “terrorist websites,” though at has not often done so. During the campaign, Trump expressed annoyance that ISIS was being allowed to use “our Internet” in the course of the war, suggesting the US could deny ISIS-held territory Internet access outright.

How that would work, and whether it is in the Pentagon’s purview, is unclear, though at the time Trump suggested Silicon Valley could come up with a way to “knock the hell out of their Internet system in the ISIS territories.”

The possibility of fighting ISIS in space sounds even more intriguing, albeit even less probable. The Pentagon, of course, has a considerable number of spy satellites, but it isn’t clear what these “space weapons” they could start using might even conceivably be.P