All things considered, the advent of cyberwarfare is simply an update of time-honored military principles: information denial/management. Pre-electricity: ambush scouts and couriers, movement control of people/merchants via ‘official roads’ [w/checkpoints]. Post electricity–pre-digital: destruction/subversion of telegraph/telephone lines, destruction of telephone exchanges, RF jamming, RF spoofing [false info or operational orders]. Digital: DNS attacks, infrastructure attacks, [making cell towers go boom...] and now, as you have witnessed first hand, white/gray/black propaganda dissemination via blog/form sites.

Unfortunately, the digital era presents more weaknesses than ever, as ably pointed out by many previous commenters. The threat spectrum runs from EMP bombs to viruses to counterfeit Cisco routers [a neat trick by the Chicoms that, thankfully, was uncovered before they could distributed to DARPA and Sandia facilities...].

Interestingly enough, I noted that the Georgian army was able to maneuver and withdraw effectively despite the loss of their telecommunications infrastructure, and no friendly air cover. I have an idea how they were able to do it but I WON”T discuss it here. Sorry, the wrong people may be peeking in.

As it’s close to bedtime for me, I’ll restrain my ramblings. I will say this: Putin may have won a short-term victory but at a much higher cost than he may realize. He gave the US Army a ‘screener dvd’ into the new tac/strat-ops of the Russian Army, with a large audience of very bright people [our military advisors...] sitting in the front row, most certainly taking notes. The day will come when that will come back to bite him, perhaps fatally.

His vanity will yet see him undone, mark my words well.