I think it is hard to appreciate DDoS until you are the target. About 7 years ago, my business partner made fun of a hacker who was trying to blackmail us and before we knew it, we were under attack. I didn't even know what DDoS was at that time, but I certainly found out. We had an eCommerce site and it was down hard for three days until we found one of the very few companies providing any level of DDoS protection at that time. We finally got the site back up, but the damage was done. We ended up closing down that business a couple months later.
And what exactly is the Pentagon going to bring to the table, since the root cause of DDOS attacks are all those compromised Windows desktop computers out there on the Internet.