On the pervasive presence of military language elements in computer security

I had to stop reading here:

> War justifies terrible behaviours: who cares about you being screamed at when you're at war? Who cares about your family life, when you're at war? What are broken principles and despicable means, when you're at war ?

As someone who’s been in the military and to war, this is just wrong. Families and friendships mean the most when you’re at war. You can never be closer to another human being than being at war. I’m not romanticizing it, war is a dirty, nasty thing.

It’s about strategy and fear, about trust and sacrifice. How many people do you trust with your life, how many people would die for you, or you for them? I could count them and since leaving the military, I haven’t counted another soul.

War. It’s a shitty thing to be used as a political pawn. It’s a shitty thing to be hated for it. It’s a shitty thing to be stomping all over someone else’s country without any say in the matter.

War doesn’t justify terrible behavior. It IS terrible behavior incarnate. But you know, I see people do shittier things every day. I see people walk past homeless people like they don’t exist, or walk by a crying person without even caring. I see people who only care about themselves, and that, that is worse than war.

War is a mechanism of rules. You can’t just shoot someone for giggles, that’s murder. You can’t even shoot someone when they point a gun in your face. And if you do shoot, make sure they shot first. The cops have it easy, they just have to feel threatened.

War is shitty, but there’s a humanity to it. An acknowledgment of the shit we are all in. We make the best of it. But when I walk down the street, I see less humanity than I did in war, and that sometimes brings tears to my eyes.

The language may be ahead of events in this case. We don’t need the language when there is no actual cyberwarfare. There has been no cyberwar in developed countries even after 25 years of the Internet. Cybercriminality yes; cyberwar, no. For some, that’s like the Coyote in Roadrunner cartoons running off the cliff but staying in the air. He’s got to fall sometime. At that point, military language and mindset would be useful.

But in Western countries, the idea of preparedness got drilled into the political psyche with WWI and WWII. You do not want to be unprepared...young men die needlessly when you are unprepared.

Be glad it’s just language. Formality of ops, chain of command, well-defined priorities, ability to respond under stress, exercises to assess what you can actually do rather than what you think you can do...combined with a well-honed working culture to support those operating under those conditions.

But we do a lot of that in IT? Yes, and the basic ideas arose from military culture first. When we compartmentalize in schooling military from agriculture from health from engineering from law, students lose the perspective of what those other cultures have provided and do provide. BTW IT could learn a lot from the military about supporting the whole life of the worker.