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Maybe I'm naive or dumb or something but I feel like comparing a hacking attempt to the construction/crewing/deploying of a battleship doesn't make a whole lot of sense?

It takes a lot of work to build a motorcycle that is roadworthy from scratch. It takes a lot of work to build a skyscraper and develop it into a used space from scratch. Talking about the latter doesn't really discount the former, right?

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My (not so well made) point was that having a two-ish decade planning horizon for serious national security activities was old hat back when punch cards were leading-edge computer technology.

Vs. from a skim of the article - the entire Solar Winds operation was less than 24 months, from plausibly-first little compromise of an employee's VPN account through detection and fix. That is "Extreme premeditation" about the same way that my hard-boiling eggs for a week's lunches every Monday morning is "Extreme premeditation".

(Vs. if they'd described it as a major effort by an A-list adversary - yeah, that would have been quite reasonable.)

In a field as fast paced as information security, that is a long fucking time.

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