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The Spectacle Blog
When the French began construction of a vast fortification system of steel and concrete tank obstacles, artillery casements and machine gun nests along her border with Germany and Italy in 1930, the Maginot Line was hailed as an astounding feat of military engineering.
While the fortification successfully discouraged direct attack, its place in the annals of military history was etched when Hitler’s Panzer divisions easily flanked its concrete entrenchments, pushed past the Ardennes, through the Low countries, and conquered France in a matter of days.
Let’s not forget that while impervious to frontal attack, air-conditioned and serviced by underground railways, the Line proved impossibly expensive, ruinous to France’s military’s budget and utterly ineffectual. It’s now exists, in perpetuity, amidst casual, international parlance — forever synonymous with a well-intentioned but short-sighted strategy, experts hope will prove effective, but instead fails miserably.
Thinking along these lines, at the tail-end of March, I penned a piece for the main site regarding the battle for cyber-security, which has found its way to the United States Congress. Lawmakers and the White House are currently fanning the flames of cyber-cataclysm.
As I wrote:
Two competing bills have emerged in the Senate — the first being the “Cybersecurity Act of 2012,” co-authored by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), that would require computer systems from “critical industry” sectors meet security benchmarks established by the Department of Homeland Security. A competing bill — titled “SECURE IT” — was subsequently introduced by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who agrees in principle with a legislative response to the danger of cyber-attacks, but worries about the potential drawbacks of arbitrary, or ineffectual, regulatory burdens on private enterprise. His bill promotes an information sharing architecture between the public and private sectors.
My piece suggested that the Lieberman-Collins bill (and White House rhetoric in its support) offers little more than a virtual Maginot Line, constructed on a framework of vibrant imagination, a willingness to assume the worst and the hair-on-fire judgment of good intentions gone awry.
In essence, Lieberman-Collins enlists the Department of Homeland Security (my least favorite federal agency, and arguably the most inefficient and cumbersome destination for your tax dollars) to regulate private industry’s defense against all shapes and sizes of cyber-attack.
As Neil Stevens over at RedState.com notes:
If we bring DHS into it, we’re multiplying obligations and creating redundancy. That’s harmful, not helpful. Security requires clarity of design and of purpose. Mistakes come with complexity, and successful attacks are born in mistakes.
The fact that the private sector leads the league in technological defense against cyber-attack might suggest why the Chamber of Commerce opposes Lieberman-Collins, in preference of McCain’s SECURE IT. Not to mention the National Association of Manufacturers, US Telecom, Tech America, et cetera, ad infinitum. You get the point.
In search of an exclamation point on the argument against government regulation of cyber-security efforts implemented by the private sector? Perhaps you caught Monday’s Washington Post report noting cyber-security headaches at the Commerce Department:
The virus struck in an e-mail 81 days ago, flagged by a federal team that monitors cyberthreats. The target was a small job-development bureau in the Commerce Department. The infiltration was so vicious it put Commerce’s entire computer network at risk.
To avert a crisis, the Economic Development Administration (EDA) unplugged its operating system — and plunged its staff into the bureaucratic Dark Ages.
E-mail? Gone. Attachments, scans, Google searches? Until further notice, no such thing.
Employees became reacquainted with their neighborhood post office and the beep-squeak-hiss of the fax spitting out paper. The must-have office supply became toner for the machine.
Twelve weeks offline and the longest intrusion into a federal network in recent history is still wreaking havoc.
“We don’t yet have any deeper understanding of what happened,” Commerce Secretary John Bryson said in an interview. “But we have the best resources in the federal government looking into this.”
Of course, Bryson is out stumping for the Obama-approved Lieberman legislation, despite the fact that the “best” resources in federal government can’t protect the Fed’s virtual shores absent defense-technology developed in the private sector — the very same industry they’re now trying to commandeer.
Talk about well-intentioned but short-sighted. Thanks… but “no thanks” on Lieberman’s Maginot maintenance of the American cybernate.
View all comments (10) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by Reid Smith
http://spectator.org/blog/2012/04/11/liebermans-maginot-maintenance
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JP| 4.11.12 @ 10:37AM
Don't ever let a crisis go to waste. We should remember who failed whom on 9/11; we should also remember who bears the brunt the government's policies since then. Allowing the federal government to nationalize "cyber security" is akin to relying on the FBI, CIA, and DOD to protect us from terrorists. The only people that are at risk are the citizens, and not the hackers.
In the late 1920s, French military "experts" (all of them highly credentialed and highly educated) promised the French people that the Ardnennes Forest was inmpenertrable to armoured attacks. That assumption was the foundation stone for French military policy for the next decade. The Maginot Line stopped at the Luxembourg border. Our expert bureaucrats are no different. The only people they will target are Americans. And our bureaucrats real target are Americans, and not criminals or cyber terrorists. Again. don't let a crisis go to waste.
MarkR307| 4.11.12 @ 11:02AM
It is remarkable, how the French did not realize the Ardennes were the ideal place to trap the German army at the crossing. The German tanks were logjammed on the narrow mountain dirt roads for a good few days. The biggest failure of the French strategy was not the Maginot line, but the faulty assumption that the Germans will never make the risky move to cross the Ardennes. The Germans practically crawled through a guilliotine, and the French were not there in time to pull the lever!
Drek| 4.11.12 @ 1:25PM
Well, since the French didn't have a mobile armour corps, and since the French lacked the ability to strike the Germans from the air, --- how were they going to spring that trap.
Recall at the disputed crossings at Sedan, the French established artillery on the heights commanding the crossings, and started firing on the Germans. The Germans simply focused Stukas on the artillery, and concentrated individual dive bombers on individual artillery pieces, and destroyed the total French artillery piece by piece.
The French weren't mobile enough.
Their tanks, which were good tanks, lacked radio equipment.
Their tank crews weren't trained to fight tank on tank as teams and as larger units.
Another thing is the morale factor, ----- the French simply didn't want to fight, and that's a fact.
MarkR307| 4.11.12 @ 10:56AM
Your analysis of cybersecurity efforts may have a point.
However people have a tendency to use the Maginot Line, or the Great Wall of China, etc., as generalized examples that "defensive strategies never work". This is a selective and exaggerated use of history.
In fact, defensive as well as offensive strategies, in war and in other things, each have their place. For example, a defensive strategy worked extremely well for the Union in the Battle of Gettysburg, while the Confederate offensive did not work out so well ;) I'm just saying, it depends on technology and the lay of the land - the best mix of defensive and offensive tactics can always be chosen as the best strategy.
Occam's Tool| 4.11.12 @ 12:09PM
The correct approach is to offer tax breaks for companies that come up with innovative ways to combat cyberterrorism, not stultify with regulations in a top down approach.
Attorneys tend to be morons.
Drek| 4.11.12 @ 1:28PM
Attorneys tend to see solutions in terms of laws, regulations and guidelines, mandates, etc.
That's why they're the ones trying to make this war on terror morphed into a law-enforcement effort against terror.
Law schools warp the mind, and if one isn't wary, one becomes an adherent of that world view, that attitude, that modern caprice that all problems can be solved by laws and subsequent law enforcement.
Dai Alanye | 4.11.12 @ 3:51PM
Let's remember that the Maginot line was never successfully broken into, even when attacked from the rear by Patton near Metz. It's a bad example to be used for argumentation, since it's only weakness in 1940 was insufficient length.
Reid Smith| 4.11.12 @ 4:44PM
Ok. It's "only weakness" led to the fall of France in a matter of days.
Critically insufficient length : Maginot Line :: Critically insufficient breadth : Cyber-security Act 2012
Reid Smith| 4.11.12 @ 4:47PM
The point being, Lieberman-Collins can't possibly be "big" enough to protect the American cyber-verse. It will only, ever get in the way by regulating private security. Again, well-intentioned, critically short-sighted and utterly "flankable."
Drek| 4.11.12 @ 6:13PM
The Wehrmacht did achieve a frontal breakthrough of the Maginot Line in May of 1940.
It was narrow, it was never really developed, because the main thrust of the Wehrmacht went through the allied center, but there was a breakthrough, though it has received little historical coverage, because the main lesson to derive from it was a line without flank coverage didn't really make sense.
Remember too, the French DID plan to cover their Northern flank by continuing the Maginot Line, but they declined to do so because of budgetary reasons.
Once that decision was made not to continue the line, then the French really needed to give some thought to the state of their Air Force and their mobile corps.
But they didn't do so.
And the rest is history.