Michael Kaiser's weblog

The Air Force announced plans this month to create a Cyber Command to bring full-scale military operations to cyberspace, although no one knows if the tactics and policies that the Defense Department uses to wage war will be effective on the cyber battlefield. Air Force officials said the new command will coordinate offensive and defensive network and electronic warfare and raise the importance of cyberspace as a warfighting terrain. Its military objective would be to dominate the electromagnetic spectrum and defend the country’s critical infrastructure and assets.
The director of the Air Force’s Cyber Task Force said the United States can work to defeat terrorists by disrupting their radio-controlled improvised explosive devices, the satellite communications they use for planning attacks and the Web sites they create for training and recruiting.

There are a few important points in this quote. The first is that the Air Force views cyberspace as a strategic medium on par with Air and Space. In claiming this, the AF is implying that the strategies and operational thought that apply to one, apply to both. This, of course, is a political statement designed by Mike Wynne and General Moseley (CSAF) to claim more military space for the Air Force, part of the long term tradition of doing so. The treatment of cyberspace is similar to that of outer space, which, for a long while, the Air Force claimed was part of a continuous “aerospace” medium between the surface of the earth and the farthest reaches of the cosmos. Since cyberspace exists in this area, it must be an Air Force AOR as well.
In doing more research on AFCYBER, I have found that my earlier suspicions about its offensive nature have been confirmed. At the tactical level, AFCYBER theoretically has some responsibilities for defending against “battlefield” cyber operations like jamming. But this is largely chimerical, as most Army units above the company level have signals officers designated to do this, Navy ships certainly do and the Air Force handles this on each plane individually . So what does that leave? Offensive cyberspace operations.
In an article in Government Executive from June 2007, the author explains some of these capabilities:

The Army acknowledged in the announcement that it already has waged cyberattacks on enemy networks and communications platforms, but provided no details. But it wants to “leverage innovative technologies” to improve its cyberattacks “and prevent enemy forces from detecting and countering efforts directed against them,” according to the announcement. “Technologies designed to interrupt these modern networks must use subtle, less obvious methodology that disguises the technique used, protecting the ability whenever possible to permit future use.”

and, later in the article

The offensive cyberattack capabilities that the Army and Air Force want to develop match what Marine Gen. James Cartwright, commander of the Strategic Command, called for during a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee in March. He told the panel that if “we apply the principle of warfare to the cyber domain, as we do to sea, air and land, we realize the defense of the nation is better served by capabilities enabling us to take the fight to our adversaries, when necessary, to deter actions detrimental to our interests.”

More to come next week, as I just today found a PowerPoint presentation by Dr. Lani Kass on Air Force Cyber Command and the limits of cyberspace.