Information technology has enabled the United States to achieve dominance in on the battlefield. However, it also has become a vulnerability, and now the U.S. is the primary recipient of targeted cyberattacks.
Not surprisingly, in 2018, the White House released the National Cyber Strategy, which shows a shift toward a more offensive cybersecurity posture. It emphasizes that the U.S. will take a strong policy stance, not only for the U.S. but also its allies and partners, to impose costs on attackers, including the use of kinetic means to deter cyber threats.
As cyberattacks pose serious national security risks to each state, the international community has also begun to discuss when cyberattacks should trigger the activation of self-defense and/or collective defense and has started cooperative programs to address the threat. For instance, NATO initiated cooperative cyber defense after a critical cyberattack on Estonia in 2007. NATO's Tallinn Manual is a crucial publication that attempts to apply pre-cyber era international law to cyber operations, asserting that both self-defense and collective self-defense are applicable to cyberattacks.