Lt. Gen. Robert Elder commands the three-star cyber command in charge of  Cyber Warfare set up at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana where 25,000 military personnel are working on electronic warfare, digital espionage, and network defense. The command's focus is to control the cyber domain, critical to everything from communications to surveillance to infrastructure security.

In July of 2002, President Bush secretly signed an order known as National Security Presidential Directive 16,directing administration officials to develop the parameters for cyber-attacks against enemy computer networks.

According to a report in the Washington Post the Pentagon is actively developing "cyber-weapons," to disable enemy radar, electrical grids and telephone systems.   Although the administration has shown interest in developing such a program, until Bush signed the directive, the government lacked rules defining who could be subject to cyber attacks, what the targets should be, and who would make the decision to launch the attacks.

"We have capabilities, we have organizations; we do not yet have an elaborated strategy, doctrine, procedures," the report quoted Richard A. Clarke, who resigned as special adviser to the president on cyberspace security.

Air Force Print News reported that cyberspace became an official Air Force domain after Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne and Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. T. Michael Moseley introduced a new mission statement.

The statement informed Air Force personnel that their new mission was to "deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests -- to fly and fight in air, space and cyberspace." mospagebreak}

The general said the Air Force has had to develop a more concrete idea of what it means to fly and fight in cyberspace. He said the command has been focusing on four key areas that help define its role as laid out in the Air Force's mission statement.   "First, we must control the domain," he said. "This is about operational freedom of action. We have to be able to protect the electromagnetic spectrum we use to communicate with each other, for example. We have to protect the electronics that we use to establish that domain and we have to protect those networks. Conversely we want to have the capability to deny those things to our adversaries." He continued, secondly the Air Force will use cyberspace to integrate operations across the other war fighting domains."

Air Force Cyberspace Task Force director Dr. Lani Kass said "Cyberspace is something on which, as a technologically advanced nation, the United States is hugely dependent. You use your ATM card, you use your cell phone and you go to an Internet cafe. All those things are in cyberspace. Our life has become totally bounded, dependent on cyberspace. Therefore, the importance of that domain is not only for how we fight, but also for our way of life.

Cross-domain dominance means being able to deliver effects in all domains at the same time, at the speed of sound and at the speed of light. We cannot afford to allow an enemy to achieve cross-domain dominance before us. This is the nature of the transformational mission the chief and the secretary gave us. Enemies who cannot match us on land, at sea, in the air, or in space, are exploiting the fact that in cyberspace you have a very low entry cost.

Low cost is what makes that domain extremely attractive to nations, criminal and terrorist organizations who could not possibly attack the United States symmetrically. All you need to do is buy a laptop or a cell phone. As a matter of fact, you can just go to an Internet café and not even buy that stuff.

What I see in the future is true cross-domain integration, to deliver effects, like we deliver in air and space, where the commander has at his disposal, truly sovereign options, as stated in our mission, which is the ability to do whatever we want, wherever we want, whenever we want, and however we want -- kinetically, and nonkinetically and at the speed of sound and at the speed of light."

Lt. Elder, told reporters on June 14^th of 2007 that China is that nation seeking to unseat the United States as the dominant power in cyberspace, "They have been quite that blatant about saying they are looking to do that."

The Defense Department said in its annual report on China's military power last month (May of 2007) that, China regarded computer network operations -- attacks, defense and exploitation -- as critical to achieving "electromagnetic dominance" early in a conflict.

"China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) is pursuing comprehensive transformation from a mass army designed for protracted wars of attrition on its territory to one capable of fighting and winning short-duration, high-intensity conflicts against high-tech adversaries - which China refers to as ‘local wars under conditions of informatization,'" according to the report.