As cyberwar gains operational maturity, the discipline has emerged as a tool of finesse and not brute force, in part to counter political concerns about the fallout from unrestricted computer attacks. "When you're discussing computer network warfare, you can get completely derailed and talk about worms and viruses and self-propagating programs and everyone thinks it's like unconstrained weapons of mass destruction," said Army Col. David Kirk, deputy commander of the Joint Information Operations Center.