Some call cyberspace the new domain of war, after land, sea, air and space. The 2010 Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran's uranium enrichment plant, suspected to have come from Israel or the US, seemed to confirm this status.

While the British government said this week that it is developing cyber-weapons to respond to debilitating attacks on critical national infrastructure, such as the electricity grid, the Pentagon says it may use traditional "kinetic" hardware to respond to such incursions.

The Pentagon is conducting basic cyberwarfare courses for lawmakers as they struggle with the confirmation of Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander as the first chief of U.S. Cyber Command. At the heart of congressional concerns is the confusion over restrictions (or more accurately, the lack of rules) governing cyber-attack.

A war game, sponsored by a nonprofit group and attended by former top-ranking national security official exposed gaps in U.S. preparedness for cyberwarfare.

Recent events demonstrate how quickly the nation’s escalating cyberbattles have outpaced the rush to find a deterrent, something equivalent to the cold-war-era strategy of threatening nuclear retaliation.

The Pentagon plans to create a new military command for cyberspace, administration officials said Thursday, stepping up preparations by the armed forces to conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare.

The Pentagon has commissioned military contractors to develop a highly classified replica of the Internet of the future. The goal is to simulate what it would take for adversaries to shut down the country's power stations, telecommunications and aviation systems, or freeze the financial markets -- in an effort to build better defenses against such attacks, as well as a new generation of online weapons.

The Pentagon plans to reorganize itself to confront the "persistent and growing" problem of cyber attacks, creating a new command focused on protecting military computer networks and fielding new offensive cyber-warfare weapons.

The U.S. military has spent at least $100 million defending its computer network from and responding to cyberattacks which have ranged from the less serious all the way up to nation-state capabilities, according to a top official responsible for network security. Defense Secretary Gates has proposed further increasing the number of cybersecurity personnel in his new defense budget.

Despite growing awareness to the threat of cyber-warfare, current NATO war games tend to treat cyber-attack simulations as an afterthought. The Pentagon is hoping to change that by developing a new center, the National Cyber Range, that will allow military war games to mimic not only the hardware that might be used to inflict cyber-attacks, but also the likely behaviours of the people behind the attacks.