What If These Ship Collisions Are the Results of Cyberattacks?

At Foreign Policy Elias Groll reports that the Navy is investigating whether the McCain’s collision was the result of a cyberattack:

The military is examining whether compromised computer systems were responsible for one of two U.S. Navy destroyer collisions with merchant vessels that occurred in recent months, Vice Admiral Jan Tighe, the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, said on Thursday.

Naval investigators are scrambling to determine the causes of the mishaps, including whether hackers infiltrated the computer systems of the USS John S. McCain ahead of the collision on Aug. 21, Tighe said during an appearance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Investigators are not, however, considering the possibility that the USS Fitzgerald collision, which took place on June 17, was the result of hacking.

“With the McCain incident happening so close to the Fitzgerald,” questions immediately arose about whether computer manipulation could have been the cause of the crash, Tighe said. The Navy has no indication that a cyberattack was behind either of the incidents, but is dispatching investigators to the McCain to put those questions to rest, she said.

That they’re investigating it doesn’t mean that’s what happened. It just means they’re considering the possibility, for this event and prospective future events. Our military considers all sorts of counter-factuals.

But what if it was a cyberattack? I don’t know that it’s even possible to operate these enormous machines without their computer systems and retrofitting them so that they can be sounds like an expensive and maybe impossible task. Security capable of definitely denying success to cyberattacks has proven elusive to our military, our government, and private sector companies alike. It requires patterns of thought presently foreign to them, completely counter-intuitive, and which limit their freedom of action in ways they presently find intolerable.