Cybersecurity in the 2017 National Security Strategy

The administration should be given relatively high marks for the document’s cybersecurity components—especially for recognizing the breadth of the threat and that it’s going to take more than the help desk to fix it. Admittedly, that’s a pretty low bar. But National Security Strategy documents are not known as documents where big policy innovation occurs. Instead, the best you can usually do is articulate the broad contours of the main threats to national security coupled with some rough themes about what the government will do to make things better. Here, the administration does not isolate “the cyber” to the sidelines; instead, by talking about cyber issues throughout the document, the administration shows an understanding that cyberspace is a critical part to practically every aspect of national security.