Today's D Brief: Biden to Putin: Critical infrastructure 'off limits' to cyberattack; Semiconductor shortage; Army's new robot guns; And a bit more.
Ben Watson | June 17, 2021 11:15 AM ET
Sixteen different kinds of critical American infrastructure are “off limits” to cyber attacks, U.S. President Joe Biden told his Russian counterpart in Geneva on Wednesday during their first in-person meeting as leaders of the two countries with the most nuclear weapons on the planet (and by a long shot).
The 16 areas include chemical production, commercial facilities, communications, critical manufacturing, dams, defense, emergency medical services, energy, finance, food and agriculture, government facilities, health care facilities, information technology, nuclear facilities, transportation and water sectors. (Hat tip to Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs.) Should Russia cyberattack U.S. critical infrastructure, “we will respond with cyber,” he said. (And if you’re wondering: “No, we didn’t talk about [a] military response,” said Biden.)
The two heads of state also launched what Biden called “a bilateral strategic stability dialogue” in the hopes of containing new and emerging weapons. And that, Biden said, means “get[ting] our military experts and our diplomats together to work on a mechanism that can lead to control of new and dangerous and sophisticated weapons that are coming on the scene now that reduce the times of response, [and] that raise the prospects of accidental war” between the U.S. and Russia. “And we went into some detail of what those weapons systems were,” Biden said, without elaborating, in a post-summit press conference.
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2021/06/the-d-brief-june-17-2021/174798/
