US and allied cyber defense establishment

It would not be until the mid-1990s that a formal, dedicated warfare fighting unit would be established to gain command and control of national security-related infrastructure, and leverage operations that would increase the ability of the United States to defend national interests in cyberspace. In Europe, the establishment of any actual functional warfighting entity that could operate at the covert or clandestine level in cyberspace would not take shape until the mid-2000s with the formalization of the NATO cyber task force and the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) cyber security units.

It would be even later when, in 2009, a singular military command body was established to take any offensive action in security cyberspace at the national level. This was done with the establishment of the US Cyber Command headquartered at the NSA in Ft Meade Maryland.

An important point of note on the evolution of this space, and the establishment of these new component commands and the authorities and capabilities that they now encompass, is that this occurred almost entirely in a defensive effort, not an offensive one. The establishment of the totality of these warfighting entities was almost singularly built on the premise of defending their respective national assets and infrastructures. It wasn't until the late 2000s that real cyber offensive capabilities came into real practice or use. This slow but important evolution from a focus on information warfare, gaining knowledge and information on the adversary, to cyber warfare, or conducting kinetic and non-kinetic attacks on the adversary, indicates a subtle shift in mission over time, based on the realization of the change in the battlespace: from one of information as a commodity necessary to the national intelligence community to one of attack and defense of the systems used to process, store, and transmit information and critical infrastructure.