US considered cyber war in launch of attacks on Libya

NY Times:

Just before the American-led strikes against Libya in March, the Obama administration intensely debated whether to open the mission with a new kind of warfare: a cyberoffensive to disrupt and even disable the Qaddafi government’s air-defense system, which threatened allied warplanes.

While the exact techniques under consideration remain classified, the goal would have been to break through the firewalls of the Libyan government’s computer networks to sever military communications links and prevent the early-warning radars from gathering information and relaying it to missile batteries aiming at NATO warplanes.

But administration officials and even some military officers balked, fearing that it might set a precedent for other nations, in particular Russia or China, to carry out such offensives of their own, and questioning whether the attack could be mounted on such short notice. They were also unable to resolve whether the president had the power to proceed with such an attack without informing Congress.

In the end, American officials rejected cyberwarfare and used conventional aircraft, cruise missiles and drones to strike the Libyan air-defense missiles and radars used by Col.Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government.

This previously undisclosed debate among a small circle of advisers demonstrates that cyberoffensives are a growing form of warfare. The question the United States faces is whether and when to cross the threshold into overt cyberattacks.

Last year, a Stuxnet computer worm apparently wiped out a part of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and delayed its ability to produce nuclear fuel. Although no entity has acknowledged being the source of the poisonous code, some evidence suggests that the virus was an American-Israeli project. And the Pentagon and military contractors regularly repel attacks on their computer networks — many coming from China and Russia.

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Actually Israel has already used it against Syrian air defense systems when it attacked Syria's secret nuclear facility.  That attack was very successful.  I suspect that in the end more conventional attacks using HARM missiles to take out the radar and clear the way for the bombers were probably used.  The HARM missiles lock onto the enemy radar signal and follow it signal all the way to impact.  They have been around since the Vietnam war and have been used in most US air strikes at the beginning of operations in Iraq and elsewhere.