A recent report tells that hackers were able to steal sensitive, though not classified, information regarding the Joint Strike Fighter – the United States Air Force's $300 billion military project, as well as gain access to systems part of the Air Force's air traffic control. According to a former official, this was not the first time hackers have obtained sensitive data from the Air Force, at least one of the cases included a series of incidents occurring in 2007.

In light of this, the Pentagon is planning to create a dedicated military command to focus entirely on cyber warfare. Both former and current Pentagon officials have confirmed this report, but would not give details regarding this matter. The Department of Defense also would not comment on a report appearing on the Wall Street Journal saying that a four-star military official would be heading this new command and would be initially a part of Pentagon's Strategic Command.

While the individual military branches have traditionally taken care of their own information systems and the security issues related to them, Strategic Command had begun taking over some of these duties from each department as a part of its strategy of "net-centric warfare". Recently, the Air Force has also backed out of its own plans to head a separate cyber security entity. According to Strategic command, they needed to take charge and defend the Department of Defense as a whole, even though the different branches needed to operate as separate entities.

The data regarding the Joint Strike Fighter was reportedly stolen from a private military contractor that was working on the program. Because of this the Department of Defense created a taskforce that will help ensure the security of their systems, particularly those of their partners as these posed were posing a serious problem.

Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense, had already testified that $100 million had been spent on cyber security in the past six months in response to various attacks. The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team has already received reports from federal government agencies of 18,050 cyber security attacks in 2008, more than three times the number reported in 2006.