Northrop Grumman is ready to cyber with Ben Carson

Defense mechanism

by Casey Newton

Jan 27, 2016, 12:09 AM UTC

Casey Newton is the editor of the Platformer newsletter and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast.

Cybersecurity made headlines this week when a candidate for president called for the establishment of a government agency to monitor it full time. Ben Carson, a confused sweater now seeking for the Republican presidential nomination, says a national cybersecurity agency is needed to “secure and advance America’s online presence.” That would seem to be a major cyber opportunity for cyber brands selling cyber weapons to our nation’s cyber forces, and indeed, defense contractor Northrop Grumman is reporting for duty with an ad blitz that will cyber the hell out of you.

"The Value of Performance," a campaign that debuted in June, can currently be found all over this story on The Hill about Carson's coming cybureaucracy. Helpfully tagged "cyber" lest you look at the accompanying photos and worry our nation is under attack by water-based soldiers from Atlantis, Northrop promises to "leverage full-spectrum cyber to neutralize enemy threats." It's part of the campaign's mission to obscure what it actually does in favor of saying "cyber" as often as possible. In the words of one Northrop employee who appears in a promotional video: "Cyber provides a unique enabler for being able to project force into a conflict environment."

Carson hasn’t projected much force into the conflict environment of the Republican primaries — he’s currently polling at around 7 percent — but he has projected a lot of cyber. The Northrop ad above helps explain cyber’s appeal: virtual soldiers dropping into the battlefield, zipping through laser grids, and shutting down communications before magically teleporting away. War is messy; cyber is as harmless as a game of Call of Duty. Praise the internet and pass the political donations.

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