There’s a term in boxing that I can’t remember but it has to do with the length of a prize fighter’s arm. No matter what the weight class, the guy whose arms are two or three inches longer than his opponent has a big advantage: he can hit with less chance of being hit back (hitting exposes you because your arm is committed to the thrust, leaving the rest of you vulnerable).
In the “war” for the Falkland Islands, Argentina’s battleships had a cannon range of approximately 16 miles. The Brits had newer ships with 18-20 mile cannon range. So, they stayed 18 miles away and watched the Argentine shells drop into the ocean a mile or two away; then they shelled away!
In fighter piloting, radar is everything because your opponent’s missiles use the incoming radar as a homing device to find and blow up the source. A very guarded non-secret is that the US of A has radar that actually bends around the earth’s curvature, even at 35,000 feet. This means that our pilots can “see” an enemy plane seconds before the enemy pilot sees ours. He can launch and watch his adversary get blown up as he comes around the bend into view. Which may be why there aren’t a lot of air confrontations these days.
I divert: in 18th and 19th century England, when the government wanted something to happen, they offered a substantial monetary prize to get it done to the first people to do so. A railroad rom Bristol to Manchester? 10 million pounds!
What if (insert name of your president of choice) called into the Oval Office the heads of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon (dunno who else) and said we want you to develop software and offer a $2 billion tax free reward to the winner for the first company that finds a way to not only detect an unlawful hacking but fire back at the servers that did it with the force of Hiroshima. I know there was a silly Bruce Willis movie a while back that had normal people’s computers blowing up, but there must be away to cause real damage at the other end of a serious hack.
We just need to motivate the endeavor.