Bottom line: Organizations must transform cybersecurity from an annual compliance exercise into continuous operational training with realistic scenarios to stand against attackers who innovate daily.
While military cyber teams operate with practiced precision in attack scenarios, enterprises still treat cybersecurity as a compliance task rather than an operational capability – with fatal consequences given daily new attack tactics.
The discrepancy between military cyber response and enterprise practice is fundamental: military operations teams understand their roles clearly, close gaps immediately, and assume cyber as a kinetic threat requiring constant operational exercises. The corporate sector, by contrast, checks cybersecurity off as a compliance box instead of establishing it as a core operational capability.
Recent incidents illustrate this gap: in early 2025, the attacker group Scattered Spider disabled retail chains and insurance brokers. Manufacturers like Jaguar Land Rover and Asahi Beer experienced months-long operational outages following ransomware attacks via supply chain compromises. In parallel, Cisco researchers showed that frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI and Amazon have significantly weaker security profiles under multi-stage attack scenarios than in single-prompt tests. Google Threat Intelligence Group also documented the first known zero-day exploit created with AI assistance.
Annual tabletop exercises are no longer sufficient when attackers probe daily. The military uses dynamic cyber ranges to test real tools, personnel and processes against realistic scenarios. Organizations need similar approaches: regular live simulations that map actual attacker tactics, combined with conventional training as a foundation.
Military cyber doctrine is based on the assumption that attacks are inevitable. Organizations should shift their mindset from “prevent breaches” to “detect, contain, recover” and treat incidents as operational events, not reputational crises. This reduces panic and leads to better decisions under pressure. At the same time, executives must understand genuine vulnerabilities: beyond reputational and financial damage, what are further primary or secondary impacts? Just as the military models risk scenarios in multiple layers, organizations should systematically investigate what is at stake beyond immediate harm.
Source: www.csoonline.com · Published 8 June 2026
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