That doesn't mean loser in the thumb-and-finger-on-the-forehead sense. Not in the "ha ha, you suck" sense. It means "Loser" in the historical sense; the archeological sense. The tragic, bloody, end-of-an-era, Napoleon after Waterloo sense; like Poland after the Blitzkrieg. The sense that the victim of an obviously inevitable tragedy became even more vulnerable by refusing to admit the validity of a growing threat, and was crushed by it without even enough time to complain that everything was happening too fast.
Losers of this kind don't get fired. They are buried on the field where they fell and disappear from history because they didn't recognize the invincibility of a Russian winter or German tanks or typhus or yellow fever or starvation or the inevitable result of marching into battle against thousands of enemy while carrying hundreds of bullets and lacking any way to go back for more.
The DoD recognizes losers of that type from its history books, but doesn't see them in itself because it can't bring itself to consider as dangerous an enemy that might operate out of its mom's basement, even when the evidence is clear that childhood fears that untold horrors lurk down there in the dark is very very clear.
Cyberwar isn't like a shooting war. The Pentagon is good at those, and at modifying itself to fight different kinds of real war using the same preparation it uses for the king-sized, mechanized war for which it has prepared for more than a century.
That kind of war allows an organization filled with guys and guns to change what kinds of guys and what kinds of guns it uses, so it can fight house to house to quell an insurgency, rather than nation-to-nation to settle an argument. It can do the job it knows how to do even when the it's more appropriate to accessorize with grenades rather than artillery, dodge RPGs rather than long-range missiles, or consider as a major battle one really bad day in a village in the middle of nowhere rather than one that flattens cities and devastates countrysides.
You can disassemble a giant, factory-made army, and send little pieces of it into smaller places to wage nano war rather than Total War.
You can't take it apart so completely you can easily repurpose the protectiveness and aggression but leave the blood-and-guts behind.
Most of war doesn't involve actual fighting. Most of it involves getting shooters to the fight feeding and arming them while they're in it, and then bringing them home again. And of supplying, transporting and feeding all the people who do the supply, transport and feeding of everyone else.
An army is a supply chain with that ends in the barrel of a gun. It is a long, predictable event-driven linear workflow with identifiable triggers, predictable responses and a few tricks to make it look more ad hoc than it really is.
Sandia National Labs.
