The essence of the "cyber war" problem

Windows cannot be sufficiently secured to prevent distributed denial of service attacks, especially when it is used in administrator mode as is most often the case. The average user will recognize malware infections only when they affect his or her machine's performance. A truly diabolical piece of malware will do nothing to make its presence known; it will just sit on the hard drive, perhaps polling its controller at intervals until it is activated, at which point some millions of machines will simultaneously target routers, gateways, and name servers all over the country, making the Internet infrastructure useless. The public Internet, and any connected network that includes Windows machines in significant numbers, cannot be relied on in the event of hostilities. Threatening to lob missiles at an attacker, as the government seems to be proposing, is ludicrous.

The only thing that seems to make sense is to create a secondary network of non-Windows, preferably non-Intel-based machines that is non-public and does not cross national boundaries. This network should ideally be linked by fiber and not copper or microwave.

In too many businesses mission critical data is managed by Windows machines that are routinely used for Internet access. Given that the majority of such machines, even if protected by antivirus software, are infected, this strikes me as folly of the highest order.