During his initial two weeks of activity the president has produced an unprecedented volume of executive orders, legislative proposals, and personnel selections, that in some cumulative regard have both substantively mitigated the acutely pernicious legacy of his predecessor, and reintroduced to the White House and our populace the rhythms and sophistication of a mode of governance that is competent and ethical in its tone and character.

Mr. president, I commend you for that most auspicious beginning and for what I am certain will be an entire term of office in which significant progressive goals shall be achieved that shall defeat the scourge of Covid-19 and reconstruct our emaciated economy, as well as accomplishing the implementation of initiatives to dislodge our republic from the grasp of systemic racism in which it has been imprisoned from the moment of its founding and rectify the grievous and profound inequities in which so many of our citizens are mired.

However, whatever the internal threats to the continuity of our federalist system the previous challenges pose in concert with the actions of those among us who have demonstrated a proclivity to engage in violent behavior to attain their political objectives, pale before the unceasing depredations of our adversaries in such foreign capitals as Moscow, Beijing, and Teheran.

These authoritarian regimes have invoked and sustained a multi-tiered and multi-decade dynamic which seeks as its ultimate objective the incapacitation of our capabilities as a viable society, and thus dramatically reduce if not eliminate our abilities to confront and defeat their fervent aspirations to ascend to the pinnacle of global domination.

At the epicenter of these exertions is the comprehensive and relentless campaign to reign supreme in the realm of cyberspace. The strategic directives they implement in this quest are both offensive and defensive in character. The offensive dimensions reflects the unimpeded pursuit of constructing those systems and technological processes and protocols that will achieve their dominance in this sphere. The defensive agenda is embodied in the uninterrupted sequence of onslaughts which they launch to invalidate and corrupt the digital infrastructure of virtually every major component that is currently operational in our nation.

Whether the particular intrusion is secreted in the hardware of these configurations, or the software which provides the coherence and intelligence of these potent technologies, or the codes which furnish the instructions required to perform the function these products were designed to accomplish, or in what comprises the limitless resources within the realm of the digital environment from which potential intrusions and disruptions may emanate, you may be assured that these activities will be augmented in both the scope and intensity their aggressive overtures reflect.

These deplorable and corrosive realities which if unchecked will augur an American future in which in postures of paralysis and utter impotence we shall become incapable of responding to potential threats that are existential in their import, and as a result we shall cease to be a functioning polity; demands a response that in its breadth and depth is unprecedented.

The mandate which this cyberspace “Czar” who shall serve as a senior advisor to the president must discharge four imperative responsibilities. The initial task is to assemble a Board of Advisors that includes representatives from every major segment of this nation’s populace, including at its epicenter the CEO’s of our technology sector, and their counterparts within the private sector that include substantial public companies and significant financial institutions, all agencies within the federal government, and officials from state and local governmental associations, as well as representatives from educational institutions and health-care organizations, and designates from the voluntary community and those groups that are engaged in the arts and cultural worlds of activity.

The second critical duty is the herculean effort to supervise the formulation of those diagnostic tools to conduct a the mammoth chore of evaluating our national technology grid to determine its current status with particular regard to its susceptibility/imperviousness to potential acts of aggression that seek to interdict its operational effectiveness or induce its total malfunction.

Should the urgency of completing this evaluation preclude the use of this mode of assessment to definitively determine the impregnability/vulnerability of these systems to disruption, it may be preferable to presume that those elements that are deemed crucial to the operation of our national digital universe have been penetrated or are susceptible to incapacitation, and instead immediately commence the fabrication of the replication of these systems utilizing exclusively those components that are manufactured within the U.S. under the most exacting and stringent national security requirements and provisions.

Moreover, in the manner most appropriate beyond the reproduction of these technological capabilities, a limited application of the practice of redundancy which was invaluable as a core principle that guided NASA’s philosophy to protect astronauts who participated in manned space flights should be evaluated as to its relevance/necessity to respond to future contingencies that may arise from circumstances should various critical elements of this digital environment fail to function or succumb to other destructive external influences.

Integral to this exploration must a determination of the current adequacy of those manufacturing facilities within the U.S. to produce the requisite elements of these systems, as well as whatever additional increments to our national community of engineers, software developers, coding specialists, or other critical skills upon which accomplishing this goal will be dependent, and subsequent to those decisions engage in the imperative discussions with universities and various training centers, to coordinate the most rapid augmentation of their capacities to educate and train the requisite labor force for this endeavor.

The third task which this entity must address in a simultaneous chronology is the creation of a mechanism whose perpetual responsibilities will be to construct and maintain those continuously evolving defensive measures to ensure that these systems will perform in postures of maximum efficacy during their operational lifespan and remain totally impervious to the attempts of nefarious actors to diminish these capabilities or their functional effectiveness due to exposure to viruses or such other attempts to impair their effective operation that various modes of malware might precipitate.

The final task this body must be responsive to is the requirement to mount and sustain a comprehensive arsenal of offensive cyberspace weapons that is incomparable in its effectiveness and lethality which targets the entirety of the digital universe of which are adversaries are composed.

By creating this senior advisory position and to the president and implementing the agenda we illuminated we shall be summoning however belatedly all crucial sectors of our nation and the extraordinary gamut of resources they represent, to both ensure the continued viability of our digital environment and by so doing preserve the integrity and future of our federalist system and the invaluable political precepts we currently embody, and a future that will harvest the initiatives which this administration is introducing to secure a more perfect union.

*Our relationships with our allies

**Responding to equity considerations

***The imperative requirements which our technology behemoths must fufill

****A previous digital challenge and the model that emerged

*To the greatest extent possible those manufacturing/training/defensive/offensive activities which this mandate demands should include the most intimate coordination with our allies to the maximum degree possible. that does not imperil those aspects of the process and protocols which must fall under the primary umbrella of national security restrictions.

**To the greatest extent possible the preceding agenda which should serve a concurrent social imperative, i.e. ameliorating those inequities among various subsets of our citizenry and be located within areas of the nation in which these minorities are substantial e.g. the African-American community, areas in which substantial aggregations of Hispanics reside, as well as those rural areas in which globalization has created pronounced economic deprivation among the principally middle-age cohort of Caucasians.

***The central requirement to significantly curtail the presence of various technology behemoths and their manufacturing operations in foreign lands to ensure the integrity of our national digital super-structure may negatively impact both their revenue streams and magnitude of profitability. As a result to compensate for these negative financial impacts a federal financial infusion may be necessary to indemnify these companies and thus minimize their inimical fiscal influences. However, in the final analysis the senior executives of these commercial enterprises must elevate their concern and commitment to our nation’s welfare above their unceasing pursuit and insatiable acquisition of monetary assets.

****In some partial regard the extensive activities which numerous actors in both the private sector and within government initiated to avert the potential catastrophe that various experts predicted would befall our nation as the result of the Y2K eventuality, may serve as a prototype for the mammoth mobilization that is currently required. However, when we were contending with this menace as the new millennium loomed, both the dimensions of our technology footprint were a mere fragment of current of its current proportions, and the complexity of contemporary systems within the digital universe has increased exponentially. The most accurate description of what must be undertaken at this moment in terms of its critical nature and the disaster that would befall us as a nation should we fail is the “Manhattan Project” of WWII, which produced the Atomic Bomb and secured our victory in the Pacific.