This week, days before Joe Biden had even stepped foot in the White House as US President, he showed a greater commitment to digitally-enabled government than most other world leaders have done for a long time.

Unveiling a $1.9 trillion relief package including billions in IT and cyber funding, the President-elect called on Congress to commit to spending to support recovery from not just one, but two crises.

Recovery from the pandemic will be essential, but Mr. Biden takes up his new role in the aftermath of one of the most extraordinary cyberattacks in history – an attack that raises significant questions about the digital and cyber capabilities of the World’s most powerful government.

Among the commitments to a digitally transformed federal government, secure, shared IT services are an ongoing theme, with $9bn to CISA, the US cybersecurity agency, and the General Services Administration, a core federal department, for their development.

Modernization and innovation are both clear priorities too, with a focus on delivering ‘the most innovative and impactful projects’; a move to cloud computing will be welcomed by many who work in Government, while those in the private sector question how it took so long for such a shift to get going.

At the heart of these proposals will be the people delivering it – and here, too, the plans do not shy away from calling for what will be needed: $200 million to fund rapid-hiring of experts to support the work of the US Digital Service.

With these proposals, the President-elect indicated that his administration will acknowledge the importance of effective digital government and take the requisite steps to build a federal digital capability that could one day be as strong as the world’s leaders in this space – Singapore, Estonia, Denmark, among others.

For those of us on the other side of the Atlantic, however, the question should not be whether these measures will take the US to the front of the pack – or if this is just the US catching up. Instead, we should ask ourselves why similar commitments are not being made by every Government in Europe.

The Commission for Smart Government has this week published a package of proposals for better digital government, outlining the steps that need to be taken in order to restore the UK’s capacity for innovative public service delivery to what it was at the start of the last decade.

In the first few years of the 2010s, the birth of Government Digital Service (GDS) and other such developments marked a period of innovation in this area, which has, in recent years, fizzled out.

It will be no surprise that our recommendations cover similar ground to the President-elect’s proposals, but go slightly further in calling for a wholesale digital reboot of Whitehall; one that breaks down the silos that lead to slow adoption secures the skills and processes to adopt and deploy technologies effectively, and ensures that decision-making is transparent and accountable.

Yet, should these proposals be implemented in their entirety – as we believe they should – the UK would still join Denmark, Estonia, and Finland as outliers in Europe.

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“Iran has recently threatened the destruction of Israel,” Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday (July 9), filmed in front of an F35 fighter jet at the Nevatim Air Force Base near Be’er Sheva. “But these planes,” he warned, “can reach anywhere in the Middle East—including Iran and Syria.”

Meanwhile, Israel’s cyber capabilities have not been held back. Almost all of the real action is taking place behind the scenes, as the integration of cyber and conventional warfare has developed this year as never before. And this has introduced a new media dynamic—what is being seen is one dimension, one slice, you see what those controlling the narrative want you to see.

In his F35 video, Netanyahu was responding publicly to the threat made a week earlier by Mojtaba Zolnour, head of Iran’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, that “if the U.S. attacks Iran, Israel will have only half an hour left to live.”

State media rhetoric apart, the real backdrop to this latest exchange is Iran’s breach of the 2015 limits on uranium enrichment—the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verified Iran’s “enriching uranium above 3.67% U-235,” and Israel’s warning that Iran faces (unilateral, if necessary) military action if it continues to break nuclear limits. Iran’s breach remains well below weapons-grade enrichment, but the direction of travel is sending a message. And that message has been received.

And so the cyber conflict is now well underway. Although sometimes this will (deliberately) hit the headlines, as with last month’s U.S. retaliatory cyberattack on Iran’s command and control systems, mostly it won’t. The message sent with that attack was that “we can reach into your most secure networks when needed,” with execution requiring more than clever coding and cyber superiority. Behind such an attack is the implication of significant action on the ground, usually entailing the compromise of individuals or physical equipment or the placement of an infected storage device into a live system.

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