WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 29th December, 2020) The United States need to modernize its defense priorities to meet strategic challenges from China and Russia, including in new realms such as in cyberspace, President-elect Joe Biden said after receiving transition briefings on key security issues.
"We talked about the different strategic challenges we are going to face from both Russia and China and reforms we must make to put ourselves in the strongest possible position to meet those challenges. That includes modernizing our defense priorities to better deter aggression in the future," Biden said during a press conference on Monday.
Biden explained that the United States has to be able to innovate, re-imagine its defenses against growing threats in new realms like cyberspace rather than continue to overinvest in legacy systems designed to address threats of the past.
"We need to close the gap between where our capabilities are now and where they need to be to better deter, detect, disrupt and respond to those sorts of intrusions in the future. This is an area where Republicans and Democrats are in an agreement. We should be able to work on a bipartisan basis to better secure the American people against malign cyber actors," he said.
Biden added that the US authorities are still learning about the extent of the recent massive hacking attack on government and private company networks and the vulnerabilities it exposed.
Several key officials have attributed the intrusion to Russian-backed hackers, though Moscow has denied any involvement. Addressing the issue during earlier briefings, Biden threatened to retaliate in kind.
