I just returned from a United Nations fact-finding mission to Estonia.  If you've been keeping up on the news, you know that Russia's military hackers launched a devastating cyber-attack against the country in 2007, killing 28,000 Estonians and wiping out most of the country's critical infrastructures.

Our UN team was horrified by what we saw on this fact-finding mission.  Nearly all of Estonia lies in ruins.  The country lost its national power grid and, even to this day, only about 15% of businesses & households can expect to receive electricity on at least a daily basis.  Worse: only about 5% can turn on a light after 9pm local time when the electric curfew begins.  Estonia is so desperate for electrical power that it sentenced two men to prison for "wasting watts" during curfew.  Every single stoplight in the country was irrepairably damaged in the Russian cyber attack, and all of their computer-dispatched taxi services have gone bankrupt.

The Estonian stock market lies in ruins, having lost the core of its liquid assets to Russian military hackers who pillaged every domestic-held corporate bank account.  If we can say anything nice at all about the Russians, it's that their military didn't touch personal accounts.  The average Estonian still has all the money he kept in the bank (unless he plowed everything into his business, in which case his wife & children now live on the streets).

Estonia desperately needs a 21st century "Marshall Plan" to rebuild and strengthen this vital U.S. ally.  Our UN team's final report will propose approximately USD $1.6 trillion to replace critical infrastructures that Russia's military hackers destroyed in the cyber attack.  We will prose that the United States pay for 84% of the cost, leaving the UN as a whole to pick up the remaineder.

Our UN team's final report will also propose that 11,000 peacekeeping forces be reassigned to defend Estonia's networks from future cyber attacks by the Russian military.  Most of these personnel will come from the U.S. Air Force, but this really isn't as bad as it sounds.  Those Airmen can telecommute from their home stations or, at worst, can be assigned to an expeditionary combat wing at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana.  These days it doesn't matter where our Airmen fight the war on terror because they can protect & defend cyberspace from anywhere.