If there's one good example that our military underestimated the importance of cyber-security until recently, it is that the U.S. Army Cyber Command was just established in 2009. Before this happened, there was definitely work being done by the Army in this field, but it wasn't the large-scale, coordinated effort that such an important threat demands.
In the years leading up to the creation of the Cyber Command, there were many field grade officers who expressed the need for such a unit. These officers suggested that the military needed some sort of presence in cyberspace, mostly to ensure the safety of U.S. networks and partly to enable us to effectively respond to cyber-attacks around the world.
This article has a lot of good information about CYBERCOM.
I hope you realize that NSA, perhaps the biggest and most capable information security organizations in the world has always been under the Pentagon. It's absurd to suggest the US attention to data security started with the establishment of "Cyber Command".
My personal view is that it's a dangerous experiment in ineptitude allow the Pentagon to "defend in cyberspace" US networks. Most of the people who are tossing around such terms don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about.
It's one thing to say we're going to let the Pentagon use its procurement bucks to have defense contractors weaponize exploits in case the day arrives. But it's highly debatable whether allowing the military to get involved in US domestic networks is even legal.
Their ability to defend even their own networks for less than 10x the cost of the private sector is still an open question, much less whether or not they can defend anything having a wide diversity of traffic such as today's business and consumer internet.
I didn't say that the creation of CYBERCOM marked the beginning of U.S. involvement in cyberspace. It was created just a few years ago, because our government's leadership felt that we needed to do far more than we have been. The NSA is very good at what they do, but unless they expand dramatically, other organizations are going to have to be formed.
That's fine. I'd just like to disagree with the idea that the US was late to this party. If anything the US has been one of a few countries leading the world into this "cyber arms" race, albeit mostly covertly until recent years.
In the years leading up to the creation of the Cyber Command, there were many field grade officers who expressed the need for such a unit. These officers suggested that the military needed some sort of presence in cyberspace, mostly to ensure the safety of U.S. networks and partly to enable us to effectively respond to cyber-attacks around the world.
This article has a lot of good information about CYBERCOM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Cyber_Command