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Operation Epic Fury didn’t start with bombs. It started with cyber.

According to U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Dan Caine, before the first U.S. bombs started falling on Iran on Feb. 28, operators at U.S. Cyber Command and Space Command had already launched what he called “non-kinetic effects, disrupting and degrading and blinding Iran’s ability to see, communicate, and respond.”

Operation Epic Fury didn’t start with bombs. It started with cyber.

According to U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Dan Caine, before the first U.S. bombs started falling on Iran on Feb. 28, operators at U.S. Cyber Command and Space Command had already launched what he called “non-kinetic effects, disrupting and degrading and blinding Iran’s ability to see, communicate, and respond.”

It’s not the first time this administration has used offensive cyberoperations: U.S. President Donald Trump suggested that they had been used to create blackouts in Venezuela in January before the U.S. military seized Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Caine also acknowledged that Cyber Command and Space Command had created “different effects” in support of the Venezuela operation, without revealing what those effects were.

It’s not even the first time the administration has used such capabilities against Iran, as Caine revealed last June that U.S. Cyber Command had “supported” strikes against three Iranian nuclear facilities that month. That reportedly included cyberweapons that disrupted Iran’s missile defense systems (the Pentagon declined to comment further on its use of cyber).

The Trump administration’s long-anticipated national cyber strategy, released on March 6, touted both of those operations. “Whether … supporting a globe-spanning operation to obliterate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, or leaving our adversaries blind and uncomprehending during a flawless........

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