The United States Air Force was the first of the military services to include cyberspace in its mission statement. The Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Chief Staff, shortly after announcing the new mission statement released a joint Letter to Airmen on 7 Dec 05, wherein Secretary Wynne stated "we have quite a few of our Airmen dedicated to cyberspace....from security awareness, making sure the networks can't be penetrated, as well as figuring out countermeasures. The Air Force is a natural leader in the cyber world and we thought it would be best to recognize that talent." In the same news release, the Air Force gave a more defined view of cyberspace: "the term cyberspace includes network security, data transmission and the sharing of information." Finally, the joint Letter to Airmen points out: "As Airmen, it is our calling to dominate Air, Space, and Cyberspace." The way Airmen will meet the direction Air Force leadership advocates, particularly in cyberspace, rests on a clear understanding of exactly what that calling entails.

Cyberspace is not a very new concept. The term cyberspace was first used in the 1982 science fiction novel Burning Chrome, by William F. Gibson. It was later popularized in Gibson's next novel, Neuromancer.

While popularized, it remained an elusive term to define. Nearly twenty years later, President Bush, in 2003 set forth a policy to secure cyberspace in his National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. Soon thereafter, the 2004 National Military Strategy included the domain as an operational battlespace requirement. Yet, cyberspace is not a term found in printed dictionaries, and on-line sources have widely varying definitions. In fact, once the Air Force claimed the virtual high ground called cyberspace last year, a flurry of activity quickly began to define exactly what it claimed.

To that end, the Air Force stood up a Cyberspace Task Force in January 2006, led by Dr. Lani Kass, chartered to investigate cyberspace as a domain in and through which the Air Force flies and fights. Following her appointment, Dr. Kass defined the initial goal of the task force as developing a set of recommendations that included designing a strategy for dominance across domains, evolving operational concepts for cyberspace and changing doctrine for the mission. One of the first items the task force tackled was to come up with a common definition of cyberspace, which Dr. Kass admits was a struggle as the team poured through hundreds of opinions during their research. The task force defined cyberspace as a warfighting domain bounded by the electromagnetic spectrum or the "maneuver space of the electromagnetic spectrum." Surely, sister services in DOD may have other ideas on defining cyberspace. However, at this time a full and complete definition is not possible, as cyberspace is an immature science and a full understanding of the domain is years away. Therefore, any definition of cyberspace must remain flexible and adaptable in order to allow future innovations to take its course.