Not wanting to miss out on Hollywood’s current craze of 1980s entertainment nostalgia the US Air Force aims for a WarGames-esque suite of hacker tools. Such tools would allow “access to” and ” full control” of all computers. If that isn’t fantastic enough, the now zombie’d computer will continue to broadcast future information back to US Air Force HQ.

On Monday, the Air Force Research Laboratory introduced a two-year, $11 million effort to put together hardware and software tools for “Dominant Cyber Offensive Engagement.”  “Of interest are any and all techniques to enable user and/or root level access,” a request for proposals notes, “to both fixed (PC) or mobile computing platforms… any and all operating systems, patch levels, applications and hardware.” This isn’t just some computer science study, mind you; “research efforts under this program are expected to result in complete functional capabilities.”

Unlike an Air Force colonel’s proposal, to knock down enemy websites with military botnets, the Research Lab is encouraging a sneaky, “low and slow” approach. The preferred attack consists of lying quiet, and then “stealthily exfiltrat[ing] information” from adversaries’ networks.

But, in the end, the Air Force wants to see all kinds of “techniques and technologies” to “Deceive, Deny, Disrupt, Degrade, [or] Destroy” hostile systems.  And “in addition to these main concepts,” the Research Lab would like to see studies into “Proactive Botnet Defense Technology Development,” the “reinvent[ion of] the network protocol stack” and new antennas, based on carbon nanotubes.

But isn’t this the NSA’s job? Actually, this sounds a lot like Skynet – the computer-based military defense system in the Terminator movies. California, let it be said, I blame you and your beloved governator.