For the first time ever, the Obama administration has publicly admitted to developing offensive cyberweapons that could be aimed at foreign nations during wartime.

According to an article published Tuesday night by The New York Times, that admission came from General Keith Alexander, the chief of the military's newly created Cyber Command. He said officials are establishing 13 teams of programmers and computer experts who would focus on offensive capabilities. Previously, Alexander publicly emphasized defensive strategies in electronic warfare to the almost complete exclusion of offense.

"I would like to be clear that this team, this defend-the-nation team, is not a defensive team," Alexander, who runs both the National Security Agency and the new Cyber Command, told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. "This is an offensive team that the Defense Department would use to defend the nation if it were attacked in cyberspace. Thirteen of the teams that we’re creating are for that mission alone."

Alexander's testimony came the same day the nation's top intelligence official, James R. Clapper Jr., told Congress that major computer attacks on the United States could so cripple the country's infrastructure that they represented the most dangerous immediate threat to the US. The risk rivaled attacks by global terrorist networks, he said. According to the NYT, it was the first time Clapper listed cyberattacks first in his presentation and the rare occasion since the September 11, 2001 attacks that intelligence officials didn't list international terrorists first among dangers facing the country. Clapper did go on to say spy agencies saw only a "remote chance" in the next two years of a major computer attack on the US.

Clapper specifically mentioned attacks waged last August on Saudi oil company Aramco, which took out more than 30,000 work stations. He also discussed persistent and powerful denial-of-service attacks on the websites of US-based banks, which anonymous US officials have said are the work of Iran.

"In some cases," Clapper said, "the world is applying digital technologies faster than our ability to understand the security implications and mitigate potential risks."