"We have no other choice."
You are the cyber operations manager for the nation of Gorgas.
The targeting analyst on the other side of the table slides a paper over to you. It details a risk assessment of a proposed operation that will advance your national objectives but requires using some high value bespoke capabilities your team has spent years building.
The target is a key weapons manufacturing facility in Donovia. This facility provides bombs for Donovia's war against Atropia, your ally. Intelligence reports incidate their digital control systems are within reach of your organization's cyber capabilities. You have a zero day exploit that will crack the perimeter of their network and then a series of stealthy software implants that will let you laterally move. The manufacturing systems themselves use a known brand of Programmable Logic Controllers that you could reverse engineer.
Committing to this operation would risk a man-year's worth of work on the PLCs, not to mention countless more developer time invested in finding the zero day and building the implants. The attack will be stopped and the tools reported to security vendors if an operator messes up or a network monitoring system is looking in the wrong place. Overnight your costly software implant and zero day would have patches and detection signatures slashing their efficacy.
Even if the operation succeeds, you know the Donovian CIRT is top notch and would probably investigate the network before you had a chance to clean up. They would find and report your capabilities, or worse steal them for their own operations.
There truly is no other choice as your operators have been probing the facility network for a few weeks with public capabilities and failed to find a foothold. The target is operating at too high of a security level for those to be effective.
Is it worth risking your best capabilities for this mission?
Will there be an even greater need next week?
Can you get more budget allocated?