Overview

An Overview of Cyber Warfare

Three books all with the same purpose – to offer an overview of cyber realities – have largely framed the discussion of what is cyber warfare.

Richard Clarke’s, Cyber War, and Martin Libicki’s, Cyberspace in Peace and War, present comprehensive studies of cyber warfare, Clarke getting this effort started in 2010, while Libicki offers a much more recent treatment (2016). The update is very useful although the central question of just what is cyber warfare remains unclear due to the enduring debate of what constitutes war let alone a cyber war. In this light, Thomas Rid in, Cyber War Will Not Take Place, sets a worthy standard rejecting a war in cyberspace on the basis of a Clausewitzian understanding of war as violence (Rid, xiv, 1-2). This western ideal hardly reflects the reality in cyberspace, Rid argues, as crime, sabotage, and espionage best indicate the flow of any confrontation online.

A number of experts push back. These authors stress that war does not have to hinge on only physical violence. Coercion can come from other measures. For instance, in a "roundtable" discussion of what constitutes cyber warfare, John Stone writes, “Acts of war involve the application of force in order to produce violent effects. These violent effects need not be lethal in character.” Force defines war, not the cost in lives (Stone, 107). Timothy J. Junio essentially agrees, writing that, “if cyber war happens, it will be extremely costly even if not lethal” (Junio, 132). Given the assumed stakes of the struggle there, a war is the best characterization.

Such thinking rests on the western definition of war as primarily a violent act coming at the hands of a military recognized by state authorities to wage this war. Derek S. Reveron put this well as he summarized the various thoughts found in a collection of essays in a book he edited and titled, Cyberspace and National Security. In his conclusion, he writes, “it is unlikely that cyber can exist as the sole source of coercion or can live up to classic definitions of war that encapsulate violence” (Reveron, 230). In western thinking, violence is the ultimate delineator of war. Anything else is secondary to this purpose. For writers like Erik Gartzke, the conventional force of arms matters most. In a 2013 article, “Myth of Cyber War: Bringing War in Cyberspace Back Down to Earth,” he writes that cyber does not represent a war onto itself. Rather, it augments existing acts of war:

  "Cyberattacks are unlikely to prove particularly potent in grand strategic terms unless they can
  impose substantial, durable harm on an adversary. In many, perhaps most, circumstances, this
  will occur only if cyber war is accompanied by terrestrial military force or other actions designed
  to capitalize on any temporary incapacity achieved via the internet (Gartzke, 43)."

Such dismissal of a “grand strategic” impact in cyberspace discounts any possibility of a standalone cyber war resting on coercion via means well short of the application of violence.

Trying to understand a cyber war is not as difficult as experts make it out to be. Once surrendering a measure of war as physical violence and instead thinking of war as a cognitive struggle over breaking an adversary’s will, some familiar parameters can be measured in cyberspace. The ideological challenge to restrictive and authoritarian regimes that the connectivity defining cyberspace represents best defines the unfolding war in that domain.

Very few have referenced the struggle to advance or retard the democratic process of representative government due to the ideological implications of cyberspace. John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Post Graduate School, does so in a 2012 issue of Foreign Policy magazine where he characterizes war in cyberspace as a "virtual conflict in the form of society-wide ideological strife" akin to the Arab Spring. He in conjunction with David Ronfeldt raised this issue as early as 1993, writing in the wake of the First Gulf War about the prospect of “information–related conflict at a grand level between nations and states.” This “netwar” meant the ability to promote “dissident or opposition movements across computer networks.” War, they wrote, after 1991 will diminish between states in favor of a “global civil society” and this transition will mark “the next great frontier for ideological conflict” (Arquilla, Ronfeldt, 144, 145). Libicki gets close to this when in an earlier book he writes that an “open approach to cyberspace” may allow one to “extend their influence and the influence of their values” online. This “friendly conquest” of cyberspace is preferable to some sort of hostile takeover of the domain because that “closed” approach forfeits the draw of more “attractive systems” (Libicki, Conquest in Cyberspace, 3). In other words, overt conquest would defeat the very premise of connectivity.

What that friendly conquest might look like, the online war over values, in short, the prospect of openness as a manifestation of cyber ideology, and this intellectual offensive checkmating strongmen and leaving them on the defensive, this dimension merits much more explication. Should there be such an advantage to those nations favoring openness, there is the imperative of keeping war confined to the cyber domain, something the US military in-step with its partners must guarantee. Altogether, as US leaders strive to recast the nation’s cyber strategy, they would do well to remember that the technological achievement of cyberspace means that states advancing openness must look to capitalize on the military advantage attendant to that realty no matter the lack of violence normally defining a war. In this respect, the scholarly debate over what is war in the cyber domain is very useful. There are two wars afoot: one, cyber capabilities that augment application of military force or arms, and two, the ideological confrontation in cyberspace that so overwhelmingly favors nations defending and advancing openness. The aim is to win both of these wars.

References

Cyber Warfare “Cyber Roundtable” (what constitutes cyber warfare). Journal of Strategic Studies,
Vol. 36, Issue 1 (2013): 101-142.

Arquilla, John. “Cyberwar is Already Upon US: But Can it be Controlled?” Foreign Policy Magazine,
February 27, 2012.

--------------- and David Ronfeldt. “Cyberwar is Coming!” Comparative Strategy, Vol. 12,
No. 2 (Spring 1993): 141-165.

Clarke, Richard A. and Robert K. Knake. Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and
What to Do About It. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010.

Gartzke, Erik. “The Myth of Cyberwar: Bringing War in Cyberspace Back Down to Earth.” International
Security, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Fall 2013): 41-73.

Libicki, Martin. Conquest in Cyberspace: National Security and Information Warfare. New York:
Cambridge University, 2007.

----------------. Cyberspace in Peace and War. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2016.

Rattray, Gregory J. Strategic Warfare in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

Reveron, Derek S., ed. Cyberspace and National Security: Threats, Opportunities, and Power
in a Virtual World. Georgetown University Press, 2012.

Rid, Thomas. Cyber War Will Not Take Place. Oxford University Press, 2013.