Unlike the other adversaries, it is still a rising power in all relevant domains and could see benefit from negotiating rules on an equal footing. China could be an exception here, as discussed further below. But, if they can avoid war, adversaries have much to gain and little to lose from cyber competition with the United States, whereas the United States in toto - government, businesses, and the public - has more to lose from theft, sanctions evasion, and information warfare than its adversaries do.

The United States would prefer to extend its advantages in cyber-enabled precision warfare while minimizing adversary utilization of cyber to spy, steal, sabotage, and subvert below the level of armed conflict. Unfortunately, the authors - and the short span of cyber-age history - do not provide detailed bases for thinking the United States and its friends will be able and willing to offer Russia, Iran, North Korea, and perhaps others sufficient threats and rewards to change their cyber behaviors. The authors propose an alternative approach of using persistent offensive and defensive competition with adversary cyber operators to establish customary legal boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable cyber espionage, economic and political competition, and warfighting.

If the great strength of the book is its structural analysis, its weakness is policy prescription. Cyber Command, and a professor at the University of Cincinnati. The authors are, respectively, a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a strategist at U.S. Thanks to their pioneering diagnosis of the structure of the digital environment and the incentives it creates for competition, Michael Fischerkeller, Emily Goldman, and Richard Harknett posit that “cyber warfare” per se will be rare, and that most exertions will be below the violence and destruction of armed conflict. Though written before the invasion, Cyber Persistence Theory does not flunk the Ukraine test thus far. approach of deterrence (primarily nuclear) and coercion (primarily threats of conventional attack) will not effectively dissuade adversaries’ cyber operations because they involve threats to inflict violence and damage disproportionate to the harm done unto us by those operations. The authors of a new book argue persuasively that the habitual U.S. Once war is underway, it is thus far unclear whether roughly equivalent cyber capabilities would advantage an attacker or a defender. Violent actions intended to take or hold territory or steal or disable assets are much more likely to provoke violent, costly, and irreversible responses. Such states and their opponents are better off pursuing these aims through cyber operations if they can. Firm conclusions must await the end of the war, but for now, cyber operations do not appear to have been decisive in destroying or disrupting military forces and economic wherewithal, or in affecting societal willpower and political cohesion.Įven the most revisionist states most of the time want to gain intelligence, enhance revenue through favorable trade, theft or sanctions evasion, and sabotage adversaries politically and economically, while avoiding shooting wars, especially with more powerful adversaries. The Russo-Ukrainian War is the first case in which opponents with advanced cyber capabilities have used them to achieve material and cognitive effects in armed conflict. Predictions about cyber war have ranged from the apocalyptic to the reassuring over the past decade, and the current war in Ukraine - beyond its horrific violence, dislocations, and criminality - provides a test case for those theories. Do cyber operations provide decisive advantages in war? Are they more escalatory or de-escalatory than other weapons? Or is it more appropriate to consider cyber capabilities primarily as instruments of interstate competition short of war? Harknett, Cyber Persistence Theory: Redefining National Security in Cyberspace (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Trump considering spy network