Understanding Cyber Conflict: Fourteen Analogies

Description

Cyber weapons and the possibility of cyber conflict—including interference in foreign political campaigns, industrial sabotage, attacks on infrastructure, and combined military campaigns—require policymakers, scholars, and citizens to rethink twenty-first-century warfare. Yet because cyber capabilities are so new and continually developing, there is little agreement about how they will be deployed, how effective they can be, and how they can be managed. Written by leading scholars, the fourteen case studies in this volume will help policymakers, scholars, and students make sense of contemporary cyber conflict through historical analogies to past military-technological problems. The chapters are divided into three groups. The first—What Are Cyber Weapons Like?—examines the characteristics of cyber capabilities and how their use for intelligence gathering, signaling, and precision striking compares with earlier technologies for such missions. The second section—What Might Cyber Wars Be Like?—explores how lessons from several wars since the early nineteenth century, including the World Wars, could apply—or not—to cyber conflict in the twenty-first century. The final section—What Is Preventing and/or Managing Cyber Conflict Like?—offers lessons from past cases of managing threatening actors and technologies. Cover Half Title Other Titles Title Copyright Dedication Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Part I | What Are Cyber Weapons Like? 1 | Intelligence in Cyber—and Cyber in Intelligence 2 | Nonlethal Weapons and Cyber Capabilities 3 | Cyber Weapons and Precision-Guided Munitions 4 | Cyber, Drones, and Secrecy Part II | What Might Cyber Wars Be Like? 5 | Cyber War and Information War à la Russe 6 | An Ounce of (Virtual) Prevention? 7 | Crisis Instability and Preemption: The 1914 Railroad Analogy 8 | Brits-Krieg: The Strategy of Economic Warfare 9 | Why a Digital Pearl Harbor Makes Sense . . . and Is Possible Part III | What Are Preventing and Managing Cyber Conflict Like? 10 | Cyber Threats, Nuclear Analogies? Divergent Trajectories in Adapting to New Dual-Use Technologies 11 | From Pearl Harbor to the "Harbor Lights" 12 | Active Cyber Defense: Applying Air Defense to the Cyber Domain 13 | "When the Urgency of Time and Circumstances Clearly Does Not Permit . . .": Pre-delegation in Nuclear and Cyber Scenarios 14 | Cybersecurity and the Age of Privateering Conclusions List of Contributors Index