Cyber Warfare: Technology backfires on the powerful.

Cyber warfare is fast becoming the most progressive military technology since the Second World War. This rapid progression raises the question of identifying which global actors benefit most from a new found cyber capability. The acquisition of offensive cyber warfare capability by apparently weaker states for use against states with stronger kinetic warfare capability gives a strategic advantage, enabling them to change the balance of power. 

Offensive cyber warfare capability is a strategic balancing factor that will be used by the rising state powers against each other and against more established powers.  The attraction of cyber warfare for the weaker state is its low cost of development & deployment and its low visibility during development & mobilization as a weapon. Plus the fact that stronger states are more highly dependent on their critical cyber infrastructure than weaker ones.

From a government, intelligence agency and a border police perspective the strategy required to deal with cyber has some historic similarities to the way in which piracy was used by nations, particularly parts of nations or groups/tribes that could attack international trade routes. This issue was eventually internationally contained and gradually significantly reduced but of course piracy still operates in many places around the globe. The global oceans and seas and the international shipping routes, trade and naval activities, which can be seen as similar to an earlier version of the Internet, have gone through so much damage, theft, destruction and life loss via piracy and privateering.

The reduction of piracy took centuries to achieve, finally significant aspects of it were outlawed by the Peace of Westphalia and put into international treaties by the Declaration of Paris in 1856. Cyber security needs a similar, but much faster, globally inter-related process to be agreed and established.

Understanding the effectiveness of the strategic culture and use of cyber warfare techniques will have consequences on national security doctrine for many countries. For the United States, one of the most wired states in the world, there is a large potential vulnerability against cyber-attacks. Globalization, fueled by technological advancement and expansion of cyber space, is a manifestation of new means through which power is exercised and distributed.

By the same token, such power comes with a vulnerability that states such as North Korea and China are trying to separate themselves from by isolating their critical infrastructure from the Internet.

It seems Cyber Warfare is a special case, where the more you have invested in your capabilities in cyberspace the  more vulnerable you become. It takes less economic, human and geo-political resources to develop cyber-attack capability than nuclear capability. This becomes a fundamental assumption in comparing nuclear capability and cyber war potential. The case that nuclear capability is the absolute form of military power that provides security for proliferated states may no longer hold.

Cyber warfare capability is a disruptive new phenomenon in strategic studies and will require an entirely new analysis of the technical and political elements to determine a new balance of power.

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