Cybered Conflict and the Third Offset Strategy

2015

Talking Foreign Policy is a one-hour radio program, hosted by Case Western Reserve University School of Law Co-Dean Michael Scharf, in which experts discuss the salient foreign policy issues of the day. Dean Scharf created Talking Foreign Policy to break down complex foreign policy topics that are prominent in the day-to-day news cycles yet difficult to understand. This broadcast featured: Peter Singer, Director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, Brookings Institution Michael Newton, Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University Milena Sterio, Associate Professor of Law, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Shannon French, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Inamori Center for Ethics and Excellence, Case Western Reserve Universit

Research Article, 2023

The power competition between the major powers of the world has always been dependent on the strategic security landscape. Over the years, military operations and warfare have evolved with the development of new weapons, equipment, and technologies. During the 20 th century, the world witnessed a transformation from conventional strategic competition to unconventional strategic competition with the advent of nuclear weapons. The genesis of the 21 st century marked another revolution in military affairs when electronic warfare was modernized and cyber warfare came into the spotlight. In the current century, new poles of powers have emerged whereby Beijing and Washington started competing at all levels and in all domains. Shortly after the incorporation of digital, electronic, and cyber equipment and techniques by militaries around the world, cyberspace became militarized and emerged as the fifth battlefield. The U.S. armed forces and the Chinese PLA both rely heavily on cyberspace when it comes to their communication, operations, and planning. Cyber campaigns launched by Washington and Beijing on various targets accounted for a cyber arms race and continuous cyberspace strategic competition between the two countries.

How cyber assaults and government responses have been interpreted is not uniform, however, especially with regard to whether the world will eventually engage in “cyber war.” There is a community of scholars and analysts who argue that cyber war will not happen or that the impact of cyberspace on armed conflict will be limited. Others in the broad field of security studies, traditional computer science, or corporate communities claim that while some form of conflict is happening, government officials, military officers, and legislators are suffering from “threat inflation.” They argue that hyperbolic projections are leading to bad policy decisions, especially with regard to specific adversaries, and that there has been overinvestment in offensive cyber weapons rather than prudent defensivemeasures. A best-selling nonfiction book has been criticized for contributing unnecessarily to public fears about the potential for cyber warfare. Many of these critics argue that what are being called “cyber attacks” are really instances of espionage, allowed by international law, or simply crime, which is not the mission area of the nation’s military services. Some analysts detect the influence of the military-industrial complex on policy debates. If hackers, official or not, from China and Russia, terrorists, and criminals use the Internet to penetrate U.S government systems, contractors see opportunities for increased revenue. As two observers of cyberspace argue, “There’s an arms race in cyberspace, and a massively exploding new cyber-industrial complex that serves it.” Our position on this ongoing debate is that neither side has it right.

Strategic Analysis, 2010

The last couple of decades have seen a colossal change in terms of the influence that computers have on the battle field, to an extent that defence pundits claim it to be a dawn of a new era in warfare. The use of computers and information in defence has manifested into various force multipliers such as Information Operations, C4I2SR Systems, Network Centric Warfare, to the extent that commentators are terming this information age as a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). These advances have not only revolutionized the way in which wars are fought, but have also initiated a new battle for the control of a new dimension in the current contemporary world: The Cyber Space. Over time cyber warfare has assumed the shape of an elephant assessed by a group of blind people, with every one drawing different meanings based upon their perceptions. Under these circumstances there was a gradual paradigm shift in military thinking and strategies, from the strategic aspect to the tactical aspect of cyber warfare laying more emphasis on cyber attacks and counter measures. This resulted in the formation of a notion that cyber warfare or information warfare is a potent force multiplier, which in a sense downgraded the strategic aspects of cyber war to a low grade tactical warfare used primarily for a force enhancement effect. The author believes this is wrong, cyber war is a new form of warfare and, rather than cyber war merely being an enhancement of traditional operations, traditional operations will be force multipliers of cyber war. This paper tries to shatter myths woven around cyber warfare so as to illuminate the strategic aspects of this relatively misinterpreted notion. This paper will elucidate the scenarios and mechanisms illuminating the process of using the strategies of cyber war, so as to achieve conventional objectives. The paper will also analyze the doctrine and strategies including first and second strike capabilities with regard to cyber war. This paper identifies a paradigm shift from the conventional belief of cyber warfare acting as a force multiplier for conventional warfare to the recognition, that conventional warfare will be acting as a force multiplier around cyber war and hence making cyber war as the primary means of achieving grand strategic objectives in the contemporary world order.

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Comparative Strategy, 2019

This article examines the intersection of the evolving Chinese command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) military paradigm, with the cyber, space, and electronic warfare asymmetric challenges posed to the U.S. on the future network-centric battlefield. In contrast to China’s conventional weapon systems, far less ink has been spilled​ on Chinese thinking in the development of the critical support architecture, which enables and enhances China’s war-fighting capabilities. A central argument this article makes is that the technologically advanced offensive weapons fused by C4ISR systems, pose greater threats to the U.S. than the sum of their parts. The destabilizing dynamics emerging in the Asia Pacific will likely increase the incentives for both sides to strike first, and pre-emptively against the others C4ISR systems.

Orbis, 2000

The Risks of a Networked Military by Richard J. Harknett and the JCISS Study Group L ost in the welter of daily crises-Serbian atrocities, Chinese espionage, North Korean nuclear programs, and Iraqi intransigence-is the big story about American defense policy. 1 Away from the headlines, as the United States designs a security policy for the twenty-first century, two basic facts of long-term consequence have emerged. The first is that present and foreseeable defense budgets are simply not large enough simultaneously to support the current tempo of military operations worldwide, the high level of training and readiness that makes American skill at warfare second to none, and the modernization of the current arsenal. The second fact is less widely recognized, but just as certain, and it has important implications for how we deal with the first. Notions of an information technology-driven "revolution in military affairs" (IT-RMA) are now deeply embedded in American defense planning. But despite their intuitive attractiveness, these ideas are dangerously misguided. American national security planners, informed by an influential group of academics and retired military officers, are pushing a dramatically new vision of conflict in the twenty-first century. These visionaries argue that the combination of advances in information computer processing, microelectronics, surveillance, and precision weapons technologies will permit a fundamentally new way of war. After reviewing the challenges for ensuring national security in the next century, the blue-ribbon National Defense Panel, for example, endorsed an aggressive transformation of the American military. The IT-RMA, it concluded, permits and demands a new force structure that "radically alter[s] the way in which we project power," reducing reliance on 1 This article is a multi-authored product of the Joint Center for International and Security Studies. The article's co-authors include

National security and the future, 2021

Hybrid Threats and Wars in 21st Century - Making Society and Critical Infrastructure Resilient are extremely important for us to respond to different future threats and challenges. Defence leadership has acknowledged that they must make significant and urgent changes to its people, processes, organisations and culture if they are to keep pace with its strategic competitors and sustain its national security posture.

National security and the future, 2021

Mori Building Digital Art Museum: teamLab Borderless-a nerve center of 520 computers and 470 projectors-in the Tokyo waterfront district of Odaiba. TeamLab's interactive, digital art is a product of endless programming, testing and retestingmeant to dissolve barriers. The EastWest Institute works to reduce international conflict, addressing seemingly intractable problems that threaten world security and stability. We forge new connections and build trust among global leaders and influencers, help create practical new ideas, and take action through our network of global decision-makers. Independent and nonprofit since our founding in 1980, we have offices in New York, Brussels, Moscow and San Francisco.

Wilton Park Conference Reports, 2019

The human race has a propensity for conflict; on land, at sea, in the air and to some extent in outer space. Has cyberspace become the latest ‘battlespace’; a recognisable domain of military activity in which the organised armed forces of states should have specific roles and responsibilities? ‘Military operations in cyberspace’, a conference held at Wilton Park in early September 2018, set out to answer these questions from a variety of perspectives – operational, political, legal, moral, strategic and technical. Rather than follow a standard, thematic agenda, Military operations was structured sequentially. The conference began by asking why and how cyberspace might indeed be understood as a battlespace. Discussion then addressed in turn the more or less discrete phases of a notional conflict in cyberspace: the prevention of conflict (including deterrence); the means available for conflict in cyberspace (e.g. cyber weapons and dual- use platforms); the justification for military operations (e.g. threats, the balance between offensive and defensive capabilities); the conduct of operations (in two parts – the tactical/operational and the higher level strategic); the management of conflict (e.g. conflict mediation and de-escalation); legal and ethical constraints on military operations in cyberspace; and the conclusion of military operations (including the notions of victory, defeat and loss). The conference finished with a discussion of plausible futures for military operations in cyberspace. The conference highlighted above all that the national security communities and militaries of technologically advanced democracies are struggling to understand the character and Page 1 of 14 implications of all of these phases of potential conflict in cyberspace. The concluding section of this report is almost entirely devoted to raising a series of intricate and urgent questions that need further reflection. One certainty though is that militaries cannot effectively undertake this reflection on their own and that it must be conducted as part of a comprehensive, integrated civil-military approach to conflict in cyberspace.

ADRI Occasional Paper, 2017

This paper sheds light on the United States’ latest conventional deterrence strategy designed for 21st century Network Centric Warfare and aimed both at maintaining US technological edge vis-à-vis its prospective peer competitors and dissuading them from using force to alter the status quo. In the Asia-Pacific context, one may view the Defense Innovation Initiative as the US military response to China’s Active Defense Strategy. In this evolving strategic dynamic, the author identifies two extra-military challenges to the full operationalization of US’ technological innovation-driven strategy, namely: a.) alleged ‘strategic schizophrenia’ within the US defense and security establishment; and b.) China’s rapid military modernization. Left unaddressed and unchecked by the incumbent administration of President Donald Trump, US’ decades-long domination of the Pacific waters and skies may be severely undermined. In turn, this may have spillover effects over China’s handling of territorial and maritime disputes in the East China Sea and South China Sea, US allies’ security risk calculus and sense of urgency to acquire nuclear weapons, as well as Russia’s and Iran’s joint bid to challenge US political leadership in the Middle East. Hence, in order for its new strategy to succeed, the US must overcome its alleged ‘strategic schizophrenia’ in order to help create the enabling conditions for the perpetuation of the US Armed Forces’ technological superiority in particular and US credibility as the de facto guarantor of peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region in general.

The uneven performance of the US armed forces in anticipating, preparing for and carrying out the post-conflict phase of Operation ‘Iraqi Freedom’ has brought into relief a ‘missing link’ in the US’s awesome military capability. The operational setbacks in Iraq have also dented the enthusiasm surrounding Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s concept of ‘military transformation’. Having enabled the three-week blitz to Baghdad in 2003, this concept has proven less applicable in the subsequent stabilisation phase. In recognition of these deficiencies, the US Department of Defense (DoD) is now seeking to implement a raft of reforms to improve the military’s ability to conduct ‘stability operations’. This constitutes a potential turning point, as the US military has since the Vietnam War focused mostly on conventional combat.

Journal of Strategic Security, 2012

Colarik is an independent consultant, author, researcher, and inventor of information security technologies. He has published multiple security books and publications in the areas of cyber terrorism, information warfare, and cyber security. He has made presentations before a host of groups and organizations; has appeared on syndicated TV and radio shows such as Fox News, The 700 Club, and Coast to Coast; and is a Fox News contributing cyber security and terrorism expert. Dr. Colarik's research interests involve technology's impact on social, political, legal, and economic structures in society; the design and implementation of secure communication systems; and the evolving applications and consequences of the global information infrastructure on businesses, governments, and individuals. For more information on Dr. Colarik, visit his website at: http://www.AndrewColarik.com. Dr. Lech Janczewski has over thirty-five years' experience in information technology. He was managing director of the largest IBM installation in Poland, and project manager of the first computing center in Nigeria.

This article examines the advanced technological, information and cyber components of hybrid war and the introduction of suggested countermeasures to counter information and cyber threats and attacks. The main hypothesis of the authors is that revolutionary development and rapid implementation of technologies in innovative ways in all spheres of life facilitate and shape the basis for the transformation of theoretical and practical paradigms of war and conflict. The focus of the article is on the hybrid nature of modern conflict.