23 Reasons Why Cyber Strategy is Bunk

http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2014/ 03/23-reasons-why-cyber- strategy-is-bunk/#comment- 37434

19 MARCH 2014

TIM STEVENS

Well, that’s not quite what he said at all but Martin Libicki has some words of wisdom for anyone still looking for the ‘digital Clausewitz’, or any similar mould-breaking, genre-defining strategist for the ‘information age’.

In a new article for Strategic Studies Quarterly, Libicki suggests ‘Why Cyber War Will Not and Should Not Have Its Grand Strategist’ [pdf]. He makes three key points about why we should not be looking for a ‘cyber’ equivalent of the ‘classics’ of Mahan, Douhet or, indeed, Clausewitz:

First, the salutary effects of such classics are limited. Second, the basic facts of cyberspace, and hence cyber war, do not suggest that it would be nearly as revolutionary as airpower has been, or anything close. Third, more speculatively, if there were a classic on cyber war, it would likely be pernicious.

On the first, it’s not always a strategist’s fault if those who follow him misrepresent him somehow in word or deed. Basil Liddell Hart laying responsibility for the ‘progressive butchery’ of World War I at the feet of Clausewitz is a case in point. Libicki rightly notes, however, that the ‘classics’ of strategy – land, sea, or air – quite often serve greater heuristic functions than they do guides to action. The danger lies, writes Libicki, ‘when such thinkers are cited as authorities [and] their arguments are converted into answers, at least in the minds of their adherents’. We have to be careful, therefore, in transposing tenets of the classical strategic canon into ‘cyberspace’.

The second point is largely an explanation for the first. Libicki presents a nuanced argument for why cyber war/fare is significantly less revolutionary than it is often presented, a position also taken by several writers of this parish. I won’t rehearse those arguments here, except to say that Libicki is onto something fundamental here: success in the ‘fifth domain’ is often unpredictable, which makes it a very risky proposition, tactically, operationally and strategically. Says Libicki, ‘Everything appears contingent, in large part, because it is’. Hardly the basis for a grand theory of cyber war, he reasons.

The third point stems from the second. If information environments are currently evolving so fast, yet we get locked into ways of viewing them based on past classics of strategy, the effects could be distinctly ‘pernicious’. To summarize a subtle argument in brutal fashion, the strategic utility of cyber war is over-rated but its complexities are under-appreciated. Getting rail-roaded into traditional modalities is ‘misleading, even harmful’, especially if cyber war is sufficiently un-strategic to warrant such a treatment in the first place. The search for a ‘cyber Clausewitz’ is not only potentially counter-productive but essentially pointless.

Libicki’s not arguing for a non-strategic approach to ‘cyber’ but he does offer a compelling argument for why war-fighters and politicians should be wary of expecting too much of this novel medium. We should not await or desire, he argues, the emergence of a strategic colossus because, in the main, there’s no need.

In concluding, Libicki writes:

Furthermore, there are good reasons to believe that its contribution to warfare, while real, is likely to be modest, while its contribution to strategic war is a great deal easier to imagine than to substantiate.