Indian Strategic Studies: 12/18/21

18 December 2021

CYBER, COMMUNICATIONS, EW & TECHNOLOGY (C2ET) DIGEST

Maj Gen P K Mallick, VSM (Retd)

Microsoft released its second annual Digital Defense Report, covering July 2020 to June 2021. This year s 134 pages report is quite detailed, with sections on cybercrime, nationstate threats, supply-chain attacks and Internet of Things attacks. The report includes security suggestions for organizations with remote workforces. It has a section describing the use of social media to spread disinformation. The report is a compilation of integrated data and actionable insights from across

Social Media in Violent Conflicts – Recent Examples

Maj Gen PK Mallick, VSM (Retd)

Introduction

Alan Rusbridger, the then editor-in-chief of the Guardian in his 2010 Andrew Olle Media Lecture, stated, “News organisations still break lots of news. But, increasingly, news happens first on Twitter. If you’re a regular Twitter user, even if you’re in the news business and have access to wires, the chances are that you’ll check out many rumours of breaking news on Twitter first. There are millions of human monitors out there who will pick up on the smallest things and who have the same instincts as the agencies—to be the first with the news. As more people join, the better it will get. ”

The most important and unique feature of social media and its role in future conflicts is the speed at which it can disseminate information to audiences and the audiences to provide feedback.

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The AP Interview: Karzai ‘invited’ Taliban to stop chaos

KATHY GANNON

In an Associated Press interview, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai offered some of the first insights into the secret and sudden departure of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani — and how he came to invite the Taliban into the city “to protect the population so that the country, the city doesn’t fall into chaos and the unwanted elements who would probably loot the country, loot shops.”

When Ghani left, his security officials also left. Defense minister Bismillah Khan even asked Karzai if he wanted to leave Kabul when Karzai contacted him to know what remnants of the government still remained. It turned out there were none. Not even the Kabul police chief had remained.

Karzai, who was the country’s president for 13 years after the Taliban were first ousted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, refused to leave.

In a wide-ranging interview at his tree-lined compound in the center of the city where he lives with his wife and young children, Karzai was adamant that Ghani’s flight scuttled a last-minute plan focused on the Taliban’s entry. He and Abdullah Abdullah, the government’s chief negotiator, had been working with the Taliban leadership in Doha on a negotiated agreement to allow the militia to enter the capital under controlled conditions.

Why China’s Advancements in Quantum Technology Worry Others

Ralph Jennings

China’s advances in quantum computing will give a new advantage to its armed forces, already the world’s third strongest, analysts say.

Quantum refers to a type of computing that lets high-powered machines make calculations that are too complex for ordinary devices.

The concept discovered by American physicist Richard Feynman in 1980 has two key military uses, the think tank International Institute for Strategic Studies said in a 2019 paper. It can decrypt encoded messages and send cryptographic keys that intercept otherwise secure communication chains, the study says.

“I think the challenge is basically in the dual civilian-military strategy of China where the government will enlist the private sector into its military modernization program,” said Alexander Vuving, professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, in Hawaii. “Also, the government of China spends a lot of money in research and development.”

Washington Is Preparing for the Wrong War With China

Hal Brands and Michael Beckley

The United States is getting serious about the threat of war with China. The U.S. Department of Defense has labeled China its primary adversary, civilian leaders have directed the military to develop credible plans to defend Taiwan, and President Joe Biden has strongly implied that the United States would not allow that island democracy to be conquered.

Yet Washington may be preparing for the wrong kind of war. Defense planners appear to believe that they can win a short conflict in the Taiwan Strait merely by blunting a Chinese invasion. Chinese leaders, for their part, seem to envision rapid, paralyzing strikes that break Taiwanese resistance and present the United States with a fait accompli. Both sides would prefer a splendid little war in the western Pacific, but that is not the sort of war they would get.

A war over Taiwan is likely to be long rather than short, regional rather than local, and much easier to start than to end. It would expand and escalate, as both countries look for paths to victory in a conflict neither side can afford to lose. It would also present severe dilemmas for peacemaking and high risks of going nuclear. If Washington doesn’t start preparing to wage, and then end, a protracted conflict now, it could face catastrophe once the shooting starts.

Great Protocol Politics The 21st century doesn’t belong to China, the United States, or Silicon Valley. It belongs to the internet.

Parag Khanna and Balaji S. Srinivasan

In a pair of recent essays, political scientist Ian Bremmer contends that Big Tech companies will reshape the global order, while FP columnist Stephen Walt’s friendly rejoinder is that states will remain predominant. We take a third view: Not only has technology already changed the global order, but it is also changing the nature of both companies and states themselves. The 21st century belongs not to China or the United States—nor to tech companies as traditionally understood. It belongs to the internet.

This is true for many reasons, of which perhaps the most important is the rise of decentralized protocols like Bitcoin and Ethereum that are controlled by neither states nor companies. To Bremmer’s credit, he does mention them, but he still underrates their importance. Many of the global technology firms’ weaknesses both he and Walt discuss—that they’re typically domiciled in the United States or China, that they rely on those jurisdictions for contract enforcement, that they don’t have a state’s political legitimacy, and that their exercise of power has already caused a global backlash—are addressed by the introduction of crypto protocols, which can safeguard property and execute contracts beyond the boundaries of traditional nation states.

China’s new military base in Africa: What it means for Europe and America

Michaël Tanchum

In one of Africa’s smallest countries, one of the largest shifts in China’s global strategy appears to be under way. Unnamed US officials are reported to have warned that Beijing plans to establish a permanent military installation in Equatorial Guinea. If true, beyond the obvious strategic challenges posed by China possessing a naval base on the Atlantic for the first time, the move signals a new phase in the country’s Africa policy. This holds far-reaching geopolitical implications.

Africa is the largest regional component of China’s $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to reconfigure the architecture of global commerce. The 46 African nations that have signed onto the BRI represent over 1 billion people and cover about 20 per cent of the Earth’s landmass. The consolidation of Chinese military power on the continent in the form of such new bases – combined with the expansion of Beijing’s already considerable economic influence – would shift global power dynamics, eroding US dominance, and relegating Europe to the sidelines of international affairs.

China’s big moment of choice on trade policy

Tom Westland

It’s twenty years this week since China was admitted to membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO). That presaged a remarkable surge in Chinese trade, an industrial transformation on a scale not seen before in human history, China’s emergence as the world’s largest trading nation and its integration into the global economy in a way that was hardly possible to imagine just two decades earlier. It’s little wonder that the WTO is among the most widely respected international institutions in China today.

China’s rapid growth since its accession to the WTO — per capita incomes are now well over four times as high today as they were in 2001 — was the single most important poverty-reducing event of the past century. China’s decision to join the WTO, and the stringent conditions it had to meet to be accepted, have been major drivers of the vast structural change away from subsistence agriculture, making China the undisputed factory of the world economy. Its rise as a manufacturing powerhouse has profoundly shaped the way the world economy operates, leading to soaring demand for raw materials, challenging manufacturing industries in other industrial countries, and leading to a major shift in the balance of geopolitical power away from the United States and Europe and towards Asia.

Xi's nuclear frenzy aimed at shielding China's expansionism

Brahma Chellaney

Far from seeking to hide its frenzied nuclear-weapons buildup, China is flaunting it, as if to underline that its rapidly growing arsenal is driven more by political than military considerations. The unprecedented speed and scale of the buildup appears to be linked to President Xi Jinping's international expansionism as China seeks global primacy by 2049, the centenary of communist rule.

China's neighbors need to pay close attention to this buildup, even though it seems primarily aimed at dissuading Washington from challenging China's actions at home and abroad.

Just as Xi's muscular revisionism has largely centered on Asia, from the East and South China Seas to the Himalayas, the security-related impacts, as opposed to the geopolitical implications, of the fast-growing Chinese nuclear armory are likely to be felt principally by Asian states.

Neighboring countries, from Japan and the Philippines to India and Bhutan, are already bearing the brunt of Xi's recidivist policies. But with a larger nuclear arsenal, Xi will be further emboldened to step up his conventional-military tactics and hybrid warfare from behind China's highly protective nuclear shield.

The U.S. Should Rethink Its Approach to Reviving the Iran Nuclear Deal

Sina Toossi

More than three years after former U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and almost a year after his successor, Joe Biden, took office seeking to revive it, the consequences of the U.S. withdrawal are becoming increasingly clear—and increasingly grim. Even in Israel, one of few countries that supported Trump’s approach to the Middle East, former senior security officials are widely rebuking his decision to renege on the accord. As Gadi Eisenkot, the former Israeli chief of staff, recently declared, the U.S. withdrawal from the deal “was a net negative for Israel: It released Iran from all restrictions, and brought its nuclear program to a much more advanced position.”

Some hawkish critics of Biden’s attempts to revive the deal accuse him of using an “all carrot, no sticks” approach to the currently stalled negotiations in Vienna. In fact, Biden has pursued a continuation of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, and the only carrots he is offering provide Iran the prospect—but not any certainty—of long-term benefits in exchange for rejoining a deal the U.S. already reneged on once. Iran is understandably reluctant to do so, but it might if it knows it will enjoy immediate economic benefits from reviving the deal, regardless of whether a future U.S. president abandons it again in 2025.

After the End of the ‘Pink Tide,’ What’s Next for South America?

It may not be a return of the “Pink Tide” of leftist governments that swept into power across South America in the early 2000s—and were largely swept out again amid a conservative backlash in the mid-2010s. But the region’s left has been showing signs of revival.

In Argentina’s October 2019 presidential election, the moderate-left Peronist candidate, Alberto Fernandez, ousted the market-friendly incumbent, Mauricio Macri, whose austerity measures and heavy borrowing triggered an economic crisis that cost him the presidency. Also in 2019, violent protests erupted in Colombia in September against mounting police brutality under law-and-order President Ivan Duque. And both Ecuador and Chile saw massive demonstrations that forced Ecuador’s government to backtrack on austerity measures and challenged Chile’s longstanding neoliberal economic model. More recently, in October 2020, Bolivia returned the Movement Toward Socialism to power in the first presidential election since Evo Morales was ousted.

The United States’ Industrial Strategy for the Battery Supply Chain

Nikos Tsafos

Key Points

The United States views the battery industry as a core pillar of economic competitiveness, decarbonization, and national security. Since it lags peers like Europe and China, the United States has articulated several elements of a strategy to catch up and ultimately lead in batteries.

The U.S. battery strategy rests on both demand- and supply-side measures, which could reshape the U.S. battery sector over the next decade.

The United States has no place-based elements in its battery strategy, but the intersection with the auto industry is clear. U.S. performance in batteries depends on how quickly the U.S. auto industry shifts to electrification and succeeds in deepening its supply chains with domestic manufacturing.

Vision

Outlined in the National Blueprint for Lithium Batteries (June 2021), the United States has three overarching aims for its battery industry: that it “supports long-term U.S. economic competitiveness and job creation, enables decarbonization goals, and meets national security requirements.”

US Leaders Pursue a Dangerously Simplistic Deterrence Policy Regarding Ukraine

Ted Galen Carpenter

One of the most dangerous conclusions that America’s political and policy elites took away from the West’s victory in the Cold War is that deterrence not only can work, but if applied with military strength and emphatic rhetorical resolve, it always will work. The current generation of U.S. foreign policy practitioners now appears determined to apply that simplistic “lesson” to Washington’s relations with both Russia and China. That attitude has already created alarming tensions with those two major powers, as the United States repeatedly adopts measures that intrude on their core security interests. If US policymakers don’t adopt a more restrained approach, the outcome could well be armed conflicts with nuclear implications. The current crisis between the United States and Russia regarding Ukraine is especially worrisome, and it is a textbook example of Washington’s warped perspective.

The members of America’s foreign policy establishment invariably assume that credible deterrence consists of two components. One is maintaining quantitative and qualitative US military superiority. If the United States deploys sufficient military assets to a theater to protect its own interests or those of an ally, the reasoning goes, a potential adversary will not challenge that force, knowing that such an effort would almost certainly fail — and do so with disastrous consequences for the “aggressor.” The other key element of credible deterrence, according to the conventional wisdom, is to make Washington’s determination to thwart aggression against itself or an ally emphatically clear, so that a challenging power understands that the US commitment is not a bluff, but is instead deadly serious.

America’s Cyber-Reckoning How to Fix a Failing Strategy

Sue Gordon and Eric Rosenbach

Adecade ago, the conventional wisdom held that the world was on the cusp of a new era of cyberconflict in which catastrophic computer-based attacks would wreak havoc on the physical world. News media warned of doomsday scenarios; officials in Washington publicly fretted about a “cyber–Pearl Harbor” that would take lives and destroy critical infrastructure. The most dire predictions, however, did not come to pass. The United States has not been struck by devastating cyberattacks with physical effects; it seems that even if U.S. adversaries wanted to carry out such assaults, traditional forms of deterrence would prevent them from acting.

Behind those mistaken warnings lay an assumption that the only alternative to cyberpeace must be cyberwar. But in the years since, it has become clear that like all realms of conflict, the domain of cyberspace is shaped not by a binary between war and peace but by a spectrum between those two poles—and most cyberattacks fall somewhere in that murky space. The obvious upside of this outcome is that the worst fears of death and destruction have not been realized. There is a downside, however: the complex nature of cyberconflict has made it more difficult for the United States to craft an effective cyberstrategy. And even if lives have not been lost and infrastructure has mostly been spared, it is hardly the case that cyberattacks have been harmless. U.S. adversaries have honed their cyber-skills to inflict damage on U.S. national security, the American economy, and, most worrisome of all, American democracy. Meanwhile, Washington has struggled to move past its initial perception of the problem, clinging to outmoded ideas that have limited its responses. The United States has also demonstrated an unwillingness to consistently confront its adversaries in the cyber-realm and has suffered from serious self-inflicted wounds that have left it in a poor position to advance its national interests in cyberspace.

Putin and Xi Show United Front Amid Rising Tensions With U.S.

Anton Troianovski and Steven Lee Myers

MOSCOW — President Biden may have his alliance of democracies, but as a video summit on Wednesday underscored, Russia and China still have each other.

President Xi Jinping of China, facing a diplomatic boycott of this winter’s Beijing Olympics from Mr. Biden and others, secured a public pledge from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that he would attend — the first national leader to R.S.V.P.

Mr. Putin, facing threats of crushing Western sanctions if Russian forces attack Ukraine, heard Mr. Xi propose that Russian and China cooperate to “more effectively safeguard the security interests of both parties.”

The videoconference between Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin on Wednesday — the 37th time the two men had met since 2013, according to Mr. Xi — was both a show of solidarity between two autocrats battling Western pressure and a display of the kind of mutually beneficial, increasingly tight partnership their two countries are building.

Japan’s Shinzo Abe warns China: Invasion of Taiwan would be ‘suicidal’

Joel Gehrke

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe warned China that an invasion of Taiwan would incur incalculable costs as the senior Japanese politician and U.S. officials spoke up for the island democracy’s autonomy.

“When there is a threat over Taiwan and its democracy, it is a dire challenge to all of us, especially to Japan,” said Abe, who resigned from the premiership over health reasons but remains a heavyweight among Japanese legislators. “An adventure in military affairs, if pursued by such a huge economy like China’s, could be suicidal, to say the least.”

Abe’s reference to the economic costs of a conflict did little to dull the edge of the threat, as he emphasized the need for both Taiwan and Japan to coordinate security cooperation with the United States — which does not maintain official relations with the government in Taipei. And yet, that diplomatic lacuna has prevented neither Japanese nor American officials of late from characterizing Taiwan as the linchpin of Indo-Pacific security in the face of a rising Chinese Communist power.

The Kremlin’s Logic of Threats and Strategic Ambiguity

Dumitru Minzarari

The December 7 video-conference between Presidents Joseph Biden of the United States and Vladimir Putin of Russia raised many questions, as both sides were scarce with details. The official read-outs of the meeting confirmed the previously voiced positions, leading many observers to conclude that the talks broke little new ground. Nevertheless, the separate statements by US and Russian officials, combined with extensive media coverage, have provided some helpful insights about the content of the talks as well as facilitated a better understanding of the rationale behind the recent Russian military buildup near Ukrainian borders (see EDM, December 8, 9).

These revelations suggest Moscow came to believe it can effectively instrumentalize the military threat to attract desired attention from the West along with diplomatic concessions on the Ukraine issue—however small they may seem—from the US but also the European Union. Having failed to directly pressure Ukraine, Russia’s strategy is now to apply that pressure indirectly, targeting fears in the US and the EU of a potential war in Europe (Carnegiemoscow.org, December 6; see EDM, December 8). The useful question to ask under these conditions is not whether or not Russia will invade Ukraine militarily but rather what actions are likely to reduce the probability of a Russian aggression, short of sacrificing Ukraine’s sovereignty? To answer this, it is necessary to delve more deeply into the Kremlin’s instrumentalization of the logic of threats (Carnegiemoscow.org, November 29), aimed at creating strategic ambiguity about Russia’s readiness to attack Ukraine.

This New AI Tool Can Help Spot an Imminent Invasion

PATRICK TUCKER

Just how many jets, cargo planes, and other military vehicles is Russia deploying to the border of Ukraine? Answering that sort of question is a labor-intensive project for analysts, requiring them to pore through satellite photos to find and classify specific objects. A new tool from data analysis firm Orbital Insight could change that.

The multi-class object detection algorithms can detect and classify a wide number of objects of relevance to the military, alerting analysts to events like buildups or unusual deployments anywhere that can be photographed by satellites. Orbital will announce the multi-class object detection algorithms today, part of the company’s GO platform.

Analysts “don't have enough time to look at all the targets. [They] focus on all the top-tier ones. But the idea [with the new tool] is to see what's also going on, in some of these second-tier and third-tier [ones] that may be really related,” Patrick Podejko, a geospatial analyst with Orbital Insight, said ahead of the public announcement. He estimated that the company tracks around 8,100 airfields worldwide, in addition to ports, testing facilities, and other locations.

Cyberattacks on our energy infrastructure: The need for a national response to a national security threat

Jeh Charles Johnson

On May 6 of this year, Colonial Pipeline was hit with a ransomware attack by the Russian-based group DarkSide. Reportedly, DarkSide attacked Colonial Pipeline’s billing system, not its operational technology. But as a precaution, for the first time in history, Colonial shut down its entire pipeline, which supplies 45 percent of all the gasoline and jet fuel consumed on the East Coast of the United States.

This shutdown had an immediate, direct, and far-reaching impact on the day-to-day lives of the American people. Shortages at gas stations popped up across Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina and Virginia. On May 11, 71 percent of gas stations in Charlotte, North Carolina ran out of fuel. On May 14, 87 percent of gas stations in Washington, DC went dry. Gas prices shot up. Panic buying and hoarding occurred. Airports and airlines were affected. Colonial Pipeline paid the $5 million ransom. The pipeline was tuned back on. But one ransomware attack, directed at one company, had far-reaching consequences to our nation, its people, and its national security.

The Republic of COVID-19

George Friedman

The emergence of the omicron variant drives home an essential point: There is no evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic will end. It might, but the possibility of the virus mutating means continual adjustments to or reinventions of vaccines, the potential resurrection of social distancing, including closed borders, and the transformation of culture. In many places in the United States, wearing masks in public used to be potentially criminal and always suspect. The virtuous now cloak their identity, and those who refuse to do so are seen as suspect by the law. The degree to which the battle against COVID-19 has changed our lives, the economy and social norms has been staggering. We lived in a world where travel between countries was seen as essential to global society. Now, those entering a foreign country are held suspect or banned.

As I have argued in the past, these measures save lives. But as I have also argued, there is a price to be paid for safety. Social distancing and a global economy are not completely incompatible, but over time they create sufficient friction in the system as to slow down or disrupt the movement of goods from one nation to another. The withdrawal of workers from the workforce has created a global shortage of labor and therefore of products. The absence of products such as fertilizers and medicines can be fatal. COVID-19 kills, but so potentially do the measures needed to limit it.

The European Union Owes Poland a Thank You

Elisabeth Braw

At the beginning of November, the situation at Belarus’s border with NATO and the European Union was dire. Belarusian authorities kept bringing migrants to the border, where some of the migrants—enticed by Belarusian forces—began attacking the Polish soldiers guarding it. Indeed, Belarusians themselves harassed Polish soldiers and tried to tear open Poland’s border fence. But a month later, migrants are flying home, and Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s subversive campaign is starting to flop. The rest of Europe should thank Poland and its fellow border defenders, Latvia and Lithuania, and learn a lesson from them.

It was a sheepish Lukashenko who addressed a group of migrants in Belarus at the end of last month: “If Germans and Poles won’t listen to me today, it’s not my fault,” he told them. “I will do whatever you want, even if it harms Poles and others. But you need to realize we can’t start a war to force a corridor through Poland to Germany.”

Gone was the swagger in May, when the Belarusian leader promised to flood the EU with drugs and migrants, and even from last month, when Lukashenko told the BBC that if migrants “keep coming from now on, I still won’t stop them because they’re not coming to my country. They’re going to yours.” The migrants, of course, were desperate to get to the EU and were deviously exploited by a ruler in need of a weapon. Not even the loss of some of the migrants’ lives prompted Lukashenko to abandon his campaign.

Defusing the Russia-Ukraine Crisis

RICHARD HAASS

NEW YORK – In recent months, Russia has positioned a large and capable military force along its border with Ukraine. What we do not know is why (capabilities are always easier to gauge than intentions), or even if Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided on a course of action. Thus far, he has created options, not outcomes.

What comes to mind is July 1990, when another autocrat, Saddam Hussein, positioned sizable military forces along Iraq’s southern border with Kuwait. Then, as now, intentions were murky but the imbalance of forces was obvious. Arab leaders told then-US President George H.W. Bush not to overreact, convinced it was a ploy to compel Kuwait to take steps to increase the price of oil, which would help Iraq recover and rearm after its long war with Iran.

By early August, though, what to many had looked like political theater had become all too real. Invasion led to conquest, and it took a massive international coalition led by the United States to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restore the country’s sovereignty.

The Supply Chain is the Perfect Asymmetric Target

ROBERT HANNIGAN

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Asked recently what risk he worried about most, alongside Taiwan and Ukraine, Cipher Brief Expert, General Stanley McChrystal said it was cyber security, particularly in the supply chain.

General McChrystal is part of a growing group of the most senior operational and strategic US commanders that include former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, in seeing the supply chain threat as existential. Unless the supply chain can be secured, the whole infrastructure on which Western economies rest, not to mention their military defences, will be compromised.

Two factors have brought the otherwise dry subject of supply chain security to the top of the political risk table. One has been the pandemic, in which we have become painfully aware of the fragility of supply chains and the over-dependence of Western countries on external providers, particularly in China. We have also realised how little we actually understand about our supply chains: which companies are in them, who owns them, who controls them and how they can be disrupted.

It’s Time to Stop Paying for a VPN

Brian X. Chen

I’m done with paying for a virtual private network, a service that claims to protect your privacy when you’re connected to a public Wi-Fi network at the local coffee shop, the airport or a hotel.

For more than a decade, security experts have recommended using a VPN to shield your internet traffic from bad actors who are trying to snoop on you. But just as tech gadgets become outdated over time, so does some tech advice.

The reality is that web security has improved so much in the last few years that VPN services, which charge monthly subscription fees that cost as much as Netflix, offer superfluous protection for most people concerned about privacy, some security researchers said.

Many of the most popular VPN services are now also less trustworthy than in the past because they have been bought by larger companies with shady track records. That’s a deal-breaker when it comes to using a VPN service, which intercepts our internet traffic. If you can’t trust a product that claims to protect your privacy, what good is it?

America’s Cyber-Reckoning How to Fix a Failing Strategy

Sue Gordon and Eric Rosenbach

Adecade ago, the conventional wisdom held that the world was on the cusp of a new era of cyberconflict in which catastrophic computer-based attacks would wreak havoc on the physical world. News media warned of doomsday scenarios; officials in Washington publicly fretted about a “cyber–Pearl Harbor” that would take lives and destroy critical infrastructure. The most dire predictions, however, did not come to pass. The United States has not been struck by devastating cyberattacks with physical effects; it seems that even if U.S. adversaries wanted to carry out such assaults, traditional forms of deterrence would prevent them from acting.

Behind those mistaken warnings lay an assumption that the only alternative to cyberpeace must be cyberwar. But in the years since, it has become clear that like all realms of conflict, the domain of cyberspace is shaped not by a binary between war and peace but by a spectrum between those two poles—and most cyberattacks fall somewhere in that murky space. The obvious upside of this outcome is that the worst fears of death and destruction have not been realized. There is a downside, however: the complex nature of cyberconflict has made it more difficult for the United States to craft an effective cyberstrategy. And even if lives have not been lost and infrastructure has mostly been spared, it is hardly the case that cyberattacks have been harmless. U.S. adversaries have honed their cyber-skills to inflict damage on U.S. national security, the American economy, and, most worrisome of all, American democracy. Meanwhile, Washington has struggled to move past its initial perception of the problem, clinging to outmoded ideas that have limited its responses. The United States has also demonstrated an unwillingness to consistently confront its adversaries in the cyber-realm and has suffered from serious self-inflicted wounds that have left it in a poor position to advance its national interests in cyberspace.

The Human Rights Risks and Opportunities in Blockchain

Blockchain technology has been proposed as a potential answer to a variety of human rights challenges, from ease of access to voting and identity-based service delivery to land rights protections and supply chain traceability. As this report reveals, however, blockchain alone is almost never sufficient to address the complex set of factors that lead to human rights risks. While the technology provides new opportunities for groups working to address human rights challenges, groups working to deploy blockchain-based solutions must ensure that these projects do not exacerbate underlying risk factors or distract from initiatives that would more directly address fundamental obstacles to progress.

This report considers the human rights opportunities, risks, and challenges associated with the adoption of blockchain solutions in four prominent use cases—supply chain transparency, voting, digital identity, and land rights management. The report summarizes the advantages and risks of blockchain technologies and details the human rights challenges in each area that cannot be solved by blockchain alone. The analysis closes with recommendations for companies to help ensure that the blockchain products and services they develop and deploy will help to strengthen human rights around the world.

How cyber gray zone conflict can shape conventional war

Lauren C. Williams

As gray zone conflict becomes the norm, especially with cyber, the intelligence community may have to make some changes to adapt.

Michael Vickers, the former undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said modernizing for conflict in the gray zone, or below the level of war, means re-prioritizing and retargeting both existing and planned capabilities.

“I would argue that it requires change in our intelligence structure across the spectrum beginning with priorities: how much do we assign collection assets and analytical assets to this problem rather than other problems,” Vickers said during a Dec. 13 Center for Strategic and International Studies event on modernizing intelligence for the gray zone.

“We tend to put more emphasis on the military capabilities of our major adversaries or strategic intentions of their leadership, and obviously the intentions [spill] over into this area,” he said.

Vickers, who is now on the board of directors for BAE Systems, said gray zone conflict often blurs the lines between war and peace, with intensity of conflict swelling and fading over an extended period of time. But its persistence can often shape what conventional or open conflict to come, which he called the covert preparation for warfare.

How cyber gray zone conflict can shape conventional war

Lauren C. Williams

As gray zone conflict becomes the norm, especially with cyber, the intelligence community may have to make some changes to adapt.

Michael Vickers, the former undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said modernizing for conflict in the gray zone, or below the level of war, means re-prioritizing and retargeting both existing and planned capabilities.

“I would argue that it requires change in our intelligence structure across the spectrum beginning with priorities: how much do we assign collection assets and analytical assets to this problem rather than other problems,” Vickers said during a Dec. 13 Center for Strategic and International Studies event on modernizing intelligence for the gray zone.

“We tend to put more emphasis on the military capabilities of our major adversaries or strategic intentions of their leadership, and obviously the intentions [spill] over into this area,” he said.

Army Bring-Your-Own-Device Experiments Test New Security Concepts

PATRICK TUCKER

Some U.S. soldiers and National Guardsmen will be allowed to carry their own cellphones and other devices on missions next year, under an expanded Army pilot program that seeks to understand the risks of bringing some commercial technologies onto the battlefield.

“We did an initial pilot in the fall, very very promising reports came out of that,” Lt. Gen. John B. Morrison, Jr., the Army’s deputy chief of staff, G-6, told reporters on Tuesday.

Officials said that the National Guard in particular would benefit from a bring-your-own-device program.

“The National Guard has had the largest deployment since World War II. And for a lot of the soldiers that were mobilized, it is very helpful to have a capability on their personal devices when they are deployed from their full-time jobs,” said Kenneth C. McNeill, the National Guard Bureau’s chief information officer.

NPS Gains Access to Joint Information Operations Range

The Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) has added a new capability to the university’s technological toolbelt with a node connecting NPS to the Joint Information Operations Range (JIOR). This advanced capability provides NPS faculty and students with access to a globally-distributed, closed-loop, live-fire cyber range complex that integrates users and capability providers to enable classified training, testing and experimentation.

The node and installation were supported by the Joint Staff J7, recognizing the critical role of NPS in bringing together DOD and industry partners for collaboration on key defense-related areas.

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Michael Senft, a military faculty lecturer in the NPS Department of Computer Science, worked diligently with the Joint Staff J7 and multiple stakeholders across NPS to bring the JIOR node installation to fruition despite challenges created by the current COVID environment. The JIOR is a closed-loop, scalable and transportable network providing a secure and accredited training and test environment. This capability provides students and faculty researchers access to both persistent and ephemeral training and testing event environments.

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