Alessandra Nisch
Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of ...

President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.

Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of Applied Friction

Cyberspace

Re-Envisioning the Cyber Domain for Deterrence

Re-Envisioning the Cyber Domain for Deterrence

By adjusting our paradigm for understanding the threats and opportunities in cyberspace, the United States can incrementally build cyber deterrence to shift the balance toward stability. States will still develop and exploit vulnerabilities. However, the proliferation of simple cyber tools for criminal usage can be defeated through increased resiliency. Improved capability and a demonstrated willingness to respond will encourage states to limit offensive cyber to espionage, saving cyber-attacks for the onset of hostilities where attribution is no longer a concern. Reshaping our national cyber defense organization by creating a cyber reserve force, implemented in a flatter, horizontal organization than typically found in government, can disseminate defensive and responsive cyber capabilities against U.S. adversaries.

The Strategic Competition to Shape Cyberspace

The Strategic Competition to Shape Cyberspace

The U.S. strategy to positively shape the international community to favor a democratic and accessible Internet requires a sustained, long-term commitment. Practiced behaviors, precedents, dialogue, and agreements will set expectations and reinforce norms over time. Washington must use a comprehensive, whole-of-government effort using various approaches and options to shift the environment away from China and Russia’s repressive vision of cyberspace. Authoritarian regimes will continue to push for norms and governance structure in cyberspace, favoring an illiberal model that threatens the U.S. vision of a free and open domain. The United States can take an active role in countering this authoritarian vision.

Remind Me Again...What Were We Deterring? Cyber Strategy and Why the United States Needed a Paradigm Shift

Remind Me Again...What Were We Deterring? Cyber Strategy and Why the United States Needed a Paradigm Shift

Persistent engagement is a strategic paradigm for cyberspace born out of failure. Deterrence theory proved neither flexible enough nor well adapted to the domain. A new domain called for a new strategy. Rather than prevent cyber-attacks by convincing the attacker the cost is not worth the risk, persistent engagement seeks to prevent cyber-attacks by disabling the attacker’s capacity preemptively. There are fears around the precedents that persistent engagement sets and how those norms may one day be quite damaging. However, these concerns miss the broader nature of the environment and the already emerging norms that called for a response. To be fair, open questions remain. How the role of national sovereignty in cyberspace continues to develop could drastically alter the evolution of persistent engagement. Nonetheless, persistent engagement is a much sounder starting point for American cyber strategy than deterrence.

#Reviewing Bitskrieg

#Reviewing Bitskrieg

In Bitskrieg, John Arquilla distills much from his three decades of advocacy about networked warfare into a compact volume accessible to a wide audience. He displays a continuing ability to produce provocative arguments and engaging books. The tenets of Bitskrieg are consistent with many of Arquilla’s previous writings. These include the point that networked warfare or netwar encompasses cyber conflict but extends beyond it.

#Reviewing The Hype Machine

#Reviewing The Hype Machine

Aral’s seminal book provides two fundamental arguments: first, social media promised and still promises economic, political, and social uplift for people; it can also cause perils, such as external election influence, financial manipulation, privacy issues, spreading of fake news, and so forth. The author also argues that left unchecked, social media can bring disharmony and destruction to a country's economic, political, and social structures. Therefore, he opines that to fully utilise the potential of social media platforms and avoid their drawbacks, there needs to be a rigorous scientific understanding of social media and knowledge of its nuances to eradicate the unscientific hysteria around social media.

Cyberspace is an Analogy, Not a Domain: Rethinking Domains and Layers of Warfare for the Information Age

Cyberspace is an Analogy, Not a Domain: Rethinking Domains and Layers of Warfare for the Information Age

The buzzwordification of the term domain has long passed the point of diminishing returns, and nowhere is that a greater hazard than with cyber operations. It’s time to re-think cyber to reflect the realities of modern war, and with it the broader lexicon of what constitutes domains and layers of warfare.

The Revenge of Geography in Cyberspace

The Revenge of Geography in Cyberspace

As they have since antiquity, geopolitical factors will continue to shape and constrain world affairs in our digital age. Emerging technologies will only up the ante—as underscored by global debates on Huawei’s involvement in the roll-out of 5G, and China-US trade disputes over data localization. Applying a geopolitical lens to events like these will be an essential first step to crafting good strategy to respond.

#Reviewing 21st Century Power: Strategic Superiority for the Modern Era

#Reviewing 21st Century Power: Strategic Superiority for the Modern Era

The adversaries of today are still human, and the threats of today may not be so conceptually different from those of the Cold War. By looking back at how a previous generation of strategists considered and communicated their strategic challenges in context, we may be able to gain insights into how to address these modern threats. 21st Century Power: Strategic Superiority for the Modern Era is a useful resource toward that end.

Multi-Domain Confusion: All Domains Are Not Created Equal

Multi-Domain Confusion: All Domains Are Not Created Equal

Over the past two decades the use of the word domain has attained wide acceptance in the military lexicon. Vague when described in doctrine, it exerts a strong influence by establishing the most basic boundaries of military functional identities. Despite the unquestioned usage of domain-centric terminology, the exact meaning of domain remains largely undefined without consideration of etymological origins. However, the word contains some built-in assumptions regarding how we view warfare that can limit our thinking. An ambiguous categorization of separate operating domains in warfare could actually pose an intractable conceptual threat to an integrated joint force, which is ironically the stated purpose of multi-domain battle.

#Reviewing Cyberspace in Peace and War

#Reviewing Cyberspace in Peace and War

While there have been many valuable contributions to our understanding of the digital realm from the social sciences, it has been a struggle on all fronts to transform those theoretical and empirical observations into cohesive, strategic and policy recommendations. Cyberspace in Peace and War is a huge stride in the right direction. Anyone interested in cyber security should have a copy of in their library, and going forward it should be regularly cited and referred to.