Название: Understanding Cyber-Warfare: Politics, Policy and Strategy, 2nd Edition
Автор: Christopher Whyte, Brian M. Mazanec
Издательство: Routledge
Год: 2023
Страниц: 365
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.2 MB

This textbook offers an accessible introduction to the historical, technical, and strategic context of global cyber conflict. The second edition has been revised and updated throughout, with three new chapters.

Cyber warfare involves issues of doctrine, strategy, policy, international relations (IR) and operational practice associated with computer network attack, computer network exploitation and computer network defense. However, it is conducted within complex sociopolitical settings alongside related forms of digital contestation. This book provides students with a comprehensive perspective on the technical, strategic and policy issues associated with cyber conflict, as well as an introduction to key state and non-state actors.

Specifically, the book provides a comprehensive overview of several key issue areas:

The historical context of the emergence and evolution of cyber warfare, including the basic characteristics and methods of computer network attack, exploitation and defense;
An interdisciplinary set of theoretical perspectives on conflict in the digital age from the point of view of the fields of IR, security studies, psychology and science, technology and society (STS) studies;
Current national perspectives, policies, doctrines and strategies relevant to cyber warfare;
An examination of key challenges in international law, norm development and deterrence; and
The role of emerging information technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing in shaping the dynamics of global cyber conflict.

Cyber confict is an expanding and crosscutting area of concern in world afairs, as relevant to those working in advanced technology or the military as it is to diplomats, journalists and consumers of everything from electricity to soap. At the time we set about the task of imagining what a book that efectively framed cyber confict might look like, there was precious little in the way of cohesive discussion of the diverse issues we cover in this book. Education on cybersecurity in international afairs made use of scattered articles, policy reports and media commentary to build engagement with everything from the history of the Internet to the contours of global cybercrime.

This second edition of Understanding Cyber-Warfare represents an efort to address major evolutions in thought and circumstance along four lines. First and most broadly, we seek to refect the ever- diversifying and ever-intensifying global cyber confict. In addition to new focus on the contours and implications of attacks that have transpired since the frst edition was published, we have substantially revamped one of the core chapters of this book that previously engaged in qualitative overview of a handful of major incidents. Now, in Chapter 7, we present empirical information on broader confict trends using a set of emergent data resources, including the 2.0 version of the Dyadic Cyber Incidents and Disputes (DCID) dataset. We also substantially enhance our conversation about cyber operations as just one element of the broader global information environment.

Our renewed focus on the information environment, consisting of a new chapter entitled “Shape: subvert, deceive, poison” and numerous smaller updates, corrects for an overuse of the cyberspace domain concept as an organizing principle that is all too common in Western writing about digital issues. In these new sections, we engage arguments about strategic culture and the social construction of technology to contextualize the development of the domain concept and place it amidst alternative perspectives that have policy and strategic signifcance in the 21st century.

The second set of updates we provide in this second edition refects topical advances in research and practice across several core national security thematic areas, which we now outline more clearly in our discussion of cyberspace in the context of the IR feld in Chapter 3. Specifcally, in this edition, we now survey and contextualize a large array of developments in strategic thought on cyber deterrence, coercion, repression and subversion. Over the past several years, an immense body of scholarship has advanced theory and provided evidence regarding the potential for successful deterrence of cyber aggression.

While those who teach about cyber confict often characterize the phenomenon by addressing the techno-institutional context of the Internet’s rise, it is increasingly clear that other forthcoming revolutionary information technologies will shape and – perhaps – change the nature of digital warfare. A third set of updates provided in this edition of UCW involves detailed discussions of several such technologies, particularly Artifcial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning, quantum computing, blockchain ledger technology and 5G wireless standards. Far from simply adding these discussions as an addendum, however, we view the imperative of addressing new ICT as an opportunity to talk about the future of cyber confict in a more detailed fashion than that exists in other publications (at the time of writing). As part of the book’s reorganization, we have built two concluding chapters that split these prospective developments into two categories – technologies that (1) may change the logics of cyber confict established in the foregoing sections of the book, such as AI, and those that (2) may transform the nature of digital confict by way of altering or supplanting global Internet architecture, such as blockchain ledger technology or quantum computing. In our thinking, this approach presents learners with the best possible framework for applying new information about technological advances to what we know about the contemporary landscape of cyber confict.

This textbook will be essential reading for students of cybersecurity/cyber conflict and information warfare, and highly recommended for students of intelligence studies, security and strategic studies, defense policy, and IR in general.