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 summarise 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.
What say you?
Yeah, cyber war is definitely not bigger than, say the great leap in battlefield intelligence brought by satellites, and all sort of sophisticated sensors. Still I feel a bitof negligence in this article.
You know armoured, steam warships was also seen as expensive dreams of the future until the American Civil War.
Does Cyber require its own strategies?
It seems to me that the biggest strategic impact of Cyber warfare is that: there is no such thing as geographical isolation.
China could target Portugal and New Zealand for Cyber espionage as easily as India or South Korea.
And I could see that driving collective/common/Federal provision of Cyber security/defence in balkanised regions, e.g. the EU.
Another thought, traditional warfare is zero-sum: I take the land away from you; you don’t have it any more.
Perhaps even negative sum: I burn down half the towns in the process; there are fewer houses in total than before.
Cyber warfare can be positive sum: I steal your trade secrets, now we both have them. Of course, this does cost the target nation in lost trade, and this also discourages R&D, so its side effects are negative.
Nations wage war to benefit themselves, the harm to their neighbour is almost always a side effect, rather than the objective. (?)
Cyber allows state-vs-state action to benefit self without directly taking away from the other. The target is likely to take a while to notice that it has lost its monopoly on a given piece of IP.
By which I mean: copyright theft happens all the time anyway, but Cyber now allows it to happen within (confidential) bidding cycles, which is probably too fast for the target to notice it.
All the other global customers of that IP are likely to be pleased by this, so instant allies?
In summary:
sure, if you look at war as “taking land”, and then seeing how Cyber can help, then Cyber looks very secondary. But if you look at war as “taking valuable stuff”, then Cyber is a method that bypasses geography, and cost the target less than it gives the aggressor, which is jolly interesting.
I thought the era of Grand Strategies was behind us and we emerged from the long dark teatime of delusions wiser for the experience, if shaken (but not stirred).
Anyway, I agree that “cyber war” (I’m taking popular US/UK meaning of the term) doesn’t and cannot have a strategy worth the title in anything but corporate and/or political meaning (duration: 6 – 12 months).
If (or is that when?) “cyber experts” decide to leave the safety of the echo chamber and take stock of what the rest of the world is doing they may notice that there already are good works for “new domain” in warfare. One of them is titled War 2.0.
But no, no grand strategy is possible until there’s significant changes in the social and political environment; after all, that is just as much part of the ‘cyber’ domain as technology.