Cyber@War
For this project, the behavior of concern will be cyberwar. The difficulties of defining cyberspace notwithstanding, cyberwar is legally, politically, and socially complex. War might be ancient, but cyberwar is not. This disconnection creates difficulties for scholars, lawyers, diplomats, soldiers and civilians.[1. Brenner, Susan. 2009. Cyberthreats: The Emerging Fault Lines of the Nation State. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, p. 65.] Cyberwar is simultaneously an action, an idea, a motivation, material and nonmaterial. It stands to challenge centuries old law, uproot established practice, and alter global processes, at a speed we have yet to fathom. The development of a framework to understand cyberwar, I am required to define its root: war.
War is an artifact of law and politics. The international laws governing war have been constructed over time by the processes of state practices and philosophical development. As a consequence, war is unambiguous, and the state has been codified as the sole arbiter of warfare. Additionally, leaving legal precedent aside, states are the only actors with the capacity to harness the resources needed to conduct war. The components of war are well defined: militaries, material resources, state(s) v. state(s), territorial boundaries, uniform attribution of the combatants. There are four crucial elements required for a war to be a war: 1) at least two states must be in contention; 2) states must utilize armed force in this “contention;” 3) the states’ goal is to overpower the other; and 4) the contestant states have symmetrical goals.[2. Dinstein 2005, p. 4-5.] Providing the four crucial elements, I understand war as a conflict between at least two opposing states requiring the use of force by easily attributable combatant forces.
Unlike war, cyberwar is more difficult to define. Also, according to the CRS, cyberwar is defined as war waged in cyberspace, and it includes “defending information and computer networks, deterring information attacks, as well as denying an adversary’s ability to do the same,” and additionally, it includes “offensive information operations mounted against an adversary, or even dominating information on the battlefield.”[3. In Hildreth, Steven A. 2001. Cyberwarfare. Congressional Research Service, p. 1, available at http://fas.org/irp/crs/RL30735.pdf.] Built into this analysis is the expressed understanding that it is produced by and for the state.
Government and policy circles describe cyberwar with vague notions about the malicious use of information and communications technology either as a target or tool by a wide range of malevolent actors. Most definitions in Washington, DC are borrowing the rhetoric from military operations protocol and place cyber front of war or warfare. From a theoretical perspective, this essentially argues that cyberwar is ‘war waged in cyberspace,’ and that is problematic. If cyberwar is “war waged in cyberspace” and the actors can be either states or individuals, that are we saying that individuals are capable of engaging states as equals war? That definition does, therefore, lend itself toward false logic.
I am arguing that more theorizing on man, the state, war, and now cyberspace is required before cementing an operational or misconstrued theoretical delineation of what cyberwar means. It is concerning that states are gearing up for cyberwar without knowing what it means, against whom, and for what purpose. The time of cyberwar’s emergence was so short that state practice, scholarly discourse, policy development, and international institutions were unable to maintain an equal pace. In terms of norms development, cyberwar, cyberthreats, and cybersecurity would necessitate a nuanced, legally entrenched, historically salient law of war and norms on the use of force (cyberforce? iForce?), but this would have to occur in a far more condensed, if not immediate, timeframe. Still absent is a clear, unique definition of cyberwar. IR scholars have refrained from addressing this discrepancy, or maybe they have failed to see that it even exists at all. The development of a definition requires broader theoretical basis from which to operate. For the remainder of this paper, I initiate a discussion towards the development of a comprehensive, yet fungible framework to understand cyberwar.
According to my definition, the space of cyberspace has no physical existence beyond the computers on which it resides, but this alone does not deny the dimension of cyberspace as being real. It is a world of information, a collection of behaviors, and social intercourse, which has real consequences and a real existence.[4. Zekos, Georgios I. 2005. State Cyberspace Jurisdiction and Personal Cyberspace Jurisdiction. International Journal of Law and Information Technology, 15(1), p. 2.] The emergence of “war in cyberspace” will have far-reaching and profound effects on physical war and the state. Cyberwar will become a matter of non-space bounded perceptions, as war once was a matter of securing defined territory.
Cyberspace has eroded erode the state’s monopolization of violence (war) by leveling the playing field between the state and other actors.[5. Brenner 2009, p. 70.] The rise of cyberwar has meant a challenge to state legitimacy. A challenge that has now become a 24/7 experience, and this phenomenon blurs conventional distinctions of jurisdiction, national/transnational/international and has altered the parameters of state action.[6. Dartnell, Michael Y. (2006). Insurgency Online: Web Activism and Global Conflict. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 96.]
Scholars[7. Tilly and Weber] have made the assumption that states maintain internal and external order by deploying the methods of legitimate violence to which only the state is privy. In achieving a monopoly on the use of force, states successfully create a sovereign internal space in which the affiliated population can enjoy security. Threats to that security from either the domestic space or from the external international realm are categorized as either internal or external. The state utilizes this categorization to determine the appropriate state apparatus to secure the threat. For example, a majority of violent crime occurs internally, so to secure order it will deploy its domestic policing machinery. In instances of terrorism where the perpetrators cross the internal/external threshold of the state, then it would most likely exert a coordinated effort across bureaucratic jurisdictions to reaffirm legitimacy. War occurs between two or more states in an effort to maintain legitimacy over a particular territory against an external threat (or state).
By affixing cyber at the beginning of the prior examples of violence—crime, terrorism, and war—what becomes readily apparent is that cyberspace increases the complexity of cross-jurisdictional investigative challenges. It has been argued that:
Cyberspace undermines the empirical assumptions that shaped the [internal/external dichotomy threat categorizations; it is becoming evident that attackers use of cyberspace can erode distinctions among the threat categories.[8. Brenner 2009, p. 99.]
The internal/external dichotomy governs statehood and influences how/when war occurs, and are requisite physical demarcations that enable states to establish and then maintain legitimacy.
Legitimacy might be increasingly difficult for states maintain. Cybernetworks are infinitely adaptable having no center and no geographic boundary making them more powerful than any group, institution, or government, and adapt rapidly.[9. see Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. I] In cyberwar, the state’s cumbersome, inefficient bureaucracy is being out-paced and out-innovated by cybercombatants This is causing a direct order challenge of the states ability to maintain legitimacy. Since cyberwarfare grants both states and individuals equal ability to engage in cyberwar, I must problematize Charles Tilly’s famous dictum, “war makes states,”[10. Tilly, Charles. 1985. War-Making and State-Making as Organized Crime in Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol eds. Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press: 169-191, p. 170.] by asking, “what does cyberwar make?”
Category: Cybertheory
