Paper Review Cyberwar as a Confidence Game Martin C. Libicki http://www.au.af.mil/au/ssq/2011/spring/libicki.pdf
Here's the last line, which sums it up nicely: """ Building up our offensive capabilities is a confidence game. It says to those who would compete in our league: are you confident enough in your cyberwar skills that you can build your military to rely on information systems and the machines that take their orders? """ One thing missing from this paper is any evidence that this kind of logic (aka, Fear Uncertainty and Doubt in military information systems as applied to network centric warfare) has any real-world effect. Militaries (including our own) simply don't take these things into account when deploying new systems. But the main anomaly in the paper is simple: He treats Stuxnet as an aberration, rather than the tip of the iceberg that finally made the newspapers. And this leads him (and most other strategic analysts) to conclude that hacking does not have real world effects. I have to assume this is the WWII legacy of Enigma - where in order to take advantage of intelligence you had to go out and order your sub killers to go sink a boat. But just because hacking is tied to intelligence bodies in most countries, and staffed with people who look and act a lot like intelligence officers, does not make it the same thing. Hacking is as kinetic as a cruise missile when you do it right. -dave (This is a first in a series of posts where-in we all get to review the Strategic Studies Quarterly's Spring Cyber-War papers - http://www.au.af.mil/au/ssq/ ). _______________________________________________ Dailydave mailing list [email protected] https://lists.immunityinc.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave
