The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”
With the shoddy creation of the global cyberspace infrastructure two decades ago, a new form of intergroup struggle —'cybered conflict’— has emerged massively enriching bad actors across the world through five novel offense advantages. The resulting enormous transfers of wealth has enabled China in particular to amass resources to ensure increasingly dominant economic, demographic, and technological power. As AI-related cyber technologies rise in criticality for the future economic and political wellbeing of nations, China now has a growing ‘great power’ advantage in three of the four ‘horsemen’ of AI conflict (scale, foreknowledge, and strategic coherence), leaving only a fourth (speed) to the fractious and disunited western democratic civil societies. To systemically counter the four AI advantages accruing to China in the rising competition among great powers, democratic civil societies need a new narrative framing their global future as minority states in terms that ensure long term wellbeing and survival. Equally as important, they also need a novel but practical organizational architecture with which to implement that vision – the cyber operational resilience alliance (CORA).