Four Horsemen of AI–Cybered Conflict, Great Power Competition, and the Cyber Operational Resilience Alliance (CORA)

About

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).

Bio

With engineering, economics, and comparative complex organization theory/political science degrees, Dr. Chris C. Demchak is the US Naval War College’s Grace M. Hopper Chair of Cyber Security and Senior Cyber Scholar, Cyber and Innovation Policy Institute (CIPI) – formerly co-founder and director of Center for Cyber Conflict Studies (C3S). Her research and many publications address global cyberspace as a globally shared, complex, insecure ‘substrate’ penetrating throughout the critical organizations of digitized societies, creating ‘cybered conflict’, and resulting in a rising ‘Cyber Westphalia’ of sovereign competitive complex socio-technical-economic systems (STESs).  Looking beyond Great Power Competition, Demchak takes a systemic approach to emergent structures, comparative institutional evolution, adversary/defensive systemic cybered tools, virtual gaming for operationalized organizational learning, and designing systemic resilience against surprises that disrupt or disable largescale systems.  Having studied LISP programming - as well as serving as a military officer, she has taught international security studies and management, comparative organization theory, enterprise information systems, and cybersecurity for international/ national security issues. Recent works include Designing Resilience (2010 co-edit); Wars of Disruption and Resilience (2011); and two in-progress manuscripts: Cyber Westphalia: Redrawing International Economics, Conflict, and Global Structures, and Cyber Command: Understanding Varying Models as National Cyber Defense Experiments.