Governance

The military not only plans for operations, it also plans to plan. Yet there is no current plan or process in place to integrate cyber initiatives into campaign planning. The US government must determine how to integrate offensive and defensive cybercapabilities into campaign planning in order to leverage these capabilities and pair them with the military’s broad array of tools.

Recent years have seen growing concern over the use of cyber attacks in wartime, but little evidence that these new tools of coercion can change battlefield events. We present the first quantitative analysis of the relationship between cyber activities and physical violence during war. Using new event data from the armed conflict in Ukraine—and additional data from Syria’s civil war—we analyze the dynamics of cyber attacks and find that such activities have had little or no impact on fighting.

"...[A]ctors that employ gray tactics in cyber operations need not be successful in actually infiltrating a system to further their revisionist ambitions. Rather, the sheer ramifications from the cyber action itself, has the power to disturb a nation's psyche and challenge the geopolitical status quo."