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Is there a Cyber Cold War?
Iran discovered the Stuxnet worm, removed it, studied it, and vowed to launch their own military cyberunit. Brig. Gen Gholmreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization, said the Iranian military was prepared “to fight our enemies” in “Cyberspace and Internet warfare.” This raises a bunch of interesting questions about the future of warfare, internet governance and state sovereignty, and the dangers of cyberweapons for the weapons.
The new use of cybertechonology marks a new direction for war and national security. Sanger writes:
Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade.
This comparison is apt for a number of reasons: one, because Nagasaki and Hiroshima marked the beginning of a nuclear arms race that defined foreign and defense policy; two, because the nuclear arms race led to a number of non-proliferation treaties that aimed to diminish the threat of mutually assured destruction; three, because drones, special ops and cyberweapons have come to define the new, discrete Obama Doctrine, which emphasizes small-scale, covert actions.
But it might be a mistake trying to draw an exact historic parallel to what is happening today to drone attacks, cyberwarfare and counterinsurgency measures. "The new rhythms of online crime, spying and staecraft are unfamiliar," writes the Brookings Institute's Noah Shachtman. "So, perhaps not surprising, they’re turning to an old parallel that they spent most of their professional lives working on: the Cold War." And this could be a mistake.
But policy makers and journalists alike have been buzzing like flies around the Cold War analogy. Indeed, the Defense Department’s cyber strategy has been one of "equivalence," which essentially argues that "harmful action within the cyber domain can be met with parallel response in another domain." Shactman contends that this is another iteration of "the old 1960s deterrence doctrine of 'flexible response,' where a conventional attack might be met with either a conventional and/or nuclear response."
Does this historical analogy hold up? Shachtman argues that the threats of cyberwarfare can hardly be compared to the Dr. Strangelove scenarios of the Cold War. Consider a fundamental difference: "Cyberspace is a man-made domain of technological commerce and communication, not a geographical chessboard of competing alliances." There were two primary superpowers fighting the Cold War, outlining ideological policies that had serious practical implications. As Shactman says importantly, "the Internet isn't a network of governments, but the digital activities of 2 billion users." This is all to say that the actors in cyberwar would be difficult to identify and culpability would be difficult to place.
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