A Fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute projects what might happen in a cyber war with China.
As Iran's nuclear plant attack and Chinese-based hackers attacking Morgan Stanley demonstrate how the Internet can wreak havoc on business and governments, a new paper by a fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy hypothesizes what an all-out cyberwar between the U.S. and China might look like.
Cyberwar defense team
To date, the cyberattacks in East Asia have been relatively benign, said Christopher Bronk, author of "Blown to Bits: China's War in Cyberspace, August–September 2020," published this month in the U.S. Air Force journal Strategic Studies Quarterly. Bronk is a fellow in information technology policy at the Baker Institute and a former U.S. State Department diplomat.
Strategic theorists frequently lament that military planners are very effective at preparing for the last war, not the next one. Planners today must cope with what conflict may look like in a new domain: cyberspace, the virtual and physical components of the global information infrastructure, what we may think of as a pre-noƶsphere.
Bronk’s article projects a scenario of what a mostly, but not entirely, cyber conflict in East and Southeast Asia might look like in roughly a decade. One must hope the world’s powers have learned that large-scale conventional war is an unfruitful undertaking that will disrupt our globalized international system in a manner where all lose. Of course, many of Europe’s leaders believed a century ago that the menace of large-scale conventional war largely had become history
"Web pages are defaced, allegations of espionage are leveled and, generally, a status quo of sorts is maintained. The threat politics of the cyberdomain, however, do not stand still," Bronk said. "China has been deeply impressed by U.S. information dominance since the 1991 Gulf War.
China has produced a considerable literature of strategic studies for cyberoperations while developing a national firewall system that shields the country from a considerable portion of Web content.
"The United States, too, has made strategic moves in cyberspace and is in the process of building a Department of Defense cybercommand that will manage the efforts of thousands of civilian and military 'cyberwarriors,'" Bronk said.
With an increasing number of countries around the globe developing military cybercapabilities, Bronk chose to consider how a conflict with major cybercomponents might appear. "Basically, many in the information-security community have been saying either, 'We're in a cyberwar with China' or 'It's time to prepare for a cyberwar with China.' The points I'm trying to make are, first, that cyberwar is not a substitute for real warfare but instead may be a component of conventional or unconventional military action, and second, that there's a great deal of very conventional thinking on this very unconventional topic."
To read the complete paper and the fictitious scenario, visit www.au.af.mil/au/ssq/2011/spring/bronk.pdf.
Contacts and sources:
Rice University
More on Christopher Bronk:
Bronk previously served as a career diplomat with the Department of State on assignments both overseas and in Washington. His last assignment was in the Office of eDiplomacy, the department's internal think tank on information technology, knowledge management, computer security and interagency collaboration. He also has experience in political affairs, counternarcotics, immigration and U.S.-Mexico border issues. Since arriving at Rice, Bronk has studied a number of areas, including information security, technology for immigration management, broadband policy, Web 2.0 governance and the militarization of cyberspace. He teaches classes on the intersection of computing and politics in Rice's George R. Brown School of Engineering.
Bronk has provided commentary for a variety of news outlets, including ABC, NPR, the BBC and the Houston Chronicle.
Bronk has a Ph.D. from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University and a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He also studied international relations at Oxford University.
To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to http://futureowls.rice.edu/images/futureowls/Rice_Brag_Sheet.pdf.
Since its inception in 1993, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy has established itself as one of the leading nonpartisan public policy think tanks in the country. With a strong track record of achievement based on the work of Rice University faculty and the institute's endowed fellows and scholars, the institute conducts important research on domestic and foreign policy issues with the goal of bridging the gap between the theory and practice of public policy.
Learn more about the institute at http://www.bakerinstitute.org or on the institute's blog, http://blogs.chron.com/bakerblog/.
No comments:
Post a Comment