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Cyberwar Is Like War Before 'Mutually Assured Destruction,' Argues Theorist

Which is a bad thing, sort of.
Image: Wiki

One of the more bizarre features of recent human history is that it exists at all. For some large part of the 20th century, the world's most powerful nations raced to build unfathomably destructive weapons and then point them at each other with almost literal fingers on almost literal triggers at all times. Earth could have been over and done with in the span of an hour and yet, somehow, here we are. That is, to me, unbelievable.

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This all has a name, of course: mutually assured destruction. The general idea is a twist on the notion of duel, where each party takes 10 steps, turns, and fires. The twist is that a bullet fired by either gunfighter will invariably ricochet back after killing the other gunfighter, killing the "winner" with the same shot. So it is with nuclear weapons: An attack by one party assures a reciprocal, symmetrical attack by the other. Mutual destruction.

How horrible is it that this is the logic responsible for our continued existence on planet Earth? In the Communications of the ACM, John Arquilla, noted cyber-war theorist and mass surveillance enthusiast, argues says that the methods and tactics of cyber-warfare have effectively returned us to a time before this mutually assured destruction, when in the absence of the threat of sudden and complete annihilation, war is free to proceed relatively undeterred. This poses some new-old problems.

Arquilla writes:

Thus the apparent 'usability' of cyber attack (causing disruption is more thinkable than effecting mass destruction) and the relatively easier "accessibility" of such a capability (due to much lower cost, along with widely diffused global expertise) may create a situation in which deterrence becomes problematic. When the "D" in MAD stands for 'destruction,' deterrence is robust. But when the grim acronym is read as "mutual assured disruption," a less stable situation will likely arise.

Therefore, the relevance of thinking about deterrence in the pre-atomic age should be recognized, and considered in the international discourse on cyberwar. Indeed, it is striking to see, even in quite early works, the rejection of MAD-like scenarios. For example, in his book Air Defence, published in 1929, E.B. Ashmore concluded retaliatory threats would not deter; rather, they would lead to the 'spectacle of two nations hammering away at each other's capital, with no immediate object but mutual destruction.'

So, is that what we have to look forward to? Earth's technological civilizations continually poking at each other with hacks? Nightly internet bombing raids? This seems to be Arquilla's argument. In the absence of mutually assured destruction, nations can affect cyberwar freely, nagging and chipping away at each other in a generally invisible tepid war. The urge to hit back will, in this environment, overrule any fear of retaliation.

"Yes, nuclear deterrence still looks quite robust, but when it comes to cyber attack, the world of deterrence after Stuxnet looks remarkably like the world of deterrence before Hiroshima: bleak," Arquilla argues. The answer, he says, lies in creating robust defenses, analogous to Britain's WWII Fighter Command, a web of airborne defenses credited with winning the Battle of Britain, in some large part thanks to rapid technological advancement in the form of high-performance interceptor aircraft like the Supermarine Spitfire. In other words, we need to start building the cyber versions of bad-ass dogfighting airplanes.

We'll know pretty soon how right or wrong he is about all of this. I think deterrence in cyberwar has more of an effect than what Arquilla assumes, which is something that we can observe at this very moment as the US weighs (seemingly quite carefully) possible retaliations against China's recent (purported) hacks. Deterrence does still exist, after all, even if it's a bit more subtle. Our fears of trans-Pacific economic disruption aren't quite on par with the global firestorms of a nuclear holocaust, but they do seem to be keeping things from immediately getting out of hand.