ABSTRACT
Cybered conflict, cyber war, the Russian ‘hybrid war’ (Chivvis, 2001), and even the Chinese ‘wars under conditions of informatization’ (Polpeter, Chase & Heginbotham, 2017; Kania & Costello, 2018), all reflect the emerging reality of conflict among states in a deeply cybered, non-westernized world. Throughout history, the keys to conflict, competition, or war are the scale of available, relevant foreknowledge and of applicable resources to act accordingly. They are the critical ‘knowing and acting’ of all struggles, but in the emerging era, the volume of both foreknowledge and resources required is unprecedented. If one is constantly open to nasty surprises that can be imposed ubiquitously from one’s critical complex systems and one cannot gather the resources needed in time to mitigate, neutralize, recover from, and innovate beyond, the surprises imposed by adversaries, then one faces both exceptional uncertainty and wartime-levels of insecurity. Irrespective of what that struggle is called, one is then likely to lose in conflicts involving cyberspace. Just as in other eras and contexts, security in cyberspace is therefore not the absence of threats, but the inability to minimize either or both systemic uncertainty and the magnitude of significant harm associated with threats.
