Cyberwar Redefines War

Joel Harding

The definition of war is going to have to change in the future.  After listening to the Russians in October and November of 2009, after cogitating what the Chinese are 'allegedly' doing, having read the Chinese PLA publication “Unrestricted Warfare”, I believe the threshold for war, or for aggressive actions which may lead to war, will have to be established at a lower level.  I believe we are being conditioned to accept a certain amount of intrusiveness via the cyber domain, I believe we are being conditioned to accept a certain amount of cyber damage, I believe we have set the conditions which will continually put us on the brink of war in the cyber realm and the nuance between war and non-war will be subtle.  I can no longer call it peace, it's non-war in my opinion, because we read about being continually attacked, continually being targeted and consistently being probed, pinged, exploited and hacked. It seems to be no longer important who is doing these actions, it is the 'why' and eventually determining the who behind the why...  but that takes human intelligence and criminal investigations simultaneously.  Human Intelligence and current criminal investigative techniques are too slow; they do not work at the speed of our networks.  By the time law enforcement builds a prosecutable case, the time for action is well over and all law enforcement can do is to prosecute with little to no chance of conviction, at least not the way the net is currently configured.  This will not change in the foreseeable future.