Armageddon on a Flash Drive: The Calculus of Cyber-Warfare

• In Event: Technology and Public-Private Relations

Abstract

Could you live a week without your smartphone? The Cyber-Balance is of crucial importance to decision makers not only to maintain military effectiveness but more importantly to offset social and political destabilization. Cyber conflict is a crosscutting notion that has embedded itself in all domains of traditional warfare but more importantly brings the battlefield to Main Street and the population’s daily lives. This paper theorizes that public services are an important part of modern life and that disruption can lead to political destabilization. Multiple destabilization variables are modeled to determine salience. While it would be speculative to predict a tipping point where destabilization undermines government legitimacy, it is possible to determine what factors are important and model their rates of decline. This paper takes a first cut at examining cyber-warfare and its potential to militarily cripple or destabilize a nation in a simulated cyber-exchange. Methodologically this work presents a dynamic model of cyber-warfare based upon established modeling techniques. Joshua Epstein (Brookings, 1985) updated the classic Lanchester models to incorporate the basic dynamics of warfare into his models of convention warfare in Europe, the aerial threat to NATO and the impact of conventional force reductions. Using the same models with updated variables, modeling a virtual cyber-war will be possible. The goal is to examine plausible cyber-war scenarios. For simplicity three dyads are modeled, 1) United States versus Russia; 2) United States versus North Korea or Iran; 3) Israel versus Iran. In sum, various factors of vulnerability, their salience and rates of decline or resilience will be modeled leading to a better understanding how cyber weaponry can affect the state. This research adds to the extant research on cyber conflict by empirically examining a previously unexplored are of cyber warfare.

Author

• Joseph J. St. Marie, University of Southern Mississippi