Ukraine and Corporations: Rise of Collective Cyber Defense

• In Event: The War in Ukraine

Abstract

For many observers of the Russo-Ukrainian War, the most important surprise was the failure of the putative Russian cyber capacity to cripple Ukraine’s response and thereby to make physical destruction unnecessary for a Russian win. However, for cyber and national security scholars, the more surprising aspect of the conflict has been the alacrity with which western IT corporate entities leapt to Ukraine's defense immediately after, and sometimes before, the invasion. It is worth asking what the implications are of this seemingly sudden ‘re-nationalization’ of corporate sentiment among otherwise globalized major IT capital goods corporations who not long ago used their globalized status to fight national regulation. For at least a decade, discussions of public and private cooperation were stymied by the seemingly intransigent demand of this same globalized industry for governments to make such collaboration worth their while in compensation, before these leaders would agree to do anything seriously costly in such projects. Yet here were, and are, corporations doing much more in direct support of Ukraine than the international sanctions on Russia require, and the explanation of simple sympathy for the underdog fails to persuasively explain the switch.

This paper will argue that the foundations of this apparently willing re-nationalization of corporate IT capital goods sentiment has been in the making for nearly a decade across multiple streams of events and has major implications for the future world order. From the rise of borders in cyberspace – the Cyber Westphalian process – to the rise of China’s digital criminal and economic exploitation and the slowly emergent public recognition by senior political leaders of autocratic state-sponsored harm to democratic nations’ digitized economies, to the small but growing calls for collective economic and cyber defense, the cumulative zeitgeist across consolidated democracies has moved against a global politically neutral position by major westernize IT corporations. As it happened, the Russo-Ukrainian War was not a cyber event, but it has had a major effect on the psyche of people who live in the IT community across the westernized world. One cannot know if this switch is permanent, but it is present now, and it offers a window of opportunity for whole-of-society defenses fully involving the private sector. This paper will link these changes to the idea of collective democratic national cyber defense and address implications for the future world economic and political order.

Author

• Chris C. Demchak, Naval War College