Measuring Strategic Culture in Cyberspace

• In Event: Empirical Approaches to Cyber Conflict

Abstract

There is a growing literature that explores the cultural and organizational determinants of strategic behavior in cyberspace. Strategic culture may act as a heuristic or cognitive schema that decision-makers use to understand their environments in a context of high uncertainty. Yet, if a state’s cyber strategic culture is mismatched to the strategic environment, technological reality, or the adversary’s cyber strategic culture, this could lead to problems of misperception, security dilemmas, or inadvertent escalation risks. One important challenge with research on strategic culture—in cyberspace and beyond—is how to measure and operationalize culture as a variable. Existing work aiming to measure a state’s cyber strategic culture has typically relied on survey data. In this article, we offer a different approach to measuring cyber strategic culture. Specifically, focusing on the United States, we locate strategic culture within a state’s military organizations and measure cyber strategic culture through evaluating how the military educates, promotes, and trains its cyber forces. We find that U.S. cyber strategic culture is highly technical and tactical—an extension of the broader American way of warfare in its focus on tactical engagements, technological substitution, and decisive effects. We explore the implications of this for U.S. cyber strategy and for understanding the role of strategic culture in state behavior and strategic outcomes.

Authors

• Erica D. Lonergan, United States Military Academy

• Jack L. Snyder, Columbia University