Biblio

NATO strategy and policy has increasingly focused on incorporating cyber operations to support deterrence, warfighting, and intelligence objectives. However, offensive cyber operations in particular have presented a delicate challenge for the alliance. As cyber threats to NATO members continue to grow, the alliance has begun to address how it could incorporate offensive cyber operations into its strategy and policy. However, there are significant hurdles to meaningful cooperation on offensive cyber operations, in contrast with the high levels of integration in other operational domains. Moreover, there is a critical gap in existing conceptualizations of the role of offensive cyber operations in NATO policy. Specifically, NATO cyber policy has focused on cyber operations in a warfighting context at the expense of considering cyber operations below the level of conflict. In this article, we explore the potential role for offensive cyber operations not only in wartime but also below the threshold of armed conflict. In doing so, we systematically explore a number of challenges at the political/strategic as well as the operational/tactical levels and provide policy recommendations for next steps for the alliance.

In NATO, an attack on one is an attack on all. In recent years, this tenet has been extended to mean that a cyberattack on one is a cyberattack on all. But does what makes sense in the physical world also make sense if extended into cyberspace? And if there is virtue in collective cyberspace defense, is NATO necessarily the right grouping - in a world where, as far as the United States and the United Kingdom are concerned, more of what constitutes cyber defense circulates within the Five Eyes coalition rather than within NATO? To explore these issues, this essay moots the creation of a Baltic-area cyberspace alliance, considers what it would do, assesses its costs and benefits for its members, and concludes by considering whether such an alliance would be also be in the interest of the U.S. Keys to this discussion are (1) the distinction between what constitutes an “attack” in a medium where occupation may result and actions in media where occupation is (currently) meaningless and effects almost always reversible, (2) what collective defense should mean in cyberspace - and where responsibilities may be best discharged within the mix of hardness, pre-emption, and deterrence that constitute defense, (3) the relationship between cyberspace defense and information warfare defense, and (4) the relevance to alliance formation of the fact that while war is dull, dirty, and dangerous, cyber war is none of these three.

The unprecedented transparency shown by the Netherlands intelligence services in exposing Russian GRU officers in October 2018 is indicative of a number of new trends in state handling of cyber conflict. US public indictments of foreign state intelligence officials, and the UK's deliberate provision of information allowing the global media to “dox” GRU officers implicated in the Salisbury poison attack in early 2018, set a precedent for revealing information that previously would have been confidential. This is a major departure from previous practice where the details of state-sponsored cyber attacks would only be discovered through lengthy investigative journalism (as with Stuxnet) or through the efforts of cybersecurity corporations (as with Red October). This paper uses case studies to illustrate the nature of this departure and consider its impact, including potentially substantial implications for state handling of cyber conflict. The paper examines these implications, including: · The effect of transparency on perception of conflict. Greater public knowledge of attacks will lead to greater public acceptance that countermeasures should be taken. This may extend to public preparedness to accept that a state of declared or undeclared war exists with a cyber aggressor. · The resulting effect on legality. This adds a new element to the long-running debates on the legality of cyber attacks or counter-attacks, by affecting the point at which a state of conflict is politically and socially, even if not legally, judged to exist. · The further resulting effect on permissions and authorities to conduct cyber attacks, in the form of adjustment to the glaring imbalance between the means and methods available to aggressors (especially those who believe themselves already to be in conflict) and defenders. Greater openness has already intensified public and political questioning of the restraint shown by NATO and EU nations in responding to Russian actions; this trend will continue. · Consequences for deterrence, both specifically within cyber conflict and also more broadly deterring hostile actions. In sum, the paper brings together the direct and immediate policy implications, for a range of nations and for NATO, of the new apparent policy of transparency.