Cyberdeterrence and Cyberwar

De: Martin C. Libicki

Narrado por: Erik Sandvold

The protection of cyberspace, the information medium, has become a vital national interest because of its importance both to the economy and to military power. An attacker may tamper with networks to steal information for money or to disrupt operations. Future wars are likely to be carried out, in part or perhaps entirely, in cyberspace. It might therefore seem obvious that maneuvering in cyberspace is like maneuvering in other media, but nothing would be more misleading.

Cyberspace has its own laws. It is easy to hide identities and difficult to predict or even understand battle damage, and attacks deplete themselves quickly. Cyberwar is nothing so much as the manipulation of ambiguity.

Martin Libicki explores these topics in detail and uses the results to address such issues as the pros and cons of counterattack, the value of deterrence and vigilance, and other actions the United States and the U.S. Air Force can take to protect itself in the face of deliberate cyberattack.

©2009 RAND Corporation (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Three-year Old RAND Report You Can Find Free

This is a three-year old RAND study for the Air Force describing the threat picture as it was then preparatory to standing up the 8th AF (which didn't, ultimately; what we got instead was US Cyber Command and the individual service components).

There is nothing ground breaking here, and for the price vs content, I would not recommend buying it. Instead look to the RAND site for a free PDF copy of the report and spend an hour looking it over.

Needless Elaboration

Had this been a government report sent to my office as a sitting President I would refuse it on the ground of needless elaboration & refused to pay for it with taxpayers dollars. If carefully filtered all this information could have neatly been streamlined into a Threat Reaction chart outlining potential threats & threat reactions to combat threats. Number of pages doesn't improve the defense of our country; well thought, well filtered, then well presented information to act on does. I highly recommend this book be rethought & rewritten to be presented in a manner to respect the reader's time & be more useful to our national defense. Needless elaboration to fill pages doesn't fool me as research.