Cyber@War0 Comments

For this project, the behavior of concern will be cyberwar. The difficulties of defining cyberspace notwithstanding, cyberwar is legally, politically, and socially complex. War might be ancient, but cyberwar is not. This disconnection creates difficulties for scholars, lawyers, diplomats, soldiers and civilians.17 Cyberwar is simultaneously an action, an idea, a motivation, material and nonmaterial. It stands to challenge centuries old law, uproot established practice, and alter global processes, at a speed we have yet to fathom. The development of a framework to understand cyberwar, I am required to define its root: war.

War is an artifact of law and politics. The international laws governing war have been constructed over time by the processes of state practices and philosophical development. As a consequence, war is unambiguous, and the state has been codified as the sole arbiter of warfare. Additionally, leaving legal precedent aside, states are the only actors with the capacity to harness the resources needed to conduct war. The components of war are well defined: militaries, material resources, state(s) v. state(s), territorial boundaries, uniform attribution of the combatants. There are four crucial elements required for a war to be a war: 1) at least two states must be in contention; 2) states must utilize armed force in this “contention”; 3) the states’ goal is to overpower the other; and 4) the contestant states have symmetrical goals.18 Providing the four crucial elements, I understand war as a conflict between at least two opposing states requiring the use of force by easily attributable combatant forces.
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