Cyber weapons and the possibility of cyber conflictâincluding interference in foreign political campaigns, industrial sabotage, attacks on infrastructure, and combined military campaignsârequire policymakers, scholars, and citizens to rethink twenty-first-century warfare. Yet because cyber capabilities are so new and continually developing, there is little agreement about how they will be deployed, how effective they can be, and how they can be managed.
Written by leading scholars, the fourteen case studies in this volume will help policymakers, scholars, and students make sense of contemporary cyber conflict through historical analogies to past military-technological problems. The chapters are divided into three groups. The firstâWhat Are Cyber Weapons Like?âexamines the characteristics of cyber capabilities and how their use for intelligence gathering, signaling, and precision striking compares with earlier technologies for such missions. The second sectionâWhat Might Cyber Wars Be Like?âexplores how lessons from several wars since the early nineteenth century, including the World Wars, could applyâor notâto cyber conflict in the twenty-first century. The final sectionâWhat Is Preventing and/or Managing Cyber Conflict Like?âoffers lessons from past cases of managing threatening actors and technologies.