Correspondence: A Cyber Disagreement

Abstract

Policymakers and pundits have been sounding alarms about internet insecurity for years, so the arst appearance of anything in International Security (IS) on this topic is a welcomed development. In the fall 2013 issue, Lucas Kello takes the security studies community to task for ignoring cyber perils, while Erik Gartzke argues that cyberwar is of limited political utility.1 Kello writes that “[t]he Clausewitzian philosophical framework misses the essence of the cyber danger and conceals its true signiacance: the virtual weapon is expanding the range of possible harms between the concepts of war and peace, with important consequences for national and international security” (p. 22). Gartzke counters, “War is fundamentally a political process, as Carl von Clausewitz famously explained. . . . The internet is generally an inferior substitute for terrestrial force in performing the functions of coercion or conquest” (p. 42). If Kello is right, then the long silence in IS on cybersecurity suggests that scholars have neglected a major transformation in security affairs. If Gartzke is right, then scholars can be forgiven their bemusement with inoated cyber rhetoric. In my investigations of American and Chinese activities, I have found cyber interventions to be more complicated and less effective than generally believed.2 Arguments from technology are common in cybersecurity discourse and have excited policymakers, so they should be taken seriously. Yet Kello’s characterization of the skeptical viewpoint as “more visceral than analytical” (p. 9) misrepresents the analytical literature that does exist. Kello insists that “scholarly inattention toward the cyber issue . . . must change” (ibid.), but he disparages the aeld while ignoring relevant scholarship. My commentary addresses the technological determinism of Kello’s argument and his Correspondence: A Cyber Disagreement