Cyber War Has Arrived?

Abstract

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks America readied itself to strike back against those it knew to be responsible. After failed diplomatic attempts to get the fundamentalist Taliban government of Mullah Omar to hand over bin Laden, a joint UK/USA invasion of Afghanistan was launched. However, unlike previous invasions, this campaign would not use large-scale deployments of troops but instead would make use of approximately 300 Special Forces operatives supporting intelligence agency staff. This paper argues that conducting an invasion in this way matches the theory of cyberwar proposed by Arquilla and Rondfelt (1993).