Making Strategic Sense of Cyber Power: Why The Sky Is Not Falling

With respect to cyber power, Dr. Colin Gray poses and seeks to answer the most basic of the strategist’s questions, “So what?” He notes that the technical and even tactical literature on cyber is as abundant as the strategic theoretical treatment is both thin and poor. However, strategic sense can be made of our limited cyber experience. Gray argues that the general theory of strategy has authority over the cyber domain as the fifth geography of war, even though physical “force” cannot be generated directly by networked computers. Cyber power is not to be compared usefully with nuclear weapons; analyses that suggest or imply catastrophic perils from hostile cyber action are thoroughly unconvincing. Cyber is an important enabler, a team player, in joint operations. As a constructed environment, cyberspace(s) is very much what we choose to make it.