Cyberspace is a man-made domain of technological commerce and communication, not a geographical chessboard of competing alliances. The problem is that the song is not the same and the historic fit to the Cold War is actually not so neat. The Pentagon’s Cyber Command and Beijing’s People’s Liberation Army’s Third Army Department now fill in for the old Strategic Air Command and the Red Army’s Strategic Rocket Forces. Swap in the words “conventional” and “nuclear” for “cyber” and “kinetic” and the new doctrine is actually revealed to essentially be the old 1960s deterrence doctrine of “flexible response,” where a conventional attack might be met with either a conventional and/or nuclear response. This attitude culminated, perhaps, with what is reported to be in the classified version of the recent Defense Department cyber strategy, which announced a new doctrine of “equivalence,” arguing that harmful action within the cyber domain can be met with parallel response in another domain. “We believe we’re seeing something a little like a cyber Cold War,” McAfee Vice President Dmitri Alperovitch says. Former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, for instance, describes the Cold War and cybersecurity as “eerily similar,” while journalist David Ignatius summed up his meetings with top Pentagon officials in a 2010 article titled “Cold War Feeling on Cybersecurity.”Įven the network security firm McAfee is susceptible to such talk. So, perhaps not surprising, they’re turning to an old parallel that they spent most of their professional lives working on: the Cold War.Īgain and again in policy circles, cyber-security’s dynamics, threats and responses are consistently compared to the technology of nuclear weapons and the standoff between the United States and Soviet Union. The new rhythms of online crime, spying and statecraft are unfamiliar. Today, the hit makers of Washington could be making a similar mistake when it comes to cybersecurity, trying to jam a new issue into the wrong historic framework. For instance, senior Air Force officers during the Vietnam War clung to a strategic bombing campaign more suited to their early experiences bombing Nazi Germany than a Third World insurgency, while in turn, the recent debate about Afghanistan keeps echoing back to baby boomer concerns about whether a 21st century war would be “Obama’s Vietnam.” Indeed, most often we turn to the songs we know best, the ones we hummed in our youth, when others may be more apt. While applying lessons from the past can be a useful analytic tool, we frequently unearth old analogies that may not be the right fit for the new problem we face. The problem for policymakers, though, is identifying which tune it exactly is that they are hearing. As Mark Twain once put it, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” For every big policy issue, there’s usually a parallel that can be found in the past.
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