Making Strategic Sense of Cyber Power: Why the Sky is Not Falling

: Cyber is now recognized as an operational domain, but the theory that should explain it strategically is very largely missing. As the military establishment accepted the revolution in military affairs as the big organizing idea of the 1990s, then moved on to transformation in the early-2000s, so the third really big idea of the post-Cold War Era began to secure traction cyber. However, it is one thing to know how to digitize; it is quite another to understand what digitization means strategically. 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.