Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition – Class 8 – Cyber

Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition  Class 8  Cyber

This vendible first appeared in West Point's Modern War Institute.


We just completed the eighth week of our new national security matriculation at Stanford - Technology, Innovation and Unconfined Power Competition. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the matriculation to imbricate how technology will shape the weft and employment of all instruments of national power.

In class 1, we learned that national power is the sum of all the resources misogynist to a state to pursue its national objectives and interests. This power is wielded through a combination of a country's diplomacy, information, its military capabilities, economic strength, finance, intelligence, and law enforcement. These instruments of national power employed in a "whole of government approach" to whop a state's interests are known by the acronym DIME-FIL.

Class 2 focused on China, the U.S.'s primary unconfined power competitor. China is using all elements of its national power, e.g. information/ intelligence, its military might and economic strength as well as exploiting Western finance and technology. China's goal is to rencontre and overturn the U.S.-led liberal international order and replace it with its own neo-totalitarian model where China emerges as the dominant regional and global power.

The third class focused on Russia, which since 2014 has asserted itself as a competing unconfined power. We learned how Russia pursues security and economic interests in parallel with its ideological aims.

The fourth class shifted our focus to the impact commercial technologies have on the instruments of national power (DIME-FIL). The first technology we examined was semiconductors, and the U.S. dependence on TSMC in Taiwan, for its most wide logic chips. This is problematic as China claims Taiwan is a province of China.

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In the fifth class we examined the impact that AI and Machine Learning will protract to have on the capabilities and employment of DIME-FIL. We heard from the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), the focal point of the DOD AI strategy; and from the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) - a DoD organization that contracts with commercial companies to solve national security problems.

In class six we discussed unmanned systems and autonomy and how the outstart of these weapons will transpiration operational concepts and the squatter of war.

Class seven looked at the Second Space Age, how our military and civil economy rely on resources in space, and how space is now a contested environment, with China and Russia capable of disabling/destroying our satellites

Today's class: Cyber

Catch up with the matriculation by reading our intro to the class, and summaries of Classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 6 and 7


Required readings

Case Study for Class

Competition in Cyber Space

Cyber Attacks / Cyber Warfare

IP & Protected Personal Information Theft

Political Interference

Reading Work Questions

Pick one of the unelevated questions and wordplay in approximately 100 words, based on the required readings. Please note that this work will be graded and count towards undertow participation.

  1. What is the U.S. Cyber Command's doctrinal tideway to competing in the cyber domain? Do you stipulate with the current doctrine? Why or why not? Would you do anything differently?
  2. Of the variegated types of cyber threats presented in this week's readings (cyberattacks, PPI and IP theft, and political interference), which do you think presents the greatest threat to U.S. interests and why? What should the U.S do to write that threat? Be specific if your recommendations are for the government or private sector.

Class 8 - Guest Speaker

Dr. Michael Sulmeyer is a Senior Adviser, USCYBERCOM (Cyber Command). He was the former Senior Director for Cyber at the National Security Council. The former Cyber Project Director at the Harvard Kennedy School-Belfer Center. He was a past Director, Plans and Operations, for Cyber Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Previously, he worked on stovepipe tenancy and the maintenance of strategic stability between the United States, Russia, and China.

Cyber Command worked in 2010 and is one of the eleven unified combatant commands of the United States Department of Defense. It's commanded by a four-star general, General Paul Nakasone who is moreover the director of the National Security Agency and senior of the Central Security Service. It has three main missions: (1) defending the DoD information systems, (2) supporting joint gravity commanders with superhighway operations, and (3) defending the nation from significant cyberattacks.

Dr. Sulmeyer has written, "A focus on cyber-deterrence is understandable but misplaced. Deterrence aims to transpiration the calculations of adversaries by persuading them that the risks of an wade outweigh the rewards or that they will be denied the benefits they seek. But in seeking merely to deter enemies, the United States finds itself constantly on the when foot. Instead, the United States should be pursuing a increasingly zippy cyberpolicy, one aimed not at deterring enemies but at disrupting their capabilities. In cyberwarfare, Washington should recognize that the weightier defense is a good offense.

In countries where technology companies are willing to cooperate with the U.S. government (or with requests from their own government), a phone undeniability to the right deject provider or Internet service provider (ISP) could result in getting bad actors kicked off the Internet.

U.S. hackers could pursue a wayfarers of erasing computers at scale, disabling finance and credentials used by hackers to attack, and wearing off wangle to services so it is harder to compromise innocent systems to self-mastery their attacks."

Our national defense cyber policy has now moved to "persistent engagement." Defending forward as tropical as possible to the origin of traducer worriedness extends our reach to expose adversaries' weaknesses, learn their intentions and capabilities, and counter attacks tropical to their origins. Continuous engagement imposes tactical friction and strategic financing on our adversaries, compelling them to shift resources to defense and reduce attacks. We will pursue attackers wideness networks and systems to render most malicious cyber and cyber-enabled worriedness inconsequential while achieving greater self-rule of maneuver to counter and races dangerous traducer worriedness surpassing it impairs our national power.

Lecture 8

If you can’t see the lecture 8 slides click here.

Lessons Learned

  • Cyber Command's role is to:
    • defend the DoD information systems
    • support joint gravity commanders with superhighway operations, and
    • defend the nation from significant cyberattacks
  • Cyber Command has evolved from a reactive, defensive posture to a proactive posture tabbed "persistent engagement"