From a book review by Lucas Kello of Ben Buchanan’s The Cybersecurity Dilemma: Hacking, Trust and Fear Between Nations on Lawfare:
Students of international relations are trained to read history—even ancient history—as a prelude to the future. Among the eternal notions that theorists commonly invoke, one enjoys special appeal: the security dilemma. It originates in Thucydides’s famous claim that “increasing Athenian greatness and the resulting fear among the Spartans made [their] going to war inevitable.” A similar fear had fueled Athens’s grab at empire. Therein lies the dilemma: in the anarchic international system, the growing security of one state ensures the growing insecurity of others. This perverse logic produces occasional outbreaks of war, even when the contenders wish to avoid it, as in 431 B.C.
In The Cybersecurity Dilemma: Hacking, Trust and Fear Between Nations, Ben Buchanan argues that this ancient logic explains much of the incessant hostility that mars interstate dealings in cyberspace. The argument has three “pillars.” They can be summed up as follows: the development of offensive weapons requires advance intrusion into other states’ networks; maximizing defense also necessitates intrusion; therefore, states penetrate foreign networks whenever they can—even while interpreting intrusions against them as threatening. The cycle repeats incessantly.
Sounds like a negative feedback loop, and it’s fascinating, but retroactively obvious. Moving to the nuclear arms scenario of last century, the remark about 431 B.C. is fairly frightening; one wonders if any of the operational issues of surviving that period have applicability to the issues of controlling and suppressing cyberwarfare. I only bring this up because all options should be examined; I suspect the answer is No, given the disparate nature of the weapons classes involved.
