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The U.S. military recently accorded cyberspace the status of a "domain," which means that it is a potential battle-space like land, sea, air, or outer space, and will be treated accordingly. What is the nature of conflict and threats in this digital landscape? What key policy questions will arise for the United States, as a result, and how might these matters be best addressed? Looking forward, these emerging questions will be top priorities for policymakers. Our aim here is to explore these issues and help spark discussion, thereby helping to shape some of the contours of these important policy debates as this new and distinct domain continues to touch and impact all the others.
THE DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM: THREAT SPECTRUM
The digital revolution has unleashed and empowered a host of new actors with previously little clout in the realms of national and international security. The added significance and potency of these actors, together with traditional and continuing sources of threat in the form of nation-states and their proxies, makes for a complex ecosystem. Effective countermeasures are complicated by the anonymity that cyberspace affords, otherwise called the attribution problem, and by the pace of cyber activity, which includes the speed and volume of action as well as the rates of change and development of the technologies used.
Who is behind the clickety-clack of the keyboard? It could be a foreign intelligence service seeking to steal secrets related to national or economic security, a criminal organization turning to online theft to make a substantial profit, a terrorist group trying to execute an attack and instill fear in the targeted civilian population, a "hacktivist" committed to a particular cause, or even a bored ankle-biter looking for a challenge.
In terms of state actors, Russia and China currently dominate the espionage business, siphoning out U.S. intellectual property that was the product of heavy U.S. investment in research and development, to such an extent that the U.S. National Counterintelligence Executive has labeled these countries "a national, long-term, strategic threat to the United States of America."1 Chinese state entities have also aggressively pursued computer network exploitation to collect intelligence to further China's strategic aspirations.2 In addition, Iran and North Korea make up for in intent what they presently lack in capability. Any...