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Cyber war proponents often argue the domain needs its own Billy Mitchell or Giulio Douhet-strategists with great vision who will declare to the world what great power lies therein.1 To be sure, cyber war has no shortage of advocates. But as Colin Gray recently observed, "When historians in the future seek to identify a classic book or two on cyber power written in the 1990s and 2000s, they will be hard pressed to locate even the shortest of short-listable items. . . . Certainly they are nowhere near deserving (oxymoronic) instant classic status."2
But has the failure of cyber war to generate any such ideal necessarily been a bad thing? There is a case to be made that it is too early to expect such a classic. If the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk, in cyberspace the sun is just above the yardarm; the information revolution is hardly a done deal. But such a case is too easy. What if the fundamental features of cyber war were to remain essentially as they are into the indefinite future? Although highly unlikely, this is not so absurd a proposition. The late Roger Molander of RAND would frequently remind me that the questions we wrestled with in the mid 1990s are no less relevant and no better understood today than they were then.
Even assuming that the cyber domain has yet to stop evolving, it is not clear that a classic strategic treatment of cyber war is possible, or, even if it were, it would be particularly beneficial. In explaining why, this article makes three points. First, the salutary effects of such classics are limited. Second, the basic facts of cyberspace, and hence cyber war, do not suggest that it would be nearly as revolutionary as airpower has been, or anything close. Third, more speculatively, if there were a classic on cyber war, it would likely be pernicious.
The Limited Usefulness of Classics
Clausewitz s On War was, is, and will continue to be perhaps the classic book on warfare, but it would be an exaggeration to argue that it was an "instant classic." It was published posthumously. Its influence spread slowly-within a generation in Germany and not until after 1945 in the United States. Furthermore,...