Professor Richard Harknett talks on 'Nuclear Prominence and Cyber Persistence'
The Oxford Cyber Studies Programme welcomed Professor Richard J. Harknett, US-UK Fulbright Professor in Cyber Security visiting from the University of Cincinnati, to present his forthcoming work on ‘nuclear prominence and cyber persistence’. Following is a summary of his talk. Prof. Harknett began by observing that, after twenty years, cybersecurity is still a young field of learning: we have yet to get the fundamentals of our thinking right. As such, he argued that there has been a shift in the strategic environment from “nuclear prominence” to “cyber persistence,” which represents a new realm of competition.
Prof. Harknett began by outlining the intellectual forerunners to the new cyber strategic environment. Structurally, irrespective of leadership, the conventional strategic world was offense advantaged: although there was continual contest, and the degree of advantage shifted, offense generally had the upper hand. By contrast, the nuclear world is purely offense dominant. After 1945 there was a paradigm shift in strategic thinking towards deterrence, caused not by the scale of destruction possible with nuclear weapons, but by their ”crystal ball effect”: that is, the lack of ambiguity about whether ultimate destruction would occur in the event of a nuclear war. Prof. Harknett distinguished this strategy of deterrence from a deterrence effect, which can be produced without the strategy (whether directly, indirectly, or residually). The strategy of deterrence has made territorial war among “great powers” less likely; thus it produced relative stability. However, it is only possible given certain relative certainties about the strategic environment.
These certainties are not present in cyberspace. Cyberspace is not a military domain, but a varied interconnected domain in which many actors operate – including militaries, businesses, and individuals. The terrain is continuously constructed, with many overlapping levels and interests. These interests are not shared (as some governments advocating public-private partnerships mistakenly assume), but they can be aligned through discussion, incentives, or coercion.
The result of this new strategic environment is what Prof. Harknett termed “a condition of constant contact” and “cyber persistence” between antagonists, defined as a continuous willingness and capacity to seek the initiative. There is no prospect of stable attrition of the enemy, as in previous strategic environments, and so the crucial question is: How to achieve security under conditions of constant contact with the opponent? The traditional strategy of deterrence does not match these strategic characteristics. Thus its replacement involves seizing and retaining the “cyber initiative,” including in arenas below those of traditional armed conflict. The United States’ foes conceive of cyberspace as struggle all the way through; consequently, U.S. strategy should reflect this perception. Finally, Prof. Harknett noted that there are several significant turning points awaiting in the near future, notably the development of Artificial Intelligence and advances in machine learning. How and what corporations in which countries achieve a position of dominance in these nascent technological domains is an open political question.
