The Fifth Domain
The Economist carries an interesting cover story this week which suggests the internet has become a "fifth domain" for warfare after land, sea, air and outer space. This is a sprawling, complex topic, but I thought the article captured one very important observation: cyberwar is an elusive threat — like terrorism and biological weapons — ...
The Economist carries an interesting cover story this week which suggests the internet has become a "fifth domain" for warfare after land, sea, air and outer space. This is a sprawling, complex topic, but I thought the article captured one very important observation: cyberwar is an elusive threat -- like terrorism and biological weapons -- that can be diffuse, compact and transnational.
The Economist carries an interesting cover story this week which suggests the internet has become a "fifth domain" for warfare after land, sea, air and outer space. This is a sprawling, complex topic, but I thought the article captured one very important observation: cyberwar is an elusive threat — like terrorism and biological weapons — that can be diffuse, compact and transnational.
The magazine says:
The internet was designed for convenience and reliability, not security. Yet in wiring together the globe, it has merged the garden and the wilderness. No passport is required in cyberspace. And although police are constrained by national borders, criminals roam freely. Enemy states are no longer on the other side of the ocean, but just behind the firewall. The ill-intentioned can mask their identity and location, impersonate others and con their way into the buildings that hold the digitised wealth of the electronic age: money, personal data and intellectual property.
Can traditional arms control or diplomacy be useful in this situation? Would nations sign a global pact to foreswear cyber war? Could it be enforced, and would it be effective against the legions of hackers and cyberwarriors who exist outside of state control, or are loosely allied with state security agencies? Is this threat too big for arms control as we’ve known it?
The answer may not be another treaty, nor promises of good intentions. We need fresh thinking for a new age.
Update, July 14: Here’s another perspective on from Jeffrey Carr.
David E. Hoffman covered foreign affairs, national politics, economics, and served as an editor at the Washington Post for 27 years.
He was a White House correspondent during the Reagan years and the presidency of George H. W. Bush, and covered the State Department when James A. Baker III was secretary. He was bureau chief in Jerusalem at the time of the 1993 Oslo peace accords, and served six years as Moscow bureau chief, covering the tumultuous Yeltsin era. On returning to Washington in 2001, he became foreign editor and then, in 2005, assistant managing editor for foreign news. Twitter: @thedeadhandbook
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