Table Of ContentBinary Bullets
Binary Bullets
THE ETHICS OF CYBERWARFARE
EDITED BY FRITZ ALLHOFF,
ADAM HENSCHKE,
and
BRADLEY JAY STRAWSER
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Binary bullets: the ethics of cyberwarfare / edited by Fritz Allhoff,
Adam Henschke, Bradley Jay Strawser.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–022108–9 (pbk.: alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–19–022107–2 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Cyberspace operations (Military science)—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Allhoff, Fritz, editor.
II. Henschke, Adam, 1976– editor. III. Strawser, Bradley Jay, editor. IV. Title: Ethics of cyberwarfare.
U163.B5525 2016
172′42 —dc23
2015009185
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
Foreword: Ethics for the Coming Epoch of Conflict vii
JOHN ARQUILLA
Notes on Contributors xiii
Introduction: Editors’ Introduction 1
Part I FOUNDATIONAL NORMS FOR CYBERWARFARE
1. Emerging Norms for Cyberwarfare 13
GEORGE R. lucas jr.
2. The Emergence of International Legal Norms for Cyberconflict 34
MICHAEL N. schmitt and liis vihul
3. Distinctive Ethical Issues of Cyberwarfare 56
RANDALL R. dipert
Part II CYBERWARFARE AND THE JUST WAR TRADITION
4. Cyber Chevauchées: Cyberwar Can Happen 75
DAVID WHETHAM
5. Cyberwarfare as Ideal War 89
RYAN JENKINS
6. Postcyber: Dealing with the Aftermath of Cyberattacks 115
BRIAN OREND
v
vi Contents
PART III ETHOS OF CYBERWARFARE
7. Beyond Tallinn: The Code of the Cyberwarrior? 139
matthew beard
8. Immune from Cyberfire? The Psychological and Physiological
Effects of Cyberwarfare 157
daphna canetti, michael l. gross, and israel waismel-manor
9. Beyond Machines: Humans in Cyberoperations, Espionage,
and Conflict 177
david danks and joseph h. danks
PART IV CYBERWARFARE, DECEPTION, AND PRIVACY
10. Cyber Perfidy, Ruse, and Deception 201
heather m. roff
11. Cyberattacks and “Dirty Hands”: Cyberwar, Cybercrime,
or Covert Political Action? 228
seumas miller
12. Moral Concerns with Cyberespionage: Automated Keyword
Searches and Data Mining 251
michael skerker
Name Index 277
Subject Index 283
Foreword
Ethics for the Coming Epoch of Conflict
Early on in the American involvement in World War II, when the Axis Powers were
still on the march and the Allies were suffering sharp reverses, Secretary of the
Navy Frank Knox gave a speech in which he noted that “modern warfare is an intri-
cate business about which no one knows everything—and few know very much.”
He spoke in the wake of German armored blitzkriegs and aerial terror bombings
of cities, and of crippling Japanese aircraft carrier strikes from Pearl Harbor to the
Philippines—and well beyond. Eventually, American and Allied forces learned to
match Axis capabilities; sadly, they mirrored many of their unethical practices as
well. Nazi U-boats waged brutal, unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic;
Americans did the same in the Pacific. Axis air forces killed civilians with abandon
from Shanghai to London; the Allies firebombed from Hamburg and Dresden to
Tokyo—and as soon as atomic bombs became available, they used them against the
innocent at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes, modern war was indeed “intricate.” And
in this intricacy mankind’s moral compass malfunctioned. In the opinion of J. F. C.
Fuller, one of the fathers of modern strategic thought, it was the weaponry itself that
proved too enthralling. As he noted when surveying all the carnage at war’s end: “It is
in this appalling dissolution of morality that armaments have played so great a part.”1
The shadow cast by nuclear weapons has kept wars smaller, but they have
still been waged bitterly and unethically. In Korea, as one historian has put it,
“Pyongyang and other major cities had been flattened, hundreds of thousands of
North Koreans killed.”2 A decade later, “entire areas of South Vietnam were desig-
nated Free Fire Zones which could be pulverized without regard for the inhabit-
ants.”3 And the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s degenerated into a missile-lobbing “war
1 J. F. C. Fuller, Armament and History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946), xiii.
2 Max Hastings, The Korean War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 268.
3 George Herring, America’s Longest War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 152.
vii
viii Foreword
of the cities.” American military doctrine came to be associated with such terms
as “overwhelming force” (forget proportionality!) and “shock and awe.” With the
rise of terrorist networks and the moral quagmires of nation-states that resorted
to torture, mass surveillance, and preventive war in response, Fuller’s assessment
of the “appalling dissolution” of war ethics is clearly still pertinent. Yet there is
also a ray of hope: the emerging technologies with which twenty-first-century
conflicts will be waged have the potential to set the moral compass aright.
How so? By emphasizing operations in the information domain—especially,
but not solely, in cyberspace—conflicts can now be conducted in more disrup-
tive but less destructive ways. A modern field army whose communications
links are severed or spoofed can hardly function, meaning that the side with
the “information edge” can outmaneuver its opponent in short order, bringing
war to a close quickly and with fewer losses. The cyberattacks on Georgian
command and control systems during the 2008 war with Russia hamstrung
the former. While there was little doubt about who would win that war, the
Georgians would almost surely have fought longer and harder than the five
days the conflict lasted had their command capabilities not been so seriously
disrupted. Russian use of psychological operations in cyberspace—messages
designed to spark panic and spur mass refugee flows—put many noncomba-
tants in harm’s way, making the conflict much less than the “ideal war” that
Ryan Jenkins describes in his chapter. But overall, the Russo-Georgian War did
provide a glimpse of how cyberattack can help to avoid lengthy bloodletting.
This notion of short, sharp, and less destructive conflict is what my colleague
David Ronfeldt and I had in mind when we developed the concept of cyberwar
over twenty years ago.4
Back then there was little interest in our focus on cyberwar as a battle-oriented
concept—a state of affairs that persists today. Instead, there has been and continues
to be an unbridled enthusiasm for and a simultaneous fear of “strategic cyberwar”
—the mounting of mass disruptive attacks on critical, information-dependent
infrastructures. In many ways this mirrors the early discourse about air power back
in the 1920s and 1930s, in which proponents of strategic bombing prevailed, for the
most part, over those who preferred—for both practical and ethical reasons—to
emphasize the role of attack aircraft in land and sea battles against enemy armed
forces. Strategic air power advocates still predominate today, suggesting that the
proponents of strategic cyberwar are likely to continue to exert a strong influence
upon policy and doctrine as well. Given that few strategic bombing campaigns
have ever succeeded, and that noncombatants in huge numbers have been killed in
them along the way, it is very troubling to think that, even if cyberattacks don’t live
4 John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, “Cyberwar Is Coming!” Comparative Strategy 12, no. 2
(April–June 1993): 141–65.
Foreword ix
up to their hype, this may be the form of cyberwar—the less ethical, in jus in bello
terms—that is resorted to more often.5
It is especially good, then, that many of the contributors to this volume have
focused on ethical questions raised by the specter of strategic cyberwar. Indeed,
taken together their insights begin to sketch out what Randall Dipert describes
in his chapter as a “full ethics” of cyberwar. Such comprehensive analysis is much
needed, and Binary Bullets is replete with fresh insights and interesting analyses of
existing aspects of ethical debates about cyberwar. In terms of going to war justly, it
seems clear that the jus ad bellum admonition to resort to force only as a last resort
comes under considerable pressure, given the relative ease of use, precision target-
ing capability, and generally nonlethal effects of strategic cyberattack. Indeed, it is
a bit troubling to note, as Randall Dipert does, that there appears to be “tacit inter-
national acceptance” of cyberattacks like the preventive strike on an Iranian nuclear
facility by whoever launched the Stuxnet worm. If anything, strategic cyberattack is
likely to be viewed as an attractive “first resort,” something that might be resorted
to in lieu of aerial bombing, commando raids, or larger-scale field operations. Thus
“early use” of cyberattack may violate one classic tenet of just war theory while at the
same time shoring up the norm of lessening the overall amount of harm.
A further factor encouraging not only early use of strategic cyberattack, but also
resort to digital attacks more generally throughout a conflict, is the point that “mass
disruption” of information systems may impose very significant economic costs
but is hardly likely to cause much, if any, loss of life. And in the situations in which
cyberattack is likely to lead to large numbers of deaths—such as when military
communications are compromised and soldiers, sailors, and airmen are killed as a
result—the losses are to the combatants, not to civilians. Noncombatant immunity,
a key jus in bello principle considered by several of the contributors to this volume,
thus seems to be left relatively untouched by cyberwar—unless the economic cost
inflicted on a whole society by strategic cyberwar is to be viewed as a violation of
the ethical norm.
Other themes in military and security affairs that receive thoughtful treatment
in Binary Bullets have to do with classical notions of deterrence and retaliation, and
the relatively new problem of “attribution”—that is, the problem of ambiguity as
to the identity of the cyberattacker. The veil of anonymity that often accompanies
cyberattacks suggests that a new lease on life may be granted to the secret coup d’état
and unattributable assassination techniques that comprised so much of “covert
action”—but that went into eclipse—in the latter decades of the Cold War.6 Against
whom is one to retaliate when the identity of the perpetrator cannot be firmly
5 The air power debate about strategic bombing is thoroughly discussed in Robert A. Pape, Bombing
to Win (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
6 On the waning of this mode of “secret warfare,” see Gregory Treverton’s powerful critique, Covert
Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
