Cyber War Essay

Plenty of researchers have done reviews about the impact of cyber warfare to take effect in the recent decades. Voices and opinions are different, when it comes to whether cyber war will take place or not, with most of the articles claiming that cyber security is alarming towards a negative effect. Like Arquilla & Ronfeldt,(1993) wrote about the coming of cyber war, and further went on to state that “industrialization led to attritional warfare by massive armies (e.g., World War I). Mechanization led to maneuver predominated by tanks (e.g., World War II). The information revolution implies the rise of cyber war”. However, Rid,(2012) pointed out that cyber war will not take place, clearly defined what cyber war entails, and make clear the difference between cyber-attacks and warfare.

2. Definitions

Before advancing the discussion on whether cyber war will take place or not, definitions of some relevant terms should be clear. The definition of cyber space, war, and cyber-attack, to some degree will be helpful to the discussion in this report. Therefore continuing further, one question should be asked: what is war?

The most concise concept of war was offered by Clausewitz in 1980 (Schweizer, 2009), which has three main elements, namely: Violent, instrumental, and political. He went further to concluded that if any aggressive or defensive actions need to be introduced as a war, the criteria and justifications of going into the war has to be met. Violent character is the first element of war, according to Rid (2012); War is defined as an act of violence to force the enemy to ‘do our will’. Wars are violent no matter what scale it is; where it takes place and what purpose it aims at. Back to the history of human beings, the wars cause h...

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...ources from other countries in the world as Western European countries cannot supply resources abundantly by its own. Then those capital countries launched wars on countries which lagged behind, while industrializing their own economy. There is a saying in diplomacy that ‘A country does not have permanent friends, only permanent interests’. Applying it in the definition of war, it is pretty clear that wars are for interest and just for interest alone. In the confrontation of two sides, there must be something that both sides want to fight for, and the benefit of winning the war has to be beyond the loss in the war, if not, war will not take place since double lose situation do not meet the requirement of political benefits. It is quite important to make further illustration as to why cyber war will not take place and it will be discussed in the following as follows.