The face of war is changing as the world’s infrastructure is interconnected and the cyber theater becomes a focus for militaries around the world. We have yet to see a full-scale war between nations at the fore of the digital revolution but recent conflicts offer a picture of how cyber will affect the future of warfare.
“The future of cyber warfare is another dimension of conflict,” said Mark Testoni, president and CEO of SAP National Security Services (NS2). “But we’ve already learned a few lessons from history.”
Testoni noted Russian military forces incorporated cyberattacks in the incursion into Georgia in 2008 and more recently in the Crimea. In those situations, Russian forces disabled the countries’ infrastructure ahead of kinetic force.
“They immediately came in and shut down their networks,” Testoni said. “They blew up their Internet and immediately created communications and command/control issues — power, utilities, telecommunications networks.”
Disabling that infrastructure gave Russian forces a tactical advantage, limiting risk to the mission and the soldiers on the ground.
But cyber does more than just add another offensive capability. Due to the interconnected nature of modern infrastructure — from the power grid to the financial sector to private industry — cyber broadens the attack surface by an exponential factor.
For Testoni, examples like these show the need to secure American networks, including critical infrastructure and the private sector.
“Our warfighting capabilities today generally are nation-state versus nation-state, generally in land, space or air,” he said. “Now we’re entering a new dimension where the Internet blurs the lines. It’s not only the normal actors — the Department of Defense/U.S. and other nation-states — it’s companies, potentially, it’s other organizations. It takes that dynamic that was three-dimensional and turns it into a six-dimensional dynamic.”
