Research project
Upholding the NATO cyber pledge: What does cyber deterrence and cyber resilience mean for NATO and Norway?
In the last few years a more assertive and unpredictable Russia has shown a willingness to use conventional and unconventional coercive means. Although this has led to a renewed focus in Norway and NATO on deterrence, Russia’s use of increasingly sophisticated and disruptive cyberattacks has not been deterred.
This calls into question the strategic utility of conventional deterrence in the ‘information age’ and demands a reassessment of its core tenets.
While cyberspace has been elevated to a military domain within NATO, the question of deterrence and resilience in cyberspace remains understudied. The aim of this project is to explore how and to what extent deterrence works in cyberspace or whether a focus on resilience as the new strategic logic is the way forward. This is done with the goal to inform, not only the future of cybersecurity, but more broadly Norwegian and NATO security and defense policy in a changing threat landscape. In addition, this project will strengthen the Norwegian knowledge of the international framework we operate within and how this affect Norway’s international position and security.
Project Manager
Participants
Articles
New publications
Upholding the NATO cyber pledge Cyber Deterrence and Resilience: Dilemmas in NATO defence and security politics
This Policy Brief clarifies the key concepts of traditional deterrence and explores how these apply to cyber deterrence for the NATO alliance. Firstly a range of problems inherent to cyberspace itself and to the translation of existing deterrence models to this domain are identified. Secondly a range of alternative and complementary approaches to deterrence are proposes that can assist in developing a new framework for conceptualizing NATO Alliance cyber deterrence. A rethinking cyber deterrence as a condition of success or failure is argued for: cyber deterrence must be reframed as an ongoing process, utilizing national and Alliance resources from multiple domains as a means to establish deterrence and resilience. It is argued that traditional models of deterrence, drawn from the nuclear and conventional deterrence thinking of many decades’ standing, are inadequate for addressing the challenge of deterring cyber threats in the 21st century. The dynamism of the environment, the range of threats, the multiplicity of state and non-state actors, and the technical challenges of attribution – all require a reorientation of deterrence posture and practice. This reconceptualization must focus on cyberspace itself in an intensification of attention to its idiosyncrasies, but should also be open to a relaxation of orthodoxy in its incorporation of new outlooks and ideas, some of which may strain the established boundaries of deterrence theory. Full text Policy Brief online version: http://www.nupi.no/en/About-NUPI/Projects-centres-and-programmes/Cyber-Security-Centre/Upholding-the-NATO-cyber-pledge