Cyberspace enables cooperation and conflict in nearly equal measure. In today’s open, near-free, digitally enabled globalization, new and old enemies from unempowered individuals to national-level leaders can use easy access to international systems to engage in conflict, or economics, or both. Barriers to entry have particularly fallen for bad actors seeking to exploit distant populations using cyberspace connections. Each set of actors today at their own chosen scale of organization can reach far, deep, and wide into other nations at little near-term physical cost or physical risk to themselves. At their whim, distant or hidden bad actors can also use...

History does not offer directly equivalent examples of the open-cybered world. If all those appropriate, legal, and sensible institutional responses to multifaceted surprise were in place and nurtured properly, one can argue that a given set of allied city-states would be at about the best place one can be to disrupt and be resilient against threats to tightly linked critical systems inside their respective borders. This discussion seeks to show the reasonableness of a security resilience strategy by rereading historical case studies. The intent is to see to what extent successful and unsuccessful leaders instinctively employed elements of a security...

Cybered conflict is a uniquely modern form of competition due to the globally open and easily accessible cyberspace. Modern city-states have much in common with their predecessors in Athens, Florence, and even the reluctant colonialists in London in terms of threats, save that today’s threatening bad neighbors, nonstate raiders, and large aggressive states will inevitably use cybered means to attack. The lessons of previous city-states are applicable in that they reinforce the need for knowledge development well in advance. Florence did not have such knowledge and was constantly paying exorbitant funds to escape the consequences of its inaccurate and incomplete...

Any book on international security in a time of cybered conflict needs to deal directly with the asymmetric knowledge challenges that enable offense advantages—scale, proximity, and precision. Cybered conflict requires a uniquely modern, highly informed, rapid way of fighting that accommodates the topology for the international system. Success in the face of surprise in large, dispersed, complex systems is crucially based on knowledge at the right moment, in the right form, and used in the most accurate and timely way. In particular, international security is no longer purely external, and any successful strategy must necessarily explain its prerequisites in...

History tells us much about human social tendencies, a good deal about prior experiments in social control and security, and only a little about today’s circumstances of multiply netted, chronic, violent, and gray threats to westernized city-states from turbulent, densely populated, dysfunctional regions of the world. In recorded history, such serious security threats induced conquest, neglect, brutal internal suppression, or annihilation (the ultimate submission of one side).¹ Today westernized nations would neither seek nor accept these outcomes. Yet one cannot allow the offensive advantages of a global cybered world—scale, precision, and proximity—to disable critical functions of modern nations...