Correspondence: A Cyber Disagreement

Policymakers and pundits have been sounding alarms about internet insecurity for years, so the first appearance of anything in International Security (IS) on this topic is a welcomed development. In the fall 2013 issue, Lucas Kello takes the security studies community to task for ignoring cyber perils, while Erik Gartzke argues that cyberwar is of limited political utility.¹ Kello writes that “[t]he Clausewitzian philosophical framework misses the essence of the cyber danger and conceals its true significance: the virtual weapon is expanding the range of possible harms between the concepts of war and peace, with important consequences for national and international security” (p. 22). Gartzke counters, “War is fundamentally a political process, as Carl von Clausewitz famously explained. … The internet is generally an inferior substitute for terrestrial force in performing the functions of coercion or conquest” (p. 42). If Kello is right, then the long silence...