Ohad Barak | Bar-Ilan University (original) (raw)
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Thesis Chapters by Ohad Barak
The position of cyber warfare in the strategic arena is the subject of an ongoing debate. While s... more The position of cyber warfare in the strategic arena is the subject of an ongoing debate. While some scholars believe that “cyber war will not take place” (to use Thomas Rid’s confident assertion), others maintain that cyber war will exert a strategic paralytic impact unto nations.
The present study seeks to broaden the debate by presenting cyber warfare as a military revolution on a par with previous major paradigm shifts (to use Hans Kuhn’s famous definition of a scientific revolution). By way of doing so it will introduce a new theoretical model of military revolutions, comprising both evolutionary and revolutionary components and addressing such issues as socioeconomic changes, technological breakthroughs and operational/organizational/doctrinal adjustments.
The dissertation identifies seven revolutions in warfare that correspond to the model’s criteria: the gun powder revolution; the naval revolution; the French/Napoleonic revolution; the industrial revolution; the aviation revolution; the nuclear revolution and its culmination in the cyber revolution. Having described the nature and characteristics of all previous revolutions as well as their historic evolution, the study will offer an in-depth analysis of cyber warfare, the political and academic debate surrounding it, its role in the future strategic environment, and its unparalleled development. It concludes with a call to scholars to open their theoretical toolkits to explore, explain, and predict adversarial cyber relationships with a view to yielding focused theorization that could guide policy planning in this ever more important sphere.
The position of cyber warfare in the strategic arena is the subject of an ongoing debate. While s... more The position of cyber warfare in the strategic arena is the subject of an ongoing debate. While some scholars believe that “cyber war will not take place” (to use Thomas Rid’s confident assertion), others maintain that cyber war will exert a strategic paralytic impact unto nations.
The present study seeks to broaden the debate by presenting cyber warfare as a military revolution on a par with previous major paradigm shifts (to use Hans Kuhn’s famous definition of a scientific revolution). By way of doing so it will introduce a new theoretical model of military revolutions, comprising both evolutionary and revolutionary components and addressing such issues as socioeconomic changes, technological breakthroughs and operational/organizational/doctrinal adjustments.
The dissertation identifies seven revolutions in warfare that correspond to the model’s criteria: the gun powder revolution; the naval revolution; the French/Napoleonic revolution; the industrial revolution; the aviation revolution; the nuclear revolution and its culmination in the cyber revolution. Having described the nature and characteristics of all previous revolutions as well as their historic evolution, the study will offer an in-depth analysis of cyber warfare, the political and academic debate surrounding it, its role in the future strategic environment, and its unparalleled development. It concludes with a call to scholars to open their theoretical toolkits to explore, explain, and predict adversarial cyber relationships with a view to yielding focused theorization that could guide policy planning in this ever more important sphere.