This book examines how states integrate cyber capabilities with other instruments of power to achieve foreign policy outcomes. Given North Korea’s use of cyber intrusions to threaten the international community and extort funds for its elites, Chinese espionage and the theft of government records through the Office of Personal Management (OPM) hack, and the Russian hack on the 2016 US election, this book is a timely contribution to debates about power and influence in the 21st century. Its goal is to understand how states apply cyber means to achieve political ends, a topic speculated and imagined, but investigated with very little analytical rigor. Following on Valeriano and Maness’s (2015) book, Cyber War versus Cyber Realities: Cyber Conflict in the International System, this new study explores how states apply cyber strategies, using empirical evidence and key theoretical insights largely missed by the academic and strategy community. It investigates cyber strategies in their integrated and isolated contexts, demonstrating that they are useful to managing escalation and sending ambiguous signals, but generally they fail to achieve coercive effect.
How might rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies affect the construction and application of military power? Despite the emerging importance of AI systems in defense modernization initiatives, there has been little empirical or theoretical study from the perspective of the international relations (IR) and security studies fields. This article addresses this shortcoming by describing AI developments and assessing the manner in which AI is likely to affect military organizations. We focus specifically on military power, as new methods and modes thereof will alter the constitution of security relationships around the world and affect the ability of states to bargain, signal, and influence in the twenty-first century. We argue that, though rapid adoption of AI technologies stands to transform states’ ways of war on a number of fronts, an AI revolution brings with it new forms of risk that must be reconciled with the widespread integration of algorithmic systems across military functions. Where new technology promises a transformation of the character of military power in some veins, it also complicates the cognitive aspects of decision-making and bureaucratic interactions in security institutions. The speed with which complex integrated AI systems enable entirely new modes of war also stands to detach human agency in a potentially destabilizing fashion from the conduct of warfare on several fronts. Preventing the negative externalities of these “ghosts in the machine” will involve significant efforts to educate decision makers, promote accountability, and restrain irresponsible employment of AI.
Combining the English School of International Relations and the study of grand strategy decision-making processes, this article investigates how dynamic density – growing volume, velocity, and diversity of interactions within international society – alters states’ strategy formation processes. By contrasting the perspectives of structural realism and the English School on the role of dynamic density in world politics, the piece illustrates the strategist’s dilemma: as global dynamic density in the international society increases, the ability of great powers to formulate coherent grand strategies and policies potentially decreases. Specifically, it contends that growing global dynamic density generates processual and substantive fragmentation in strategy formation. Building on a large body of elite interviews, US policy toward China – and the so-called US ‘rebalance’ to Asia – is used as a probability probe of the central idea of the strategist’s dilemma. In conclusion, we contrast our findings with complex interdependence theory and examine their implications for ‘great power management’ (GPM) as a primary institution of international society. We argue that, by generating processual and substantive fragmentation in strategy formation, global dynamic density complicates GPM by hindering the capacity of great powers to manage and calibrate the competitive and cooperative dynamics at play in a bilateral relationship.
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