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Series on Memory, History and Power: Which door to which city? The Vraca Memorial Park and anti-fascism legacy in Sarajevo

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View from Vraca Memorial Park, 2015. Photo by the author

This article is a part of our Series on Memory, History, and Power.  Read the Series Introduction here.

From the slopes of mount Trebavić, you have a privileged view over Sarajevo. To get there, it is only a 20-minute walk from Grbavica, a popular residential neighbourhood built during Socialist Yugoslavia. Although short, the climb is quite literally breath-taking: the air pollution hits dangerous levels during the winter, the road doesn’t have proper pavements to protect you from high speed cars and, as soon as you arrive you are struck by a panoramic view over the whole capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Thus, it is not hard to understand why the original site’s name is Vratca, meaning ‘small door’. As soon as you get there, the view over Sarajevo gives you the impression that the place is a door to the city.

Due to its strategic place in the city, Vraca was coveted by different groups over the centuries. Successive occupying powers curated the place according to the role they attributed to Sarajevo. Whilst under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1898, it was a military fortress. Later, during the Second World War, the site was transformed into a death field and burial ground, where Ustaše[1] executed thousands – mostly Jews, Serbs, communists and Partisans. Moreover, due to its position as ‘a door to the city’, it was used as a deportation hub, where prisoners were taken to concentration camps throughout the region. In total, at least 12,000 inhabitants of Sarajevo were killed by fascist forces. Their names were inscribed into the monument, which would be built almost four decades later at that site.

The Vraca Memorial Park was first conceived by veterans’ groups and authorities in Sarajevo as early as 1965. Around this time, other monuments and memorials were built to celebrate the National Liberation War, or Narodnooslobodilačka borba (NOB), as it was called in Yugoslavia the guerrilla-style liberation war led by the Yugoslav Partisans against the Axis occupying forces and their puppet regimes in the region. From the 1950s onwards, the Yugoslav authorities invested in the construction of thousands of monuments and memorials to the NOB, including large structures, such as the Monument to the Battle of Sutjeska, and many other smaller initiatives, such as plaques and sculptures. The NOB monuments occupied a special place inside the narrative of Yugoslavia, publicly demonstrating the centrality of the shared struggle against fascist forces, thereby creating an intra-ethnonational memory of suffering.[2] The abstract modernist-brutalist sculptures and memorials recall the days when Yugoslavia promoted ideals such as modernization and statehood, avoiding, at the same time, association with any particular ethnonational group.

Unlike other NOB monuments, that were built after Second World War and laid the basis for official narratives and memories of that period, Vraca Memorial Park took a long time to be constructed, in a moment where the economy was not so prosperous any longer.  It was only in 1981 that the six-hectare memorial was built, in an attempt to transform a place associated with suffering into a site of tribute and socio-political gathering. The memorial itself comprises several monuments addressing different categories of victims: one tomb is dedicated to ‘the city’s national heroes’, there is a memorial wall inscribed with around 12,000 names of those who were killed during the war, a tribute to women fighters and a monument to Tito, the leader of the Partisans through NOB/Second World War and Yugoslav leader until his death, in 1980.

Even though the Vraca Memorial Park was built in the 1980s, at a time of resurgence for ethno-nationalism in Yugoslavia, the memorial – which precisely claimed an anti-ethnonationalism approach – has played an important role in the life of the city for some time. It became a place that hosted mass gatherings, such as the Young Pioneer political youth group; a place to celebrate public anniversaries and holidays or to simply sit down and enjoy the view. A page dedicated to the monument states that ‘Vraca without a doubt was (…) a cultural landmark for the city and stood as one of Sarajevo’s enduring and unifying symbols during this time period’.

Ironically, despite being an antifascist memorial, Vraca was transformed ten years later, into one of the sites from which Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces (VRS) conducted the siege of Sarajevo, from 1992 to 1995. From Vraca, the VRS fired against the Bosnian capital, using heavy artillery or snipers. VRS operations against the people of Sarajevo were never recognized as genocide by an international court, but have been labelled an urbicide, a deliberate targeting of urban life, which involved the ‘destruction of buildings as a condition of possibility of being-with-others’.[3] From Vraca (and elsewhere), the agenda of ‘ethnonational cleansing’ targeted the shared histories, cultures and heritages in Sarajevo on a daily basis, destroying the city’s social tissue and hampering any possibility of a ‘normal life.’[4] As VRS general Ratko Mladic said, ‘go on with the artillery fire. Don’t let them sleep. Let’s make them crazy.’

The agenda of total destruction was carried out from the site. When VRS retreated, they left Vraca Memorial Park completely devastated, and its outskirts littered with anti-personnel mines. As politics of memorialization in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina were produced along ethnonational lines,[5] there have been a myriad of new monuments dedicated to the suffering of each constituent people (Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats). In a city such as Brčko, there are three different memorials in the main square dedicated to the victims of each ethnonational group. As churches and mosques were being rebuilt through the country, not surprisingly the Vraca Memorial Park, a unifying symbol, remained abandoned and vandalized. Many other NOB monuments suffered the same fate, not only in Bosnia but also in Croatia, Kosovo and North Macedonia. Some have completely vanished, much like the regime which constructed them.

Since 2005, Vraca Memorial Park has been declared a National Monument thanks to civil society groups, such as SABNOR (Association of Antifascists and Fighters of the People’s Liberation War in the Sarajevo Canton). Until very recently, however, this was not translated into a better care of the site, nor into its reintegration into the city’s public life.

Last year, memories of Second World War regained the streets of Sarajevo. On the 16th of May, a mass devoted to honour Ustaše troops and Axis-aligned civilians killed by partisans in 1945[6] was celebrated in Sarajevo Cathedral. Even though the city, and the world, was under the yoke of the Covid-19 pandemic, thousands of activists, members of anti-fascist organisations and citizens took the streets to protest against the religious service. One woman held a poster reminding people that ‘it doesn’t take that many fascists to make fascism’. The protest was a clear message that thousands of people will still stand against far-right movements that claim memories both from the Second World War and the 1990s wars. They showed that, although monument-building is a crucial practice to establish official narratives, ‘anti-fascism is not a monument’. It depends a lot on how people enact those positions, what they do and how they practise those memories from the past. From everyday practices such as cleaning, caring and curating Vraca by volunteers[7], to more public spectacles, such as the 2020 protest against the mass, it is clear that anti-fascism stances are very well alive. Both the May protests and the everyday silent work of curating Vraca are signs that citizens are willing to enact anti-fascism practices whenever they feel memories from the wars are being challenged, instrumentalized or simply facing oblivion. Recently, there was also a sign from Sarajevo authorities in the same direction. In 2019, at the anniversary of liberation of Sarajevo from fascist forces, the Eternal Flame at Vraca was again relight, after 27 years.

[1] Ustaše, led by Ante Pavelić, is the Croatian fascist movement that nominally ruled the Independent State of Croatia during Second World War. Among its aims, the Ustaše movement sought independence from Yugoslavia, and, once it was achieved, their goal was to create a ‘purely Croatian state’. Hundreds of thousands of Serb, Jewish, Muslim and Gypsy inhabitants were brutally killed in such attempt.

[2] Vladana Putnik, “Second World War Monuments in Yugoslavia as Witnesses of the Past and the Future,” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 14, no. 3 (2016): 206-21.

[3] Martin Coward, Urbicide. The Politics of Urban Destruction (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).

[4] Ivana Macek, Sarajevo Under Siege. Anthropology in Wartime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

[5] Jelena Subotić, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2019).

[6] The memorial mass is organized annually by the Croatian Church and held in Bleiburg, Austria, where sympathisers of Ustaše regime were killed by partisans. The commemoration has attracted thousands of people, and, more recently, has increasingly attracted overtly pro-Ustaše fascists. Due to sanitarian restrictions to prevent the spread of Covid-19, last year the borders with Austria were closed and, therefore, the mass was held elsewhere.

[7] Lydia Cole, Curating Vraca Memorial Park: Everyday Practice, Counter-Politics, and Counter- Monumentalism (Forthcoming).

Series on Memory, History and Power: Introduction

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The fallen Columbus after a group led by American Indian Movement members tore it down in Minnesota, 2020 | Photo by Tony Webster, used under Creative Commons.

Over the last years, we have seen disputes over statues and monuments all over the world. Memorials dedicated to military achievements, war heroes, colonialists and slave traders have been at the centre of debates on the deconstruction of history and the ways some events and national groups have been inscribed in the public space.  In 2019, for example, we saw Santiago, the capital of Chile, being occupied by protesters waving the flag of the indigenous Mapuche people. One particular image went viral all around the world: in the photo, dozens of protesters climb a military monument in the centre of Santiago and at the top of the statue, a man raises the Mapuche’s flag, a people that has been under attack in Chile since the arrival of Spanish colonizers, in the 16th century. In South Africa, the campaign Rhodes Must Fall led to the removal of a statue in honour of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town. The withdraw flared up a discussion regarding what to do with other monuments to Rhodes around the country. In 2020, we saw similar scenes being repeated throughout Europe, United States and Latin America, when statues of slave trader Edward Colston, Columbus, Belgian King Leopold II and Portuguese Jesuit missionary Father António Vieira, just to name a few, woke up either, at the bottom of a river, painted in red, headless or wearing signs saying: ‘decolonize’. Such movements intended to problematise what is remembered in the public sphere and how those monuments relate to the way we conceive a country’s history or the history of colonialism and slavery.

‘There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’[i], writes Walter Benjamin on his 7th thesis on the philosophy of History. For some, statues such as those of Colston, Rhodes and Vieira are symbols of civilisation. For many others, they are memories of massacres and genocides, symbols of barbarism. Monuments as, for example, the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, built in the memory of the infant Henry the Navigator – considered the patron of the 16th century Portuguese colonial expansion – represent the memory of the victors, they anchor history the way power wants it seen. That is the reason why, if we take Benjamin’s critique of history as a guide, we need to deconstruct such monuments built by hegemonic historical narratives. And what we have been seeing over recent years throughout the world are precisely such moments of such deconstruction.

That is to say that the debate over monuments and statues should be considered under a broader scope of history, memory and dynamics of power intertwined in both phenomena. In a recent article in the French newspaper Le Libération, Paul B. Preciado described statues as ‘prosthesis of historic memory that remind us the lives “that matter”’. They inscribe on public space the bodies that deserve to be immortalized in stone and metal. ‘Public sculptures’, he writes, ‘do not represent the people, they build it: they depict a national pure body and determine an ideal of colonial and sexual citizenship’. To critique history as celebrated by statues is, then, to critique the construction of the nation state itself. This series analyses both how events and characters are chosen to be marked in a city or a country’s landscape, and how art might disrupt national and imperial ideals, functioning sometimes as a sort of counter-memory.

Series Publication Schedule

  • Part I: Portugal: the return of the colonial war, by Miguel Cardina
  • Part II: Which door to which city? The Vraca Memorial Park and anti-fascism legacy in Sarajevo, by Renata Summa
  • Part III: Indigenous Uruguay: monuments, histories and memories, by Henrique Gasperin
  • Part IV: The Red Atlantic: modernity and markers of discrimination, by Victor Coutinho Lage
  • Part V: The Memory Sewing: alternative history(ies) of the past and present, by Mariana Caldas

[i] Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), p. 256.

Offensive Cyber Series: Amy Ertan on AI and Military Innovation, Part I

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Photo Credit: Mike MacKenzie, licensed via Creative Commons.

On Wednesday 17th March, Strife Interviewer Ed Stacey sat down with Amy Ertan to discuss offensive cyber in the context of artificial intelligence (AI) and military innovation. For part three of Strife’s Offensive Cyber Series, Ms Ertan discusses the current role of AI in offensive cyber and potential future trajectories, including effects on the offence-defence balance and arms racing, as well as her PhD research, which explores the unforeseen and unintended security consequences of developing and implementing military AI.

Ed Stacey: Amy, could you start by briefly defining AI in the context of offensive cyber. Are we really just talking about machine learning, for example?

Amy Ertan: Artificial intelligence is not just machine learning algorithms – it is a huge range of technologies. There is a whole history of AI that goes back to before the mid-1970s and late-80s: rule-based AI and knowledge-based AI which is, as it sounds, learning based on rules and logic. Then in the last decade or so we have seen a huge uptick in machine learning-based algorithms and its various sub-branches, including deep-learning and neural networks, which are incredibly complex algorithms that we cannot actually understand as humans. So, in summary, AI is a big umbrella term for different kinds of learning technologies.

At the same time, there is some snake oil in the market and a lot of what people call AI can just be probabilistic statistics. Being generous, some of the start-ups that you see are doing if-then algorithms that we could probably do on Excel. That does not, of course, account for the tech giant stuff. But when we talk about AI, we have everything from the super basic things that are not really AI to the incredibly well-financed, billion dollar projects that we see at Amazon, Microsoft and so on.

Machine learning is where a lot of today’s cutting edge research is. So the idea that you can feed data, potentially untagged data – unsupervised learning – into an algorithm, let the algorithm work through that and then make predictions based on that data. So, for example, you feed in three million pictures of cats and if the algorithm works as intended, it will then recognise what is and is not a cat.

In terms of how that fits into offensive cyber, AI is another tool in the toolkit. A learning algorithm, depending on how it is designed and used, will be just like any other cyber tool that you might have, only with learning technology within it. I would make the point that it is not something that we see being utilised today in terms of pure cyber attacks because it is not mature enough to be creative. The machine learning AI that we have right now is very good at narrow tasks, but you cannot just launch it and there is no “AI cyber attack” at the moment.

ES: How might AI enhance or facilitate offensive cyber operations?

AE: As I said, AI is not being used extensively today in offensive cyber operations. The technology is too immature, although we do see AI doing interesting things when it has a narrow scope – like voice or image recognition, text generation or predictive analytics on a particular kind of data set. But looking forward, there are very feasible and clear ways in which AI-enabled technologies might enhance or facilitate cyber operations, both on the offensive and defensive side.

In general, you can talk about the way that AI-enabled tools can speed up or scale up an activity. One example of how AI might enhance offensive cyber operations is through surveillance and reconnaissance. We see already, for example, AI-enabled tools being used in intelligence processing for imagery, like drone footage, saving a huge amount of time and vastly expanding the capacity of that intelligence processing. You could predict that being used to survey a cyber network.

Using AI to automate reconnaissance, to do that research – the very first stage of a cyber attack – is not a capability that you have now. But it would certainly enhance a cyber operation in terms of working out the best target at an organisation – where the weak link was, the best way in. So there is a lot that could be done.

ES: Are we talking then about simply an evolution of currently automated functions or does AI have the potential to revolutionise offensive cyber?

AE: In terms of whether AI will be just a new step or a revolution, generally my research has shown that it will be pretty revolutionary. AI-enabled technology has the power to revolutionise conflict and cyber conflict, and to a large extent that is through an evolution of automated functions and autonomous capabilities. I think the extent to which it is a full-blown revolution will depend on how actors use it.

Within cyberspace, you have this aspect that there might be AI versus AI cyber conflict in the future. Where your offensive cyber tool – your intrusion, your exploit tool – goes head-to-head with your target’s AI-enabled cyber defence tools, which might be intrusion prevention or spam filtering tools that are already AI-enabled. It really depends on how capabilities are used. You will have human creativity but then an AI algorithm makes decisions in ways that humans do not, so that will change some aspects of how offensive cyber activity takes place.

There is debate as to whether this is a cyber attack or information warfare, but I think deep fakes would be an example of a technology or tool that is already being used, falsifying information, that has revolutionised information warfare because of the scale and the nature of the internet today. So how far AI revolutionises offensive cyber will depend not only on its use but also a complex set of interconnections between AI, big data, online connectedness and digital reliance that will come together to change the way that conflict takes place online.

That is a complicated, long answer to say: it depends, but AI definitely does have the potential to revolutionise offensive cyber.

ES: No, thank you – I appreciate that revolutionary is a bit of a loaded term.

AE: Yes, there is a lot of hyperbole when you talk about AI in warfare. But through my doctoral research, every industry practitioner and policy-maker that I have spoken to has agreed that it is a game-changer. Whether or not you agree with the hype, it changes the rules of the game because the speed completely changes and the nature of an attack may completely change. So you definitely cannot say that the power of big data and the power of AI will not change things.

ES: This next question is from Dr Daniel Moore, who I spoke to last week for part two of this series. He was wondering if you think that AI will significantly alter the balance between offence and defence in cyberspace?

AE: I am going to disappoint Danny and say: we do not know yet. We do already see, of course, this interesting balance that states are choosing when they pick their own defence versus offence postures. And I think it is really important to note here that AI is just one tool in the arsenal for a team that is tasked with offensive cyber capabilities. At this point, I do not predict it making a huge difference.

At least when we talk about state-coordinated offensive cyber – sophisticated attacks, taking down adversaries or against critical national infrastructure, for example – they require such sophisticated, niche tools that the automation capabilities provided by AI are unlikely to offer any cutting-edge advantage there. So that depends. AI cyber defence tools streamline a huge amount of activity, whether that is picking out abnormal activities in your network or your logs, that eliminates a huge amount of manual analysis that cyber defence analysts might have to do and gives them more time for meaningful analysis.

AI speeds up and streamlines activity on both the offensive and defensive side, so I think it simply fits into the wider policy discussions for a state. It is one aspect but not the determining aspect, at the moment anyway or in the near future.

ES: And I guess the blurring of the lines between offence and defence in some cyber postures complicates the issue a little?

 AE: Yes, especially when you look at the US and the way they define persistent engagement and defending forward. It is interesting as to where different states will draw their own lines on reaching outside their networks to take down the infrastructure of someone they know is attacking them – offensive activity for defensive purposes. So I think the policy question is much bigger than AI.

ES: Thinking more geopolitically, the UK’s Integrated Review was heavy on science and new technologies and other countries are putting a lot of resources into AI as well. There seems to be some element of a security dilemma here, but would you go so far as to say that we are seeing the start of a nascent AI arms race – what is your view of that framing?

AE: I think to an extent, yes, we do see aspects of a nascent AI arms race. But it is across all sectors, which comes back to AI as a dual-use technology. The Microsoft AI capability that we use now to chat with friends is also being used by NATO command structures and other military structures in command and control infrastructure, albeit in a slightly different form.

Because cutting-edge AI is being developed by private companies, which have the access and resources to do this, it is not like there is this huge arsenal of inherently weaponised AI tools. On the flip side, AI as a dual-use technology means that everything can be weaponised or gamed with enough capability. So it is a very messy landscape.

There have been large debates around autonomous systems in conflict generally, like drones, and I think there is an extent to which we can apply this to cyberspace too. While there is this security dilemma aspect, it is not in any states’ interests to escalate into full-blown warfare that cannot be deescalated and that threatens their citizens, so tools and capabilities should be used carefully.

Now there is a limit to how much you can apply this to cyberspace because of its invisible nature, the lack of transparency and a completely different deterrence structure. But there is an argument that states will show restraint in weaponizing AI where it is not in their interest. You see this conversation taking place, for example, around lethal autonomous weapons at the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts, where it is generally considered that taking the human out of the loop is highly undesirable. But it is complicated and early days.

Looking at the UK, my research has shown that there is pressure to develop AI capabilities in this space and there are perceptions of an AI arms race across the private sector, which is who I spoke to. And there is this awareness that AI investment must happen, in a large part because of anticipated behaviour of adversary states – the idea that other states do not have the same ethical or legal constraints when it comes to offensive cyber or the use of military AI, which is what my PhD thesis focuses on. The only preventative answer to stop this security mechanism building up into an AI arms race seems to be some kind of consensus mechanism, whereby like-minded states agree not to weaponize AI in this way. That is why my research has taken me to NATO, to look in the military context at what kinds of norms can be developed and whether there is a role for international agreement in this way.

If I had to summarise that argument into one or two sentences: there are trends suggesting that there is an AI arms race which is bigger than conflict, bigger than the military and bigger than cyber. So you have to rely on the security interests of the states themselves not to escalate and to potentially form alliance agreements to prevent escalation.

Part II of this interview will be published tomorrow on Friday 18th June 2021.

Offensive Cyber Series: Dr Daniel Moore on Cyber Operations, Part II

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Photo Credit: Ecole polytechnique / Paris / France, licensed with CC BY-SA 2.0.

This is part II of Ed Stacey’s interview with Dr Daniel Moore on cyber operations for Strife’s Offensive Cyber Series. You can find Part I here.

ES: Thinking about alliances more broadly, what sort of opportunities and challenges do allies face when conducting joint operations in cyberspace?

DM: Allied operations on networks – I am not a fan of cyberspace – are contentious as well. They are a good measure more sensitive than any conventional equivalent that you can think of. It is not like having a joint military operation: it means putting your sensitive infrastructure and capabilities on the line alongside an ally. That is not to say it does not happen and there have been documented cases which were purportedly joint operations by multiple countries. So I think it will happen, but there are complexities involved. I know that NATO has already declared that they are together, as an alliance, bringing forward cyber capabilities that they will use jointly. I welcome that declaration, even if I am sceptical as to what it actually means.

I would tend to believe that, considering how porous NATO is as an entity and how there are varying levels of trust within NATO, truly sensitive capabilities will be kept off the table by individual member states in favour of their own arsenals and sets of strategic capabilities. This is not to say it is not possible, but it is unlikely that at a NATO level you will see joint operations that are truly strategic in nature. What you might see is allied members that are operating together. I do not think that, for example, a joint UK-US operation against a target is out of the question, especially if one brings a certain set of capabilities to the table and one brings others – somebody gives the tools, this unit has the relevant exploits, this intelligence organisation had already developed access to that adversary and so on. Melding that together has a lot of advantages, but it requires a level of operational intimacy that is higher than what you would be able to achieve at the NATO alliance level.

ES: Moving beyond the state, what role does the private sector play in the operational side of offensive cyber? Do we have the equivalent of private military contractors in cyberspace, for example?

DM: There is a massive role for the private sector across the entire operational chain within offensive cyber operations. I would say a few things on this. Yes, they cover the entire chain of operations and that includes vulnerability research, exploit development, malicious tool development and then even specific outfits that carry out the entire operational lifecycle, so actually conduct the intrusion itself for whatever purposes. In some cases, it is part of an industrial-defence complex like in the US, for example, where you have some of the giant players in defence developing offensive capabilities, both on the event- and presence-based side of things. And ostensibly you would have some of those folks contributing contractors and operators to actually facilitate operations.

But in other countries that have a more freeform or less mature public sector model for facilitating offensive cyber operations, the reliance on third party private organisations is immense. If you look, for example, at some of the US indictments against Iranian entities, you will see that they charged quite a few Iranian private companies for engaging in offensive cyber operations. The same happens in China as well, where you see private sector entities engaging in operations driven by public sector objectives. In some cases, they are entirely subsumed by a government entity, whereas in others they are just doing work on their behalf. In some cases, you actually see them use the same infrastructure in one beat for national security objectives, then the workday ends and they pivot and start doing ransomware to get some more cash in the evenings – using the same tools or infrastructure, or something slightly different. So, yes, the private sector plays an immense role throughout this entire ecosystem, mostly because the cost of entry is low and the opportunities are vast.

ES: Just to finish, you have a book coming out soon on offensive cyber. Can you tell us anything about what to expect and does it have a title or release date yet?

DM: The book is planned for release in October. It will be titled Offensive Cyber Operations: Understanding Intangible Warfare, and it is basically a heavily processed version of my PhD thesis that has been adapted, firstly, with some additional content to reflect more case studies, but also to appeal to anybody who is interested in the topic without necessarily having a background in cyber nor military strategy and doctrine. So it is trying to bridge the gap and make the book accessible, exactly to dispel some of the ambiguities around the utility of cyber operations. Questions like, how they are currently being used? What can they be used for? What does the “cyber war” narrative mean? When does an offensive cyber operation actually qualify as an act of cyber warfare? And, most importantly, what are the key differences between how different countries approach offensive cyber operations? Things like organisational culture, different levels of maturity, strategic doctrine and even just circumstance really shape how counties approach the space.

So I tackle four case studies – Russia, the US, China and Iran – and each one of those countries has unique advantages and disadvantages, they bring something else to the table and have an entirely different set of circumstances for how they engage. For example, the Iranians are incredibly aggressive and loud in their offensive cyber operations. But the other side to this is that they lack discipline, their tools tend to be of a lower quality and while they are able to achieve tactical impact, it does not always translate to long-term success.

The US is very methodical in its approach – you can see, taste and smell the bureaucracy in every major operation that it does. But that bureaucratic entanglement and the constant tension between the National Security Agency, Cyber Command and other involved military entities results in a more ponderous approach to cyber operations, although those organisations obviously bring a tonne of access and capability.

With the Russians, you can clearly see how they do not address cyber operations as a distinct field. Instead, they look at the information spectrum more holistically, which is of pivotal importance to them – so shaping what is “the truth” and creating the narrative for longer-term strategic success is more important than the specifics. That being said, they are also one of the most prolific offensive actors that we have seen, including multiple attacks against global critical infrastructure and various aggressive worms that exacted a heavy toll from targets. So for Russia, if you start looking at their military doctrine, you can see just how much they borrow, not only from their past in electronic warfare but also their extensive past in information operations, and how those blend together to create a broader spectrum of information capabilities in which offensive cyber operations are just one component.

And finally, the Chinese are prolific actors in cyber espionage – provably so. They have significant technical capabilities, perhaps somewhat shy of their American counterparts but they are high up there. They took interesting steps to solidify their cyber capabilities under a military mandate when they established the Strategic Support Force, which again – like the NCF – tried to resolve organisational tensions by coalescing those capabilities. But they are largely unproven in the offensive space. They do have an interesting scenario on their plate to which cyber could and may play a role, which is any attempt at reclaiming Taiwan – something I look at extensively in the book and how that shapes their offensive posture.

So the book is a combination of a broader analysis of the significance of cyber operations and then how they are concretely applied by different nations for different purposes.

The next interview in Strife’s Offensive Cyber Series is with Amy Ertan on AI and military innovation. It will be released in two parts on Thursday 17th and Friday 18th June 2021.

Offensive Cyber Series: Dr Tim Stevens on Offensive Cyber in the 2020s, Part I

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Photo Credit: AirmanMagazine, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

On Wednesday 3rd March, Strife Interviewer Ed Stacey sat down with Dr Tim Stevens to discuss the state of play in offensive cyber in the 2020s. As part one of Strife’s Offensive Cyber Series, Dr Stevens introduces the topic and offers his thoughts on a range of topical debates, from the utility of offensive cyber capabilities to questions around international law and ethics and the UK’s recently avowed National Cyber Force.

Ed Stacey: Tim, as you know, this interview series is all about offensive cyber. This is quite a slippery term, so could you perhaps kick us off with a working definition?

Tim Stevens: You will be unsurprised to hear that there is no working definition, or at least no consensus on definition, about what offensive cyber is. Obviously, it is a term that attempts to draw some kind of analogy from other capabilities that can be used for offensive purposes – one of which is obviously weapons, another would be munition. But actually, offensive cyber is a lot more difficult to pin down because it is not kinetic in any conventional sense: it is not something that you can throw, shoot or drop on someone to cause damage.

But what offensive cyber tries to get at is the idea that through computer code, so little packets of software that can be sent through computer networks, you are going to attempt to deny, degrade, disrupt or even destroy something that your enemy holds to be of value. This principally could be data itself or it could be the computer systems and computer networks that data is held on.

Now offensive cyber is also being used not just in a military context but an intelligence context too, so it has some relationships with espionage or at least the covert activities of intelligence agencies. It could conceivably be used not in the kind of military break things sense but in the more inflected activities of intelligence, like subversion or sabotage, that occupy a slightly weird space and do not look like acts of war, for example.

ES: Terms such as cyber war, cyber attack and cyber weapons are used quite loosely in public discourse. Do you think we need to be more precise with our language when we are talking about offensive cyber?

TS: I think it would help if we had in common discourse some understanding that perhaps we are overhyping some of the phenomena that were describing, and using heavily militarised language like cyber war really does not help. Cyber attacks are usually nothing of the sort and cyber weapons usually cannot be classed as weapons, for example.

To take the cyber war example. When we think about cyber war, these days it usually means some kind of state of hostilities operating between two states, in which they are battering each other with cyber weapons of some description or another. Now apart from the fact that we have not seen this, it is also unlikely that we will see it. I think if two states are to be in a declared or actual state of cyber hostilities, there will be other issues – other types of operations in other domains – that are going to be just as relevant. So this idea of a standalone cyber war is not helpful.

Cyber warfare, on the other hand, is helpful because that is what militaries and intelligence agencies arguably are involved in at present – they are fighting, conflicting and contesting cyberspace as an operational domain. And they are doing that through offensive cyber, in part, but also through other activities that they can bring to bear on that domain. So cyber warfare has some utility; it is a form of warfighting or conflict through cyber means.

Cyber attacks, well that is just used to denote anything that you do not like. Whether it is an attack in any kind of conventional or attenuated sense is really irrelevant. If your adversary – whether they are a criminal, terrorist, state or proxy – has done something to your networks that you do not like, you call it a cyber attack, even though it might be nothing of the sort. It might be one of billions of automated pings or bots that confront your networks everyday as a matter of course. Or it could be a cunning, socially-engineered and sophisticated cyber operation against something that you hold of value. The two are clearly not the same, but they are all being called cyber attacks in popular discourse, and the media are just as guilty of this as politicians and occasionally academics and civil society too. So I do think it is important to make these distinctions.

The issue with cyber weapons is whether these types of capabilities can actually be described as weapons, and again there is no consensus. Conventionally weapons have to have the capacity to hurt by virtue of, say, ballistics. If you think about discussions around chemical and biological weapons, people are sometimes unconformable calling them weapons in any conventional sense too. And the thing about cyber weapons is that, as of yet, no direct physical harm has been caused by any of those capabilities. Instead, what happens is that there is attenuated secondary harm that would be caused when, for example, you change the 1s and 0s in an incubator in an intensive care unit and as a result of that someone dies, but it does not directly harm that person. So that is the kind of debate that is being had about whether these capabilities are weapons or not.

ES: Thinking about the utility of offensive cyber, why are states developing these types of capabilities and what do they offer that other capabilities do not?

TC: To think about the broader utility or the framing of these capabilities is, I think, to return to the [revolution in military affairs] of the late 1980s and early 1990s, then going on in subsequent decades in western military affairs. So the suggestion that we are shifting towards informationalised, precision strike, stand-off warfare that prioritises our own force protection and the ability to cause effects hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away.

Clearly, if you are sitting at a computer in one part of the world and you wish to attack another computer on the other side of the world, it is much easier to do that through computer networks than it is through conventional means: the mode of operation, the platform and the technology is much easier to get hold of. And if you can create the same effects remotely than if you were standing a hundred yards or half a mile away, then why would you not? You do not have to put your troops, or indeed your intelligence agents, in harm’s way. If you do not have to put a human asset into a foreign country to achieve an effect, why would you? These are the kind of attractions that states are finding in these sorts of capabilities.

Another one, of course, is that it is relatively cheap. It is much easier to hire people to develop these kinds of capabilities than it is to develop a new weapon system. Essentially, if the weapon system you need is, if not quite an off the shelf computer system but something existing that can be adapted, it is much cheaper than trying to develop a new line of fighter jet, precision guided munition, helicopter or battleship of any description. So that is attraction there.

Another thing is this idea of effects. As I mentioned previously, if you can create some kind of effect that generates, mainly operational or strategic but also tactical, advantage over your adversary through the use of computer networks, that has to be attractive. If it is cheaper, if it does not put your troops in harm’s way and, importantly, does not immediately escalate to something that looks like a conventional shooting war. Because if people are not being directly harmed, but yet you are causing your adversary to change their mind or behaviour in some fashion, that is incredibly seductive for a commander or state that is looking to improve, enhance or extend their operational and strategic toolbox. So that is the general idea behind why these capabilities are attractive.

ES: Looking at the other side of things, what are the limits of offensive cyber?

TC: That is a good question and an open one too. These kinds of capabilities may be attractive to countries and their militaries and intelligence agencies, but the jury is out on how effective they actually are. Because it turns out, for various reasons, that it is actually quite difficult to get your adversary to do what you want through cyber means. Partly this is because they are not as easy to control as we might think, and partly it is because, as I mentioned earlier, causing kinetic effects to actually change someone’s mind in a visceral sense is very difficult.

It is also difficult because you cannot keep doing it with the same capabilities. Once you have developed an advanced offensive cyber capability, essentially you can only use it once because then your enemy will see the code, understand the vulnerability that has been exploited, patch their systems and then that vulnerability disappears. So you cannot keep holding your enemy’s assets at risk, which means that even if something happens once – and given that no computer system is demonstrably secure, it is going to happen at some point – you know that it is a one-off attack. Because you know, or at least you hope, that your adversary has not got the capability to keep punishing you in that way. So that means that if you can roll with the punches if you get attacked or exploited, you are not expecting a follow-up that is really going to double down and force you to change your mind or your behaviour.

So for all the attraction of these capabilities, there are limits. Now that is not to say that there are limits to the imagination of people who wish to develop and deploy these things, and I am not saying for a second that, with this realisation that there are limits to their utility, states are going to stop developing them, because they are not. In fact, what I think is going to happen is what you are seeing at the moment, which is that states and other actors are going to continue to experiment with them until they find some way of generating the higher-level effects that they wish.

To bring that round to a conclusion: tactically, they can be very useful; operationally, they can generate some really interesting effects; strategically, it looks very difficult to generate the effects that you want.

Part II of this interview will be published tomorrow on Friday 4th June 2021.