Deciphering Cyber Operations: The use of methods and simulations for studying military strategic concepts in cyberspace
By Seth T. Hamman, Jelena Vićić, Jack Mewhirter, Philip White, Richard J. Harknett
| March 23, 2020
The academic research community faces a significant hurdle when it comes to the study of nation-state cyber operations dynamics. For national security and commercial reasons, little to no cyber operations data is disclosed to the public. Without access to operational data, academic contributions will remain
inhibited and the academy will be underutilized in the study of this important strategic domain. We claim that researchers can begin to overcome this information gap by designing experiments that take place within simulation environments. Such approaches are beneficial in that they allow researchers to generate data not easily collected or observed in real-world settings and increase the capacity of researchers to isolate causal effects.
In this paper, we describe a simulation environment specifically designed to study cyber operations dynamics below the threshold of armed attack—the competitive space where nearly all nation-state cyber operations activity takes place today. We discuss the simulation environment and then, to illustrate how it can be leveraged to generate tests of research hypotheses, detail our pilot experiment which examines the escalatory dynamics of defend forward activities.
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