Cyber capabilities and operations properly aligned to a military's operational scheme can provide commanders with additional ways to prevail in armed conflict. Leveraging the potential operational impact of cyber capabilities in all-domain operations requires policymakers and contingency planners to adopt an operational scheme framework as a first step. A military operational scheme indicates how a state plans to fight. The impact of various conventional military capabilities varies across such schemes as blitzkrieg, limited aims, attrition, and insurgency. The same holds for cyber means. When planning beforehand and assessing afterwards, alignment with an operational scheme is a key variable. Cyber capabilities and operations are not one-size-fits-all. This article offers a framework and illuminates the importance of alignment or misalignment with a brief examination of how Russia employed cyber operations in Ukraine from 2015 through the opening weeks of its 2022 full-scale invasion. We conclude that poor alignment of cyber capabilities with Russia's warfighting scheme limited the operational impact of cyber means.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE
doi.org/10.55682/cdr/t41n-758s
The Cyber Defense Review
Volume 11, Issue 1