Cyberspace has evolved into a persistent arena of “Great Systems Conflict” in which states increasingly target the socio-technical-economic foundations of rival societies through continuous, digitally enabled campaigns. The insecure and commercially driven foundations of the modern cyber substrate created enduring offense advantages that have systematically favored adversaries, particularly China, in areas ranging from intellectual property extraction to technological dependency and cognitive influence operations. As a result, democratic societies face mounting strategic vulnerability across the interconnected systems that underpin governance, critical infrastructure, economic competitiveness, and public trust. This Senior Leader Perspective argues that the strategic edge of the coming decade will depend on whether democratic states can transition from fragmented and reactive cyber defense toward a Cyber Operational Resilience Alliance (CORA): an integrated defense architecture uniting allied governments, militaries, private-sector technology providers, academia, and legal institutions into a collective defense-in-depth ecosystem. The perspective highlights Ukraine’s wartime cyber resilience as an operational proof of concept for such collaboration. Ultimately, the author calls for wartime-tempo institutional coordination, allied technological integration, and sustained public-private collaboration to preserve democratic resilience in an increasingly contested digital century.
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doi.org/10.55682/cdr/vsw6-exwb
The Cyber Defense Review
Volume 11, Issue 2