Thirteen years ago, I argued that "cyber war will not take place", and that the more productive questions were how espionage, sabotage, and subversion — and the attribution of these covert activities — were evolving. This essay revisits that argument in light of a dozen pivotal years. Cyberwar as an idea has continued to recede, yet the covert contest beneath it has intensified. I survey three major trends: a mid-2010s visibility spike into signals intelligence and advanced threat actors that has since collapsed; the rise of sabotage from rarity to routine, increasingly fused with subversion and military operations; and a subversive turn in which authentic exposure operations and old-fashioned physical active measures outperform synthetic content. I then ask whether large language models (LLMs) will amplify or break these trends. My answer is that they will largely amplify them: deepening stealth in espionage, integrating sabotage more fully into combined operations, and raising the premium on authenticity in subversion. The essay concludes that what gets buried alongside cyberwar is the field's youthful confidence that clear lines once separated espionage, sabotage, subversion, and counterintelligence.
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doi.org/10.55682/cdr/8kyd-rrkd
The Cyber Defense Review
Volume 11, Issue 2