My takeaway is a bit not-apropos of his main point, but here goes:
Mutually Assured Destruction has indeed obsoleted conventional great-power warfare. This is not to say that we need to disarm, though! But we should dump as much as we can into cyber, because that’s how the next conflicts will be decided.
I’m actually not as alarmed here as most might suggest I should be, at the fact that we don’t appear to have any cyber edge over our primary adversaries. This is because cyber, unlike nukes, is one of those military assets that loses its entire value when you make it public.
So either way - whether we have a better cyber arsenal, or not - there’s little you or I can do from a public accountability standpoint. It’s not that our opinions won’t change public policy, it’s just that it’s a Schrödinger’s Arsenal: We’ll find out whether our government listened to us and bothered to have a sufficient one, when the actual shit goes down.
In the absence of actual warfare and conquest, economic and propaganda warfare is clearly the next realm of competition. Which sucks for us, because we’re… falling behind.
Fortunately for the West, it’s really just America that’s falling behind. Europe is twice our population and twice our economy. The only real problem is that Europe doesn’t have the military to fend for itself.
But that’ll sort itself out in a few generations, violently or not. The real long-term threat is that Europe’s systems of governance, while seemingly saner than America’s for now, clearly have the same sorts of insane fault lines sewn into them. They just haven’t had as much time under those systems for those fault lines to become as disastrous as they have here.
The U.S. has some talent in the cyber field. How much is hard to say and some of the problem may be getting everyone pointed in the same direction. Plenty of people are wary of working for the government; fears of governmental overreach permeate our society. We also have a hodge-podge of agencies each tasked with oversight of its own systems.
The hodge-podge is less of a problem than most people think it is. We've overblown a handful of critical failures over the past century without understanding the risks of overcentralization.
Centralization is kind of a mixed bag. Totalitarian systems are notoriously *de*-centralized. But authoritarians and illiberal democracies tend to centralize their security services.
I think the big problem is just that we haven't focused on consolidating our purely offensive and defensive capabilities into the military. We don't treat cyber as a mostly military issue, we treat it as an issue mostly concerning criminals and private corporations. Dumb journalists will write alarmist shit like "We don't have a single service that's focusing on [X infrastructure sector], so we're all doomed!", and it's stupid when they do that. Yes, we actually DO have various actors in our government who are working night and day on these problems. The real problem is that even if we nag and nag our power companies to have secure infrastructure, even if we understand that the critical strategic threat isn't cybercriminals but national actors, we don't take the obvious steps like air-gapping the power grid, because it's so expensive. Private power companies don't want to spend the money, and taxpayers bitch that the government is spending too much money to prevent things that will never happen.
Amen to that! The UK has deeper cultural fault lines that have kept its party system somewhat more agile: As much as US Southerners hate Northerners, they've always been able to countenance finding common cause with like-minded Northerners, and vice-versa. But in the UK, Scots and Irish view England as an entirely different country, and thus while the idea of making common cause with English parties has never been completely anathema, it's always been in the form of negotiating with them as a unified national party, not by joining them outright.
If the EU had never happened, I suspect the UK's party system would eventually have ossified to the point that the SNP and Irish would join their respective sides. As it stands, though, the EU/Brexit has made separatism more likely. If that ever happens, and absent any electoral reforms, the two parties left in England will consolidate power.
The U.S. has some talent in the cyber field. How much is hard to say and some of the problem may be getting everyone pointed in the same direction. Plenty of people are wary of working for the government; fears of governmental overreach permeate our society. We also have a hodge-podge of agencies each tasked with oversight of its own systems.
The hodge-podge is less of a problem than most people think it is. We've overblown a handful of critical failures over the past century without understanding the risks of overcentralization.
Centralization is kind of a mixed bag. Totalitarian systems are notoriously *de*-centralized. But authoritarians and illiberal democracies tend to centralize their security services.
I think the big problem is just that we haven't focused on consolidating our purely offensive and defensive capabilities into the military. We don't treat cyber as a mostly military issue, we treat it as an issue mostly concerning criminals and private corporations. Dumb journalists will write alarmist shit like "We don't have a single service that's focusing on [X infrastructure sector], so we're all doomed!", and it's stupid when they do that. Yes, we actually DO have various actors in our government who are working night and day on these problems. The real problem is that even if we nag and nag our power companies to have secure infrastructure, even if we understand that the critical strategic threat isn't cybercriminals but national actors, we don't take the obvious steps like air-gapping the power grid, because it's so expensive. Private power companies don't want to spend the money, and taxpayers bitch that the government is spending too much money to prevent things that will never happen.
"They just haven’t had as much time under those systems for those fault lines to become as disastrous as they have here."
Except for the U.K., which uses the same electoral system as us (FPTP).
Amen to that! The UK has deeper cultural fault lines that have kept its party system somewhat more agile: As much as US Southerners hate Northerners, they've always been able to countenance finding common cause with like-minded Northerners, and vice-versa. But in the UK, Scots and Irish view England as an entirely different country, and thus while the idea of making common cause with English parties has never been completely anathema, it's always been in the form of negotiating with them as a unified national party, not by joining them outright.
If the EU had never happened, I suspect the UK's party system would eventually have ossified to the point that the SNP and Irish would join their respective sides. As it stands, though, the EU/Brexit has made separatism more likely. If that ever happens, and absent any electoral reforms, the two parties left in England will consolidate power.