Russian Cyber Operations. Scott Jasper
and parties for its aims.”139 While Russia enjoys massed conventional superiority in Europe along its frontiers, the nonkinetic aspects of its asymmetric arsenal operate uninterrupted today without fear of legal reprisal.
The DDoS attacks against Estonia in 2007 constituted Moscow’s first use of large-scale, coordinated cyber operations in an attempt to coerce a neighboring state into making a concession.140 The unrest posed no immediate threat to the Russian Federation but to the interests of nearby Russian-minority populations. Throughout the cyber campaign, NATO member Estonia grappled with the decision to invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter for collective self-defense but could not decisively tie the Kremlin to the attacks. Seemingly, according to Jaak Aaviksoo, it was clear that “at present, NATO does not define cyber-attack as a clear military action.”141 Nonetheless, the DDoS attacks failed to reach the scale-and-effects threshold for classification of an armed attack, an essential condition of Article 5, which alone did not allow Estonia to defend itself with force. Likewise in the Georgia conflict, labeled by the international media as “cyber war,” the effect of the cyber operation itself “was not serious enough to amount to severe economic damage or significant human suffering.”142 It was also difficult to distinguish the damage and suffering in Georgia caused by cyber operations from that caused by the traditional armed conflict. Even if the effects could be deemed as sufficiently severe, the role of the state on behalf of the hackers and criminals was questionable enough to avoid state responsibility for the cyber operations.
The use of proxies for misattribution prevented holding Russia responsible for the cyber operations in Georgia under the law of armed conflict—even though the cyber operations appeared to be a distinct component of the conflict. So did the deceptive use of patriotic hackers to divert or take the blame in Estonia stymie attribution, which gave Russia a viable option for cyber coercion while plausibly denying its involvement. In some ways, the two cyber campaigns represented the Russian theory of victory, for which leading Russian defense intellectual Andrei Kokoshin has “labeled as asymmetrical, as it is a competitive strategy playing one’s strengths to opponent’s weaknesses.”143 The Russian leadership recognizes that despite recent modernization of its armed forces, the state cannot compete with the West in conventional military terms. President Putin has said, “We must take into account the plans and directions of development of the armed forces of other countries. . . . Our responses must be based on intellectual superiority, they will be asymmetric, and less expensive.”144 Cyber operations fit well into this unique category.
Notes
1.Steven J. Lambakis, “Reconsidering Asymmetric Warfare,” Joint Forces Quarterly, no. 36 (December 2004): 102.
2.Minority Staff, Putin’s Asymmetric Assault on Democracy in Russia and Europe: Implications for U.S. National Security, report prepared for the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, January 10, 2018), iv.
3.Olga Oliker, “Unpacking Russia’s New National Security Strategy,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 7, 2016, 3.
4.Keir Giles, Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2019), 15.
5.Keir Giles et al., The Russia Challenge (London: Chatham House, June 2015), 21.
6.Brian Wang, “Russia Is Weak and Has a Rapidly Aging and Shrinking Population,” Next Big Future, August 6, 2018.
7.DOD, DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (Washington, DC: Secretary of Defense, April 2018), 22.
8.Oliker, “Unpacking Russia’s New National Security Strategy,” 7.
9.Dmitri Trenin, “The Revival of the Russian Military: How Moscow Reloaded,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2016: 23–29.
10.Associated Press, “NATO Members Concerned about Russian ‘Military Posturing,’” Stars and Stripes, September 11, 2018.
11.Mark Galeotti, “Here’s the Real Message behind Russia’s Big Far-East Wargame,” Defense One, September 12, 2018.
12.Justin Doubleday, “New Cyber Strategy Etches Out DOD’s More Prominent, Day-to-Day Role,” Inside Defense, September 19, 2018.
13.Lionel Beehner et al., “Analyzing the Russian Way of War,” US Army Modern War Institute, March 20, 2018, 4.
14.Steven Metz, “Strategic Asymmetry,” Military Review (July/August 2001): 23.
15.Joseph S. Nye Jr., “Cyber Power,” Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, May 2010, 5.
16.Rebecca Slayton, “What Is the Cyber Offense-Defense Balance?,” International Security 41, no. 3 (Winter 2016/17): 79.
17.Joseph L. Votel, “Operationalizing the Information Environment,” Cyber Defense Review (Fall 2018): 1.
18.Everett C. Dolman, Pure Strategy: Power and Principle in the Space and Information Age (New York: Frank Cass, 2005), 6.
19.Lukas Milevski, “Asymmetry Is Strategy, Strategy Is Asymmetry,” Joint Force Quarterly, no. 75 (Fourth Quarter, 2014): 79.
20.Roger W. Barnett, Asymmetrical Warfare: Today’s Challenge to U.S. Military Power (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2003), 15.
21.Milevski, “Asymmetry Is Strategy,” 79.
22.Milevski, 79.
23.Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky, “Cross-Domain Coercion: The Current Russian Art of Strategy,” Proliferation Papers no. 54, IFRI Security Studies Center, November 2015, 25.
24.Andreas Jacobs and Guillaume Lasconjarias, “NATO’s Hybrid Flanks: Handling Unconventional Warfare in the South and the East,” in NATO’s Response to Hybrid Threats, ed. Guillaume Lasconjarias and Jeffrey A. Larsen, Forum Paper no. 24 (Rome: NATO Defense College, 2015), 268.
25.Diego A. Ruiz Palmer, “Back to the Future? Russia’s Hybrid Warfare, Revolutions in Military Affairs, and Cold War Comparisons,” in Lasconjarias and Larsen, NATO’s Response to Hybrid