The U.S. Naval War College (NWC) and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University welcomed cyber experts from around the world to discuss possible cyber futures on a global scale at the Center for Cyber Conflict Studies 3rd Biennial Workshop held at NWC.
The three-day workshop, this year titled “Cybered Future and Conflict/Governance Implications,” examined three separate possible futures for cyber development and how world governments might respond to each.
“Cyberspace is ending its frontier era and has spread so far and deeply across societies as a highly insecure yet massively critical substrate to all social functions,” said Chris Demchak, co-organizer of the event and Rear Adm. Grace M. Hopper Chair of Cybersecurity at NWC. “As such, it is changing the distribution of power across the global international and economic system, including deeply challenging the influence of the U.S. and its allies as consolidated democratic civil societies.”
The first of the three possible futures examined at the event explored the future of cyber as we have now where societies continue with similar international cyber architecture currently in place, according to Sue Eckert, co-organizer and senior fellow at the Watson Institute. This future continues the pattern of United States and Western countries largely dominating the cyber world, but with no concerted international strategy.
In the second future, individual states begin to assert their jurisdiction in cyberspace more concretely.
The third possibility is a future in which we have competing groups of nations each looking out for their interests, said Eckert.
The three scenarios were chosen because experts believe these futures are the most likely to occur, so deserve the most examination.
The goal of the workshop is to provide a framework for dealing with each of the possible futures, according to Demchak.
“Specifically, we will provide concrete recommendations of what we should be doing now to prepare for eventualities or futures depending on which way it goes,” said Eckert. “And [those recommendations include] the kind of policies, procedures and institutional arrangements and alliances or technologies that we should be working on now.”
In future workshops, the group will continue to focus on the evolving challenges of the cyber world.
“The challenge is growing and becoming more pressing because what all of us are building in institutions, policies, and strategies across the U.S., our allies, and the wider democratic civil societies community, and even in the Navy, are likely to last a long time,” said Demchak. “If we have built for a world that does not closely resemble what actually emerges in 15 to 20 years, then we run the risk of being unable to maintain our economic and social wellbeing or to defend our national security sufficiently in a highly cybered conflictual globe.”
The workshop will continue to meet on a biennial basis to re-focus on issues that continually emerge.
“Every other year we will keep reconvening this expanding, collaborating, personally collegial, thought-leading community in order to contribute to the best possible future for all of us,” added Demchak. “The U.S. is moving into a deeply cybered-conflicting world that the Western world — with declining economic dominance and less than 10 percent of the global population — will no longer control nor be able to impose civil society rules. It will be turbulent and challenging, and in need of all the scholarly and practical thinking in advance that we can muster.”
