This installment of On Future War analyzes Russian cyber operations linked to the war in Ukraine. Rather, a mix of Ukrainian determination, the characteristics of the cyber domain, and a Russian preference for waging a global campaign focused more on misinformation and undermining support for Kyiv appear to have taken its place. The so-called “thunder run” never materialized. Yet, Russia has not launched an all-out, costly cyberwar against Ukraine or its backers in the West. Into the war’s second year, Russia remains locked in a protracted conventional conflict that, in addition to pitched battles and missile strikes, has seen sabotage, forced displacement and kidnapping of children, systematic rape and torture, and threats to use nuclear weapons. were entirely consistent with a so-called thunder run strategy intended to stoke chaos, confusion, and uncertainty, and ultimately avoid a costly and protracted war in Ukraine.” Researchers from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) even argued during the war that “Russian cyberattacks on government and military command and control centers, logistics, emergency services. Pundits and academics alike came out with grand predictions about a coming cyber war. It marked the fourth time Russia used military force against a neighbor since the end of the Cold War and the seventh time Russia used cyber operations as part of a larger campaign or independently as an instrument of coercion against a neighboring state. On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. How central are cyber operations to combined arms campaigns in the twenty-first century? Between the spring of 2021 and winter of 2022, Russian military forces began to mass combat troops along Ukraine’s eastern border. They will also face fewer restrictions on waging information warfare to mobilize and shape discontent. Due to their uncertain effects, military leaders will initiate fewer critical cyber operations against command and control and military targets than currently anticipated. ![]() Cyber operations will remain a limited tool of coercion. The merits of cyber operations continue to be their utility as a tool of political warfare because they facilitate an engagement short of war that leverages covert action, propaganda, and surveillance but in a manner that poses a fundamental threat to human liberties.During the transition to warfighting, military commanders will prefer the certainty of lethal precision strikes against high-value targets to the uncertainty of generating effects in cyberspace. War will still be a continuation of politics by other means and rely on the more tangible effects of violence than on the elusive effects of compromising information networks.Great powers will continue to invest in cyber capabilities but see diminishing returns on these investments outside of intelligence and deception efforts once major conflict breaks out. ![]() ![]()
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