Discutendo qualche ora fa di relazioni internazionali e cyber-spazio ho avuto un’altra, sconfortante, prova dei danni che la “bolla” cyber sta causando in giro. Soprattutto in quei Paesi che storicamente non brillano per cultura strategica.
In soccorso arriva il grande Colin Gray. Un autore fortemente consigliato a tutti ed in particolare a coloro (ad es.: ingegneri e tecnici informatici) che sono convinti della eccezionalità del cyberspazio.
Da “Another Bloody Century”, Infinity Journal, Issue 4, Fall 2011:

[…]The Temptations of Novelty
We would protect ourselves against undue capture by the novelty of the moment were we to be more careful in the adjectives we use. When in doubt, avoid them in reference to war and strategy. To explain, if one refers to nuclear strategy or air strategy, or today cyber strategy, it is natural to lay emphasis upon that which is new, the adjectives and not the noun. What you should refer to is strategy for nuclear weapons – if that is not an oxymoron – or strategy for air power, or strategy for cyber power or cyberspace. If you say cyber strategy you risk implying that the strategy is somehow distinctive as strategy because it is owned by its cyber tools.
In fact, boringly, one must recognise that strategy is just strategy, regardless of the geographical domain to which it relates or the military or other agents that it employs. Although the military capabilities by and large unique in kind to each of war’s ive geographical domains (land, sea, air, Earth-orbital, and cyberspace), must work in harmony towards a common goal, it is quite proper to develop domain-specific strategies as contributing sub-sets of the whole endeavour. To conceive of a strategy for air power is not to postulate a strategy that only employs air assets as its means. It is, however, to suggest strongly that each geographically defined military tool is likely to be able to make a unique contribution to the common strategic purpose. In every war it is necessary to identify what friendly land, sea, air, Earth-orbital, and cyber capabilities bring to the strategic table. Because fungibility usually is not extensive among the different military instruments, the strengths and limitations of each geography’s kind of military power have to be relected in distinctive land, sea, air and so forth strategic narratives – in aid of a single political purpose, of course.
When you use the term cyber strategy you risk misleading people into thinking that they are entering a new and mysterious domain. Happily, we know a great deal about strategy. We should, with 2,500 years of past experience from which to learn. And we have readily to hand a good enough general theory of strategy that certainly has authority over cyber power. This recognition helps reduce the ‘wow’ factor about computers and provides useful historical perspective for those who, yet again, claim that ‘the sky is falling’ and strategic Armageddon is nigh! In the course of the last century the human race has made sense of air power, has made such sense as can be made of nuclear weapons, has begun usefully to corral and understand space power. Cyber power in its turn will be mastered strategically, and seen for what it is, just another (fifth) quasi- geographical domain of warfare. It will have its own tactical ‘grammar’, to cite Clausewitz, but not its own political or strategic logic. Of course, cyber power is ill understood today; how could it be otherwise? Cyber power today is approximately where air power was in, perhaps, the First World War, or nuclear weapons in about 1947-8.
[…] You might care to relect on these propositions.
1. We are no better or worse at strategy than were the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines.
2. Despite the technical progress of the past two centuries, that progress does not transfer from tactics and operations to strategy/politics; […]