Cyberwar: The What, When, Why, and How [Commentary]

Cyberwar is insidious, invisible to most, and is fought out of sight. It takes place in cyberspace, a location that cannot be seen, touched, nor felt. Cyberspace has been defined as the fifth domain of war. We can see the physical instruments, such as computers, routers, cables, however these instruments interact in a virtual and unseen realm. This facilitates a reach that can extend from one part of the world to attacks on public or private sector entities in another part of the world, while the perpetrator remains unknown in a legally provable sense. The term cyberwar has been used in a variety of different contexts. Since war itself is generally considered as a military enterprise, cyberwar has often been linked to a conceptual framework associated with traditional notions of warfare. In this work, we examine the challenges this definition presents in a 21st century cyber-connected and cyber-dependent world, and we propose an expanded conceptual framework for cyberwar.