The National Defense University, the sponsor of this book, has produced an excellent collaboration on the related subjects of Cyberspace and Cyberpower and their influence on National Security. The authors selected for this effort appear remarkably competent for the task and have together produced a highly informative and useful book.
Unlike so many books in this genre, this book begins with an accurate and well developed definition of "cyberspace" that brings the concept from a vague buzzword to a concrete multi-tiered system. The authors of this book are particularly adept at identifying and analyzing the layers and protocols that constitute cyberspace. Perhaps most importantly one chapter discusses the role of the Department of Defense developed Global Information Grid (GIG) which is base for military use of cyberspace. Although the book makes a valid reference to the misnamed Global Network, it fails to note that the GIG actually is a component of this network. Still it nails the concept of cyberspace very accurately.
Given its sponsor the book of course devotes a good deal of attention to the military use of cyberspace particularly in its central role in the latest iteration of command and control doctrine called `Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance' (C4ISR) which the basis for the "network centric warfare" concept which has been widely adopted by the U.S. Navy and Air Force. Still the book also includes information of considerable importance to non-military applications of cyberspace and the concept of civil infrastructure protection.
This leads to the concept of cyberwar in which an enemy tries disrupt or destroy targeted military and civilian computer networks by means of hostile computer systems. The prospect of cyberwar is the foundation for one of the most interesting series of discussions in this book on the subject of"cyberpower."
The late U.S. Navy Admiral Arthur Cebrowski was a strong advocate for the evolution of naval command and decision systems to C4ISR systems. He also had a very significant idea on cyberspace, which he argued was the new "commons" on which 21st Century commerce would depend. This represented a modernization of A.T. Mahan's concept that the sea represented the `commons' on which maritime commerce was based. ("Transforming Military Force", Praeger 2007). In this book it is argued that cyberpower is analogous to sea power and a 21st Century mission of the U.S. Military is to acquire and maintain control over cyberspace much as it remains the Navy and Air Force missions to acquire and maintain control over the sea and air.
This book is one the most complete and technically accurate books written to date on the increasingly important issues of cyber warfare and cyber security.
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