Working on an in-depth study of the US spending on cyber ops & cybersecurity infrastructure with Brita Achberger (with main focus on DoD RDT&E spending). Going through the DoD docs from 2008 until 2020, we found 75 relevant budget items across services.
Verifying and analyzing this data has been a lot harder than we initially expected (items moving, lack of clear item descriptions, cross-item analysis, classification etc.) Some preliminary graphs.
President Budget Request for 'Cyber Activities'
The figure above captures a generally known trend of cap. build up. The requested budget more than quadrupled from 2.3$ billion in 2012 to 9.6$ billion in 2020. It is expected to further grow in the coming years. Actual budget spending is not far off from req. budgt
Presidential Budget Request IT/CA Classified vs. Non-Classified
I was reflecting a bit on what has been published in the (academic) field of cyber conflict, and tried to organize my thoughts into 2 categories: what issues are highly contested vs widely accepted amongst scholars?
Mini thread on what I came up with thus far:
1. What are statements that are highly contested?
A. Cyber operations provide strategic value
B. Cyber operations are novel instruments of power
C. Cyber conflict is qualitatively different from intelligence contests
D. Cyber operations are escalatory
I realized actually quite a few academic books were published in 2021 on cyber conflict/competition relevant topics – or will be published in 2022. Decided to run a short thread with books I’m aware of (& publicly listed):
FY2021:"The DoD has also increased investments in [..] cyber operations to boost resiliency against adversaries, as evidenced by standing up the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center to adapt to the pending growth of machine learning, and to capitalize on big data.."
FY2021: "Another key action for FY 2021 is to develop an organizational construct to support joint training enablers by Q4 FY 2021."
If you'd like to keep track of the latest scholarship in the field of cyber conflict, here's a list of all the articles published in the top 150 Poli Sci journals from Jan 2020 - Jul 2021:
@TobiasLiebetrau & Christensen, "The ontological politics of cyber security: Emerging agencies, actors, sites, and spaces" 2021 - on complex and transformative dynamics of ICT and new actors - cambridge.org/core/journals/…