NATO Cannot Cede the New Art of Modern Warfare to Russia and China

As early as the Russian military campaign in Georgia in 2008, it was clear to anyone paying attention that cyberattacks had become a critical element of conventional warfare strategy. Instead, the Kremlin's brazenness in using military force to show that Georgia would be broken up before joining NATO shocked us, while the EU's attempts at instant war diplomacy distracted us.

In late February 2014, moments after the flames of another distraction - the Sochi Winter Olympics - flickered out, Russia began a multi-year, multi-front military campaign in Ukraine that quickly updated the meaning of "hybrid warfare". The country became the Kremlin's favourite testing ground for the weapons of cyberwarfare in support of conventional military aggression.

Russian military hackers, including several currently under indictment in the US, quickly escalated their cyberwar against Ukraine. They unleashed a large-scale power outage in winter; attacked the Ukrainian electoral process; and in the case of the "NotPetya" malware attack, they hacked government, financial, energy and global logistics networks. The total estimated cost of repairing the damage was $10 billion.

One US Navy cybersecurity expert, who referred to Ukraine as a "live-fire space" for the testing of Russian cyberweapons, claimed that: "[NotPetya] was the most damaging attack in history, of a scale and cost that would far exceed a missile fired from the Donbas into Kiev."

A moment of the CWIX Coalition Interoperability Battle Training, in areas devoted to underwater research, cyberdefence and the network of the Federation mission, in Bydgoszcz, Poland, 22 June 2017. EPA/Tytus Zmijewski New weapons of potential mass destruction - and little fear of using them

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