Cyberattacks don’t escalate and believing it does overlooks opportunities in cyberwarfare
Lonergan 22- Assistant Professor in the Army Cyber Institute at West Point and a Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.
Erica D. Lonergan, "The Cyber-Escalation Fallacy," Foreign Affairs, 4-15-2022, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2022-04-15/cyber-escalation-fallacy-- 嘉玮
In fact, the negligible role of cyberattacks in the Ukraine conflict should come as no surprise. Through war simulations, statistical analyses, and other kinds of studies, scholars have found little evidence that cyber-operations provide effective forms of coercion or that they cause escalation to actual military conflict. That is because for all its potential to disrupt companies, hospitals, and utility grids during peacetime, cyberpower is much harder to use against targets of strategic significance or to achieve outcomes with decisive impacts, either on the battlefield or during crises short of war. In failing to recognize this, U.S. officials and policymakers are approaching the use of cyberpower in a way that may be doing more harm than good—treating cyber-operations like any other weapon of war rather than as a nonlethal instrument of statecraft and, in the process, overlooking the considerable opportunities as well as risks they present.