OCOs (Offensive Cyber Operations) don’t escalate.
Leuprecht et al. 19 – Christian, Class of 1965 Professor in Leadership, Department of Political Science, Royal Military College and Adjunct Research Professor at Charles Sturt University; Ph.D, Queen’s. Joseph Szeman, an undergraduate student in Political Studies and History in his 4th year at Queen’s University. David Skillicorn, Professor in the School of Computing at Queen’s University, and an adjunct Professor at the Royal Military College of Canada. “The Damoclean sword of offensive cyber: Policy uncertainty and collective insecurity”, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 40, Issue 3, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13523260.2019.1590960?journalCode=fcsp20, 03-27-2019 [MSDI-JE-wk1]
To date, no direct use of OCO capabilities has resulted in the outbreak of traditional conflict, perhaps owing to uncertainties in the novelty of the attacks, the difficulty of attribution, and the reluctance of national cyber actors to retaliate when the path of escalation is unclear (Rid & Buchanan, 2015). Most importantly, however, the actions of armed forces in democratic countries are constrained by the rule of law, which translates into multiple authorities to ensure responsible and acceptable use, and safeguard against escalation. The fine-grained control of OCOs compared to conventional military force provides a way to manage escalation without the direct use of physical or military assets, whose effect in sparking conflict is much better known. In other words, instead of reacting to an escalating conflict by deploying physical military assets to a region, an OCO can be employed covertly to incur more controllable costs on the adversary, with the benefit of plausible deniability (Hare, 2018). Depending on the type of OCO employed, if there is a reduction in tension, the effects of the OCO can be reversed or scaled back.