The cyber spiral? : operational and political implications of emerging domains of warfare
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This project examines how international actors send, receive, interpret, attribute, predict, and act on information about their opponents during security crises, with special consideration to conflict involving emerging domains such as cyberspace. The first paper baselines how states perceive each other's images to determine if there are patterns of perception and misperception in these interpretations. This paper uses content analysis of historical wargames from the Cold War to evaluate how states convey and interpret images of resolve. It finds that strategic misperception is very common, and that actors are more likely to underestimate opponents' images of resolve than overestimate them. It also finds little evidence that significant game moves, often described as signals, effectively shift prior assumptions or beliefs; this suggests that assumptions, biases, and other priors are likely drivers of misperception. The second and third papers use scenario-based survey experiments of elite practitioners to establish how decision-makers consider traditional versus emerging technological domains to (1) interpret the intent of adversary actions and (2) assess and assume risk under conditions of uncertainty. These two papers find that practitioners view military actions in cyberspace with many of the characteristics the literature typically ascribes to signals, and that these practitioners view cyber activity as decidedly less escalatory than kinetic activity. We also find that technological uncertainty has almost no effect on the calculus of decision-makers, but assessments of escalatory risk are highly important. Further, almost all US military respondents coalesce in roughly equal numbers around three distinct decision constructs with distinct logics. The surveys reveal a great chasm between US military and US public decision-making involving emerging technologies. The dissertation contributes substantively to the literature on escalation, risk and uncertainty, misperception, signaling, and conflict in cyberspace.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2024; ©2024 |
| Publication date | 2024; 2024 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Sinnott, Shawna Lee |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Schultz, Kenneth A |
| Thesis advisor | Schultz, Kenneth A |
| Thesis advisor | Fearon, James D |
| Thesis advisor | Sagan, Scott Douglas |
| Degree committee member | Fearon, James D |
| Degree committee member | Sagan, Scott Douglas |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Political Science |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Shawna Lee Sinnott. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Political Science. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2024. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/jr359jz3277 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2024 by Shawna Lee Sinnott
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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