InKings

A great advantage of having many faculties on one campus is that you can get to interact with people with quite different perspectives who are interested in similar real-world issues. Today I spent a refreshing hour in the company of Thomas Rid, one of several War Studies colleagues who, like a few of us Informaticians, wants to understand whether cyber war is just another kind of warfare in a new domain (after land, sea, air and space), or whether it falls outside Clausewitz’s three characteristics of warfare (violent, instrumental and political). Thomas has already blogged about his article on Kings of War: http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2011/10/no-cyber-war/ and I wanted to probe and test his contentions with possible cyber counter-examples for each of the three characteristics.  Since our offices are just the length of a corridor apart it’s easy to have these impromptu get-togethers over a freshly brewed coffee (thanks, Thomas!). And it appears that there may be rather more to this issue than initially meets the eye – watch this space for developments as they happen!