ABSTRACT
A number of significant cyber incidents in recent years have sparked spirited debate about how the United States can best defend itself and advance its interests in cyberspace. This chapter examines three enduring challenges that affect the achievement of this goal. First, there is a perennial tension between the desire for greater coordination and oversight on the one hand and flexibility, agility, and responsiveness on the other. Moving quickly in cyberspace, often seen as an operational necessity, can make it harder for relevant entities to coordinate and oversee those same operations. Second, the fact that the United States’ chief rivals are autocracies, each of which tightly controls the Internet, introduces complications when it comes to devising appropriate responses to cyber-enabled disinformation and election meddling. Third and finally, there is the continued problem of credibility in cyberspace. The secrecy surrounding most cyber operations and the difficulty of imposing painful enough costs that would change an adversary’s decision calculus, among several other issues, imposes constraints on its utility for things like coercion.
