ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to clarify the field by offering one basic term for the conflict exploding in, through, and enabled by, cyberspace – ‘cybered conflict’. It offers an integrated way to view what has changed, what is happening, and the stark choices ahead for the societies and their thinkers in the coming deeply cybered world. Cybered conflict, cyber war, the Russian ‘hybrid war’, and even the Chinese ‘wars under conditions of informatization’, all reflect the emerging reality of conflict among states in a deeply cybered, non-westernized world. Among state level adversaries especially, every aspect of the opposition’s national social, technical, and economic sectors is in play, making cybered conflict a particularly broad-based system-versus-system struggle. Globally critical to all the major sectors of nearly all societies, the underlying cyberspace substrate was built shoddily, written in quick-written, fault-tolerant code cheaper to produce and relatively easy to hack.
