ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses assumed militarization of cyberspace and its possible impact on international peace and security. Digitalization in the 1980s and 1990s made a qualitative shift by improving the performance of all military functions – a tendency that signifies the anticipated utility of contemporary information and communications technologies and emerging technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. The securitizing and militarizing acts in cybersecurity seem to reflect more the potentialities and fears embedded in digitalization than the current state of affairs. Strategization utilizes a number of calculations in evaluating one’s own capabilities – most commonly versus the enemy’s/ies’ strengths and weaknesses. It is essential to observe that the process of creating deployable cyber capabilities – organized, trained and equipped units and teams – is slow. The nuances of the diffusion/proliferation of national cyber power projection capabilities are not necessarily tangible or as obvious as in the examples of conventional or even nuclear proliferation.
