Gompert, David C., and Martin Libicki

Abstract
China’s prevailing military strategy and America’s response to it meet the classic criterion for ‘crisis instability’. The state that initiates hostilities against the other would achieve an important war-fighting advantage, thereby giving both an incentive to strike before being struck. The core reason for this is that the forces of each side are targeted at those of the other, and are capable of damaging them within days or hours. As a consequence, there is a growing danger that a Sino-American crisis (perhaps over an incident in the Koreas, Taiwan or the South or East China seas) could trigger a conflict that neither country would rationally want. This has led to a debate in American defence circles about the need for an alternative military strategy that would remove both sides’ incentive to resort to force first.1
What is not being debated, but should be, is whether the prospect of cyber warfare, to which both China and the United States are increasingly committed, makes one or both sides that much more inclined to strike first. If it does, a Sino-American crisis would be even more likely to lead to hostilities. One reason that such scenarios have not been thought through is that analysts have not assigned enough importance to the role of cyber warfare in preparing the battlespace, or the ways in which a cyber conflict could begin and trigger regular war. This paper is intended as a first step in rectifying that inattention. We discuss the underlying Sino-American crisis-instability problem, the general implications of cyber-warfare options for crisis stability and the specific influence of such options in the Sino-American case. We then consider measures to reduce the risks of instability and conflict that our analysis identifies.
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