Quote Originally Posted by selil View Post
Of course cyber war is asymmetric. If you put "cyber" and "war" together than cyber is the modifier of war. War is inherently asymmetric otherwise it is a stalemate. That is as Clausewitz, Sun Tzu as you can get. Why would you engage in conflict it it was symmetric? That is why peer competitors rarely are aggressors towards each other.
Still processing the other bits of your post, but from what I gathered, Aitel is arguing that attacking or gaining access to computers is wrongly considered to be "asymmetric" in the same way, say, a ASBM being launched against a carrier is--that is, a "cheap" system of tactics/weapons used against an "expensive" system. Instead, there are these massively expensive parts of the cyberwar picture that are getting overlooked in "maintenance" and "analysis."