Is Cyber a new warfare? Debate (catch all)

[selil]

So if I used a 454kg LGB to kill the computers would that be "cyberwar" or just an airstrike?

This is what worries me about people trying to come up with new terms to explain stuff we don't actually need to explain. Computers and networks are primarily used for command and control. Attacking the technology associated with that function is primarily an area of EW.

This is the kind of question that makes it really hard to have a discussion. If a terrorist group uses a nuclear bomb is that global thermonuclear war? If with two non-warring soldiers look at each other and one stabs the other. Is that an act of war or simply murder?

Cyber warfare in some ways is the transition from using kinetic weapons as the primary method of interruption of command and control, espionage, etc. To using the cyber tools themselves to make war. The evidence suggests (extensive analysis of attacks), that in cyber warfare the tools are the terrain. That is a fairly substantial leap and substantive shift in thinking about war. To say a tank is the terrain rather than the land would be ludicrous. Yet in some ways that is exactly what we say about cyber warfare.