Book Review | Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare

Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare. By John Arquilla. Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-5095-4363-6. Pp. viii, 220. $19.95.

John Arquilla’s Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare is a timely and provocative analysis of how information and digital networks are reshaping the nature of conflict. Best-known for coining the term “netwar” and for being the first scholar writing on swarming and information-age war, Arquilla extends those thoughts further in Bitskrieg, arguing that cyberwarfare is the twenty-first-century version of Blitzkrieg. As the 1930s and 1940s were transformed by the mechanization of warfighting, he contends that cyber weapons, joined by flexible organization and strategic vision, have come to dictate both peacetime competition and wartime combat. Central to his argument is that information flow is the key to success in the information-age war of the twenty-first century: it must flow quickly to underpin decision and coordinated action but must be highly protected as well. Speed without security invites catastrophe, which is why Arquilla advocates universal encryption and the migration of data into resilient cloud architectures. Only when information flows are both swift and shielded can they provide the decisive edge in modern conflict. As a wake-up call to those policymakers, military leaders, and scholars dealing with cyber strategy, Arquilla’s book sends a stern message: offense leads, defense lags, and nothing short of a massive rethinking of how we fight and the policies by which we operate will prevent catastrophic vulnerability.

Arquilla—professor emeritus and one of the founders of the Defense Analysis department at the Naval Postgraduate School, and a longtime advisor on information warfare—structures the book thematically rather than chronologically. The opening chapter on the rise of the “Cool War” frames cyber conflict not as spectacular destruction but as persistent disruption, which ranges from Russian operations in Georgia and Ukraine to the Stuxnet and Shamoon attacks. He follows this with a critical assessment of “Pathways to Peril,” in which he faults overreliance on brittle firewalls and antivirals as “Maginot Lines,” urging instead a shift to strong encryption, resilient cloud architectures, and deterrence by denial. Later chapters turn to the future of battle, highlighting the “Afghan Model” of small, networked SOF teams supported by precision strike, and speculating on how swarming, robotics, and artificial intelligence (“AI Jane”) will shape combat. Arquilla also examines the prospects for cyber arms control, arguing that, like chemical and biological weapons, it should be built on a “behavioral basis,” with international norms constraining specific actions rather than the tools themselves. He concludes with a call for doctrinal transformation: militaries must shed their industrial-age hierarchies and adopt Bitskrieg’s logic of many small, fast, and flexible units empowered by information networks.

The book’s greatest strength is its ability to blend theory, history, and recommendations. Arquilla illustrates his arguments with vivid cases, from NATO’s Kosovo campaign to Russia’s hybrid operations, alternating citations of Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, and his own earlier writings. His insistence that “offense rules” in cyberspace is sobering, as is his critique that the United States, despite formidable offensive capabilities, suffers from “the very worst defenses.” Particularly compelling is his warning that organizations must transform, because big, slow bureaucracies cannot survive against small, agile, networked adversaries who exploit information faster.

Nonetheless, the book does have its shortcomings. As Arquilla compellingly identifies the weaknesses of contemporary cyber defense, his solutions, such as ubiquitous encryption and cloud dependency, may be reinforced with additional empirical instances and case studies. Furthermore, even though his argument about cyber arms control is morally justified, it may fall on deaf ears among skeptics in an international environment where suspicion is the order of the day and verification a challenge. A comparative examination of the manner in which China, Iran, or smaller nations are developing their doctrines would have enhanced the international angle of his research.

Even with these reservations, Bitskrieg is an essential addition to the literature on cyber war and contemporary strategy. Military leaders and SOF commanders will find it both a warning and an encouragement about the possibilities of adapting force structure and doctrine to the information age. Policymakers will take from it the lesson that defensive hubris brings disaster into the world where offense prevails. And scholars and students of the study of security will take from it a synthesis of Arquilla’s decades-long intellectual journey, joining theory to practice with a sense of necessity. Chief among its many virtues is the way it compels readers to reevaluate the very nature of war itself in an age where bits rather than bullets may be the decisive factor.

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