NWC Issues in National Security, Lecture 3 "Cyber and National Security”
Channel: U.S. Naval War College
Date: 16/11/2023

This lecture took place on November 14, 2023.

From Professor Demchak: 
Cyberspace is the “substrate” on which all of the modern societies and their technologies must rest, including modern consolidated democracies, but it is constructed so poorly that a large number of bad actors and autocratic states have been able to exploit its shortcomings at will.  China in particular has been able to accelerate to a meteoric economic rise enabled by cyber-related theft, blackmail, and bullying of companies and states alike. For the first time in modern history, the US and its allies face an unabashedly autocratic peer power that outscales and outproduces us and is determined to assume what it calls its “rightful place” (due to its size) as the central political, economic, and technological power of the world and near space. Today, fragmented consolidated democracies cannot individually survive against the Chinese strategically-targeted bad behaviors and the loss of wealth and leverage. This talk integrates all these observations and suggests one overarching solution in collective defense in cyberspace. Navies will have a role to play in ensuring the survival of these democracies in a deeply cybered, hostile world.
 
About the Speaker: Dr. Chris C. Demchak
With engineering, economics, and comparative complex organization theory/political science degrees, Dr. Chris C. Demchak is the RDML Grace M. Hopper Professor of Cyber Security and a member of the Cyber and Innovation Policy Institute, U.S. Naval War College. In her research on cyberspace as a globally shared insecure complex ‘substrate’, Demchak takes a systemic approach to emergent structures, comparative institutional evolution, adversaries’ use of systemic cybered tools, virtual worlds/gaming for operationalized organizational learning, and designing systemic resilience against imposed surprise.

The views presented by the faculty do not reflect official positions of the Naval War College, DON or DOD.