Prioritizing Strategic Cyberspace Lethality

Abstract

The primary concern of United States national security policy, as detailed in the 2018 National Defense Strategy, has shifted from asymmetrical counter-insurgency operations to countering inter-state strategic competition by rogue regimes and revisionist powers. This doctrinal shift has prompted an increased emphasis on military lethality, particularly in strategic-level cyberspace operations intended to counter open challenges to the global security environment and United States preeminence. Drawing from the theory of constraints in industrial engineering and Bayesian search theory in operations research, this paper identifies the key organizational constraints that hinder the lethality of the Department of Defense’s strategic-level cyberspace operations units in light of a continued struggle for available cyberspace personnel. Current force structure paradigms and command and control policies are identified as the key limiting factors of military lethality in cyberspace. This paper argues for ruthlessly prioritizing the elimination and improvement of these constraints in order to align Department of Defense policies with efforts to project strategic power in and through cyberspace.