Bureaucracy and Cyber Coercion

Abstract

States are increasingly incorporating militarized cyber technologies, or cyber weapons, into their defense arsenals, but there is vigorous debate about their coercive utility. Existing scholarship often adjudicates the debate by parsing technical differences between cyber and conventional weapons. This technical approach overlooks a critical consideration: bureaucrats who inform state assessments may hold unique perspectives on coercion due to their organizational affiliation. We make an empirical intervention by fielding a survey experiment on bureaucrats inside US Cyber Command, offering a rare glimpse into elite perceptions. We find little evidence that technical differences between weapons yield systematically different assessments. Bureaucrats perceive that conventional and cyber weapons have statistically indistinguishable coercive utility and battlefield effects. Replicating the study on a public sample, we find that bureaucrats are more optimistic about coercion across all domains and their optimism stems from organizational culture, rather than parochial interests or technical expertise. The findings show how who is responsible for assessing a technology's coercive value can shape estimates even more than which technology is being assessed. Unique perspectives clustered within influential bureaucracies may shape state assessments and policies in ways that diverge from the expectations of analyses that emphasize technical characteristics of military capabilities.