Book Excerpt: “The Decision to Attack: Military and Intelligence Cyber-Decision-Making”

Dr. Aaron Brantly is a cyber security expert and West Point professor who is regular cited for his expertise in the digital domain.  His new book, The Decision to Attack: Military and Intelligence Cyber-Decision-Making, available on Amazon, takes a deep look at the intricacies of decision making in the complicated worlds of military intelligence and cyber security.  For anyone even remotely interested in either of those subjects, Brantly’s book is well worth the read.  Here is a brief excerpt:

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Our lives, our hopes, and our existence in modern society are directly tied to the cyber world. We depend on magnetic strips on credit cards to feed and clothe us. We tote mobile lifelines, send e-mails, receive phone calls, and conduct commerce on electronic devices.

Our bank accounts are numbers stored in computer databases, and the value of our life savings can be wiped away with a stroke of a keyboard. But beyond these modern inventions we are dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum to manage our power grids and the ordering systems that ensure our gas stations have fuel and our grocery stores have food. We don’t have to plug ourselves into the matrix; we already live in it.

In the “The Decision to Attack: Military and Intelligence Cyber-Decision-Making” Brantly investigates how states decide to employ cyber in military and intelligence operations against other states and how rational those decisions are. He contextualizes broader cyber decision-making processes into a systematic expected utility–rational choice approach to provide a mathematical understanding of the use of cyber weapons.