Cyber Technology and Arms Race

Vesa Kanniainen

No 6365, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Cyber technology represents digital military capability with the purpose of causing damage to the military strength and the social infrastructure of a potential enemy. War using conventional weapons may be preceded by or combined with a war using cyber technology. This paper introduces such technology into the theory of conflicts, suggesting the striking proposal that the expected return on cyber investment is convex. It is shown that an asymmetric successful cyber program results in an option for a pre-emptive cyber attack. These features of the model make the cyber technology a first-ranked military investment. The optimal scale of a cyber program of a country expected to have access to a superior cyber capability is derived. It is shown that the asymmetric cyber capability reduces the international arms race but nevertheless raises the likelihood of a war reducing the deterrence.

Keywords: military conflicts; cyber war; arms race (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H12 H56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp6365.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Cyber Technology and the Arms Race (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6365

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().