The hierarchy of cyber war definitions

Abstract

With the advent of militaries declaring cyberspace as the fifth domain of military warfare, those modern societies that are heavily dependent on its reliable operation need to have a clear understanding of the actors and future activities brought about by this new doctrine. Knowing what is meant by the terms ‘cyber war’ and ‘cyber warfare’ is critical to navigating a path forward in preparing for and mitigating the effects caused by such activities. In this paper, the authors identified and analysed 159 documents containing the definitions for these terms in order to discern definitional origins, patterns of usage and the relative trends that emerge as a result. From this analysis, we construct a discourse hierarchy of cyber war and cyber warfare definitions, both as a representation of the findings as well as a basis for incorporating future works into the larger context of the domain.