The persistent and sensationalized image of “cyberwar” as a standalone digital conflict that replaces traditional battlefields with lines of code is a dangerously misleading fiction. In reality, cyber capabilities have evolved into a fully integrated and indispensable component of modern military strategy, fundamentally altering how nations prepare for and engage in conflict. No longer a separate domain siloed away from conventional forces, cyber is now intricately woven into the fabric of multi-domain operations, acting as a critical enabler that shapes the environment and multiplies the effectiveness of kinetic power. The United States’ “Operation Absolute Resolve” in Venezuela provides a definitive blueprint for this new reality, demonstrating with stark clarity how digital effects are layered with physical force to blind an adversary, manage escalation, and achieve strategic objectives long before the first shot is fired. This shift marks a point of no return in military doctrine, where digital supremacy is no longer a luxury but a prerequisite for success on the modern battlefield.
A New Doctrine of Integrated Warfare
The foremost role of cyber in a contemporary conflict is to serve as a battlespace enabler, shaping the conditions for victory before conventional forces are even committed. In the initial phases of an operation, cyber effects are deployed to systematically degrade an adversary’s ability to see, communicate, and respond with any degree of coherence. By disrupting and infiltrating an enemy’s command and control networks, these operations can effectively blind their sensors, corrupt their intelligence, and sow widespread confusion throughout their chain of command. This digital preparation of the battlefield serves a vital military function: it creates temporary windows of tactical superiority and directly reduces the risk to personnel and equipment on the ground, in the air, and at sea. This integrated approach, which combines digital disruption with physical maneuver, has become the new standard for projecting power, ensuring that friendly forces operate in an environment that has already been digitally tilted in their favor.
This fundamental integration effectively redefines the very concept of cyberwar, moving it away from the realm of science fiction and into the practicalities of military planning. Instead of replacing bombs and bullets, sophisticated cyber operations now precede and accompany them, functioning as a force multiplier that enhances the lethality and precision of kinetic strikes. The objective is not to achieve victory through code alone but to leverage digital tools to gain a decisive tactical advantage, compress an adversary’s reaction time, and create localized windows of opportunity where conventional forces can act with minimal resistance. Furthermore, these actions are often designed to be reversible and plausibly deniable, offering commanders a uniquely flexible instrument to manage escalation. This allows a nation to impose costs and shape an opponent’s behavior without crossing the threshold into overt, irreversible acts of war, providing a critical off-ramp in a crisis.
An Instrument of Sustained Coercion
Beyond its immediate battlefield applications, cyber has emerged as a potent instrument of ongoing political coercion and statecraft. In the aftermath of a kinetic strike or during a prolonged standoff, cyber capabilities can be used to apply sustained, debilitating pressure on an adversary without resorting to further military action. By selectively disrupting critical civilian services such as power grids, financial systems, and telecommunications, a state can impose significant economic and social costs, thereby influencing an opponent’s decision-making calculus. This persistent, low-level pressure keeps an adversary off-balance and preoccupied with internal crises, all while remaining below the threshold of what would typically justify an armed response. In this capacity, cyber functions less like a weapon and more like a strategic tool akin to economic sanctions, designed to methodically shape a series of smaller policy decisions rather than forcing a single, dramatic surrender.
While some argue that cyber is poorly suited for coercion due to the uncertainty of its effects and its covert nature, this view overlooks its utility within a broader strategy. When deployed against an adversary with limited cyber defenses and under the shadow of a credible kinetic threat, these digital operations become exceptionally effective. The ambiguity that makes cyber a difficult tool for clear signaling in peacetime becomes an asset in a post-conflict or crisis scenario, as the target is left to guess the scope, scale, and timing of the next disruption. The goal is not to achieve a single, dramatic capitulation but to conduct a sustained pressure campaign that gradually compels the target state to align with the aggressor’s preferences. This strategic patience, backed by the latent threat of renewed military force, transforms cyber from a simple tool of disruption into a sophisticated instrument for achieving long-term political and strategic goals without the costs of prolonged war.
Global Lessons and Divergent Responses
For allies and partners across the globe, the key lesson from this evolution is that national critical infrastructure is no longer merely civilian infrastructure—it is now potential operational terrain in any future conflict. Power grids, communication networks, cloud services, and industrial control systems have all become dual-use assets that an adversary can target to degrade a nation’s will and ability to respond in a crisis. This recognition demands a fundamental shift in defensive thinking, moving beyond basic cyber hygiene and perimeter security toward a national strategy centered on resilience. It is no longer sufficient to simply try to keep adversaries out; nations must now plan for the certainty that they will get in. This reality sharpens the case for adopting a more proactive and realistic security posture that acknowledges the pervasive and persistent nature of state-sponsored cyber threats in an era of great-power competition.
This new strategic environment necessitates the widespread adoption of an “assume compromise” cybersecurity posture. This advanced approach accepts that determined, state-level adversaries will eventually breach even the most well-defended networks as an inevitable baseline condition. Consequently, defensive strategy must pivot from a singular focus on prevention to a balanced approach that prioritizes resilience and rapid recovery. This includes implementing continuous threat hunting to actively search for pre-positioned attackers, developing robust and well-rehearsed plans for damage limitation, and regularly practicing how to operate in a degraded environment when primary systems inevitably fail. The ability to function when networks are dark, through out-of-band communications and manual fallbacks, becomes a powerful form of deterrence in itself, as it reduces the strategic payoff for an adversary contemplating a coercive cyber campaign.
Meanwhile, adversaries such as China have observed these developments not as a revelation but as a confirmation of their own evolving strategic doctrines. Beijing’s military philosophy has long emphasized the deep synchronization of cyber operations, electronic warfare, information campaigns, and kinetic maneuvers to overwhelm an opponent and achieve a swift, decisive victory. For Chinese military planners, the key takeaway is not the discovery of a new strategy but the imperative to perfect the timing, scale, and integration of these multi-domain effects. The goal is to create a strategic shock that paralyzes an adversary’s decision-making process, presenting them with a fait accompli before they have the chance to mount an effective defense. This approach is evident in China’s coercive activities, where cyber pressure has been consistently timed to coincide with military exercises, demonstrating a clear intent to master this integrated form of warfare.
Russia, in stark contrast, likely viewed these events as a reinforcement of its long-standing “grey-zone” strategy, which treats civilian and economic infrastructure as legitimate targets for persistent pressure. Rather than attempting to engage in a symmetrical cyber conflict with a technologically superior power, Moscow has continued to favor its tested approach of persistent, deniable, and corrosive activity designed to weaken an adversary from within over time. It has consistently favored indirect responses through sabotage, disruption, and sophisticated influence operations aimed at eroding social cohesion and systemic resilience. This doctrine of perpetual conflict below the threshold of war allowed Russia to pursue its strategic objectives by exploiting the seams between peace and war, wearing down its opponents through a thousand small cuts rather than a single, decisive blow.
