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6 May 2022

What Does the 2022 NDS Fact Sheet Imply for the Forthcoming Cyber Strategy?

Michael P. Fischerkeller 

The Defense Department’s two-page fact sheet summarizing the 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) provides notable insights from a cyberspace strategy perspective. Identifying campaigning as one way to advance Department of Defense goals is consistent with the lessons learned by employing the doctrine of persistent engagement for operating in and through cyberspace. Additionally, three of the NDS’s campaigning objectives—to gain advantages against the full range of competitors’ coercive actions, to undermine acute forms of competitor coercion and to complicate competitors’ military preparations—could be supported by persistent engagement. Further, although a fourth objective mentioned in the NDS fact sheet—resilience—is not listed as an objective of campaigning, persistent engagement has demonstrated that campaigning is critical to supporting anticipatory resilience in cyberspace, including ongoing efforts such as the use of hunt forward teams to inoculate the U.S. public and private sectors from malicious cyber activity. Overall, such cyber campaigns support integrated deterrence by undermining an opponent’s confidence that they will prevail in crisis or armed conflict. The forthcoming cyber strategy will be nested within the NDS, and the cyber strategy should be expected to support these same objectives. This post elaborates on each from a cyber strategy perspective and offers an additional objective unique to cyberspace—precluding exploitation and/or inhibiting the cumulation of strategic gains in and through cyberspace that can independently influence the international distribution of power.

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