IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2023 - 42

Feature
The First Total War and
the Sociotechnical
Systems of Warfare
Jordan Richard Schoenherr
Department of Psychology
Applied AI Institute
Concordia University
Montreal, QC H4B 1R6, Canada
Department of Psychology
Institute of Data Science
Carleton University
Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada
 Warcraft evolves by identifying and adapting
the technical and functional affordances of
technologies to exploit vulnerabilities in adversaries'
defenses and defend against their attacks [1].
Nowhere is this arms race more apparent than cybersecurity
wherein zero-day vulnerabilities are identified
and exploited at an ever-growing rate [2]. Cybersecurity,
however, is not limited to hardware and
software. Cyberoperations require an understanding
of the larger sociotechnical system that includes
individual users and groups, for example, governmental,
industry, and nongovernmental organizations.
Indeed, the failure to identify the technical
and functional affordances that allow for zero-day
vulnerabilities illustrates the ambiguous and ill-defined
nature of " cyberspace. "
To reduce our uncertainty about cyberspace,
we can turn to analogical reasoning and use metaphors
[3], [4], [5]. The ability to access and map
the similarity from a familiar to a novel domain can
help identify coherent strategies for responding to
problems [6]. However, if inappropriate analogies
are selected, this can undermine decision-making
and problem-solving by selectively emphasizing or
deemphasizing a limited number of features of a situation
[7].
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2023.3299315
Date of current version: 21 September 2023.
42
0278-0097/23©2023 IEEE
Invocation of concepts such as " attack " and " warfare "
should not be taken lightly. Warfare implies
specific groups of actors, working in a coordinated
manner, leading to losses and rewards (e.g., human,
material, and financial resources) for these groups.
As Nguyen [8, p. 1116] notes in his discussion of jus
ad bellum, " Cyber-attacks do not succumb to easy
analogy, nor has any international court attempted
to so analogize. " Identifying what metaphors are
used and which can help understand cyberoperations
is, therefore, a critical task for developers, analysts,
and policymakers [9].
Further complicating matters, " cyberwar " need
not reflect a distinct mode of conflict, nor is the Internet
the only attack vector associated with cyberoperations
[10]. In combination with kinetic operations
cyberoperations can act as force multipliers, or be
used in hybrid warfare [11]. However, as others have
noted, it is not clear that " hybrid warfare " represents
a conceptually distinct-nor novel-form of warfare
[12], [13] as regular and irregular warfare have been
recurrent features of human conflicts throughout history
[14], [15].
Rather than debating the nature of hybrid warfare,
I argue that the combined use of physical and
virtual assets in sociotechnical systems to achieve
military objectives reflects the contemporary realization
of the concept of Total War. After differentiating
aggression, conflict, and totalized warfare, I
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2023

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