Deter, Disrupt, or Deceive: Assessing Cyber Conflict as an Intelligence Contest

Robert Chesney — a law professor at UT Austin, national security lawyer, and co-host of the Lawfare podcast — and Max Smeets — a researcher at ETH Zurich's Center for Security Studies — bring together contributions from some of the field's most distinguished scholars including Amy Zegart, Ciaran Martin (former head of GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre), and Michael Sulmeyer. The volume reframes cyber conflict as fundamentally an intelligence contest — a struggle for information advantage conducted through intrusion, deception, and manipulation — rather than a military domain governed by the logic of deterrence and escalation.

This reframing has important implications for policy and practice. If cyber operations are primarily intelligence activities, then the frameworks developed for conventional military deterrence are largely inapplicable, and the more relevant models come from the history of espionage and covert action — domains in which deception, plausible deniability, and the exploitation of ambiguity are central. For practitioners working on attribution, threat assessment, or the policy dimensions of cyber conflict, this book provides the most intellectually sophisticated available framework. The contributions from practitioners like Ciaran Martin give the volume an operational grounding that purely academic treatments often lack.