Do you think there is a change in U.S. Strategic culture within the last few years? Why?
Within the past few years, I would argue that there has been substantial change within U.S. strategic culture due to two significant factors. The first would be the adoption of cyberspace and, by extension, cyber operations in other countries, and that adoption causing U.S. strategic culture to change around it. Due to countries like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and several other countries having differing strategies for how they want to utilize cyberspace, the U.S. has needed to not only ensure that those actions do not cause greater problems but also that U.S. civilians are protected from it as well. This has then led to the strategic culture having heavy investment into both offensive and defensive cyber operations to protect people, but also to have retaliations not only for current attacks but significantly more powerful ones if they were to emerge.
The second factor as to why the strategic culture has changed is due to the evolution of offensive cybersecurity technology and the mass popularity of social media sites as avenues for possible misinformation. Cyberspace’s flexibility with almost anyone to interact with each other has led to malicious actors taking the opportunity to manipulate others to get information by committing cybercrimes. With the rampant number of phishing attacks and spoofing, strategic culture has been changed to crack down on this now global issue despite the difficulty of attribution compared to more traditional attacks. Social media platforms have also given way to misinformation and disinformation campaigns influencing public opinion, like the 2016 U.S. election. These platforms also create new difficulties for strategic culture by having information up in the air for credibility and individual people having more responsibility to cross-reference information. These changes from other countries and the evolution of cyberspace have caused significant changes within U.S. strategic culture by investing in both offensive and defensive cyber operations to protect against future threats from other countries and to mitigate the apparent disinformation that spreads on social media sites and the cybercrime that happens in multiple critical sectors and industries.