A nation must think before it acts.
Cyber Power and International Security
Are our networked societies really vulnerable, as some have suggested, to a knock-out blow, perpetrated by state-sponsored hackers or terrorists? And what can be done to defend the state from this and from the encroachment of external networks that transcend its borders and breach its laws? This talk will tackle a range of issues raised by our dependence on digital networks.
David Betz is a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and is a senior lecturer in the War Studies Department at King’s College London. He is the head of the Insurgency Research Group there as well as the academic director of MA War in the Modern World. He also heads a 2-year US DoD Minerva-funded project on Strategy and the Network Society. Dr. Betz has written on information warfare, the future of land forces, the virtual dimension of insurgency, propaganda of the deed, cyberspace and insurgency, and British counterinsurgency in such journals as the Journal of Strategic Studies, the Journal of Contemporary Security Studies, and Orbis. His book Cyberspace and the State has just been published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He has advised the UK MOD and GCHQ on strategic issues, counterinsurgency and stabilization doctrine, cyberspace and “cyberwar.” He regularly lectures internationally and in the UK at the Defence Academy to the Advanced and Intermediate Command and Staff. After a short and generally unremarkable career as an infantryman in the Canadian Forces he left with the rank of Master Corporal to wander around Asia and the Middle East for three and a half years before going back to university where he remains still.