Cyber offense in NATO: challenges and opportunities

As a response to the Russian invasion of Crimea, NATO returned to the core military concepts of deterrence and collective defence. This NATO adaption has recently come to include attempts to integrate offensive cyber effects into NATO force structure and response doctrine. The article argues—counter to what is publicly declared—that such an integration does little to strengthen NATO's deterrence posture and is unlikely to deter non-military, hybrid cyber activity below the threshold of collective defence. The article identifies several practical challenges to the current integration effort, which include the temporal dimension of developing exploits, battle damage assessment and deconfliction. With these challenges in mind, the article suggests that deploying minor and less resourceful cyber effects that cause persistent ‘cyber annoyances’ holds an unappreciated potential as they can drain opponent resources, disturb vital IT-systems and complicate decision-making. The article ends by arguing that NATO should not adapt its collective defence clause to cyberspace. A more active NATO in cyberspace risks undermining the cyber-intelligence norm that so far has prevented escalation and thereby increasing the likelihood that Russia misinterprets intelligence and active cyber defence activities as military preparation, armament or an attack in the making.

Battle damage assessment of surface warship formation based on improved gray relational analysis

The paper analyzes the pros and cons of classical gray relational analysis on solving multi-target and multi-attribute problems, and presents an improved gray relational model to assess the battle damage of surface warship formations. First, with an entropy method and analytic hierarchy process, the subjective and objective weights of the index attributes are determined, respectively, and then they are combined with the product method to obtain the combined weight. Second, to make full use of the information carried by the index attributes, a polygon area formed by the adjacent points of the reference sequence curve and alternative sequence curve is used as gray relational coefficient. Third, by combining with the combined weight and the gray relational coefficients, an improved gray relational degree is thus determined. Finally, the numerical results illustrate that the battle damage assessment is generally consistent with the assessment results of experts, and the achieved result will provide important information to make a correct decision for carrying out a next strike.