As the number of advanced persistent threat incidents grows, incident response becomes increasingly important (Lemay& Leblanc, 2018). States have adopted a clear perspective regarding the strategic value of cyberspace during conflict according to which they view cyber power as an imperfect and underwhelming method of exerting force and compelling behavioral change on the international stage (Kostyuk & Zhukov, 2019. Moreover, a new wave of wargaming studies has honed in on how elites and military officials deploy cyber options in response to conflict scenarios (Schneider, 2017; Jensen & Valeriano, 2019; Gomez & Whyte, 2020), recurring finding in these studies is that cyber-attacks are viewed by elite actors as less serious than kinetic warfare, and there is high skepticism regarding the ability of cyber to cause substantial and enduring strategic harm.
This study aims to reveal the cognitive processes that occur in the decision to response to an attack on strategic national infrastructure and the differences in these processes between cybernetic attacks and conventional attacks. As well this study also aims to uncover the importance hierarchy of considerations among elites and military officials depending on the type of attack.
There are two phenomena that often appear in a decision-making process that may cause the decision to be non-optimal; heuristics and bias – each one appears in the first and the second phase of decision-making respectfully. Heuristics are cognitive short-cut in information acquisition in the editing phase of decision-making that most times involve ignoring part of the given data in a decision node (Gigerenzer, 2008). Biases, on the other hand, are consensually defined as a systematic discrepancy between a person’s judgment and the norm (Kahneman, 1973) and occur in the second phase of decision-making.
The research on foreign policy decision-making is a well-studied field and aim to explain and understand some of the complex decisions of leaders in time of international conflict, from the Cuban missile crisis and the invasion of the bay of pigs to the decision to invade Iraq (Mintz & DeRouen, 2010) and more. The literature has covered decisions in conflicts, conventional warfare, and even nuclear-related affairs. This study contributes to the literature an important tier that only grows wider in global relations: the dilemma of decision-making to a cybernetic attack. Understanding the cognitive processes that underlie these professional individual decisions is therefore critical in understanding how future conflicts can be optimally addressed. Furthermore, since cyber response is viewed by the international community as less harmful than a conventional one, understanding the consequences which lead to a certain response is crucial in the attempts to predict conflict escalation and de-escalation.
Another importance of this study is its unique and first-of-its-kind access to elite foreign policy decision-makers and military officials in the research of the cognitive process of decision-making related to cyber threats – and more specifically cyber-attacks by an enemy state on national infrastructure.