This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 17th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As the US military and intelligence services gear up to fight conflicts using code, what are the pitfalls

and why might restraint be the most prudent course?

Brandon Valeriano is co-author of the New Cato paper, The Myth of the Cyber Offence, the Case for Restraint.

We spoke this week.

Stuxnet was a clever bit of code that was produced by Israel and probably the United States to shut down facilities in Iran.

That was discovered to be an operation and the code for Stuxnet got out and it's been used since to do other things that were probably more nefarious than shutting

down nuclear facilities in Iran.

That seems to be a pretty good jumping off point for making the case for using cyber as something

to repel attacks on the United States and its critical interests.

Explain what you mean in your paper about, you know, the role code

essentially can play in fighting adversaries

and you know what the stakes are.

Sure.

Well, there's a lot to impact there,

but really the main issue is about effectiveness.

And the reality is that if the goal was to forestall an Israeli attack on Iran, then it's likely

that this stuccent attack was effective in delaying Israeli activities.

But if you're looking at whether or not the Stuxent attack actually degraded Iranian capabilities.

There's a lot of debate about that, but generally people suggest they actually got better

at your rich in uranium because basically they went through all their processes,

...