This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 3rd, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

So far, we haven't seen much in the way of cyber warfare in the war being waged

by Vladimir Putin's Russian government against Ukraine, so why not?

Cato Senior fellow Brandon Valeriano explains.

Before we get into the subject matter, what is this war about if you can

characterize it? Yeah, it's a great question. It's a tough one. I think a lot of

people are hanging their hat on the idea that this war is really about the status of NATO and NATO enlargement,

but really the war is about the status of Ukraine and the ability of Ukraine to be a nation state.

So it's an existential crisis for the Ukrainian people.

And that would lead to the assumption

that all options are on the table.

So that's really the concern a lot of us in international security have about this conflict.

Okay, so does that explain why at least so far we have not seen, speaking cyber war being undertaken by the Russian government.

Well I think there's been a fundamental failure of imagination in the international security community to understand the nature of technology and warfare,

and that a lot of these assumptions about how war might be fought are often colored by fictions and these strange ideas about the capabilities of cyber weapons when cyber is not really a capability that's useful on the battlefield.

It's not really a capability that's useful for coercion.

Cyber capabilities, digital manipulation is good for information warfare, but it's not good for actual warfare.

And I think a lot of people are fairly confused that this is how things have shaken out.

And we'll see how things develop because we're only in the beginning stages of this war horrifically and possibly

But as of right now we have not seen cyber operations leverage to great effect in this conflict.

Okay, so when there's a lack of imagination, what would a properly calibrated imagination

...