The blurring of offense and defense reflects another feature of netwar
(albeit one that is exhibited in many other policy and issue areas): It
tends to defy and cut across standard boundaries, jurisdictions, and
distinctions between state and society, public and private, war and
peace, war and crime, civilian and military, police and military, and
legal and illegal. This makes it difficult if not impossible for a govern-
ment to assign responsibility to any single agency—e.g., military, po-
lice, or intelligence—to be in charge of responding.
As Richard Szafranski (1994, 1995) illuminated in his discussions of
how information warfare ultimately becomes “neo-cortical warfare,”
the challenge for governments and societies becomes “epistemologi-
cal.” A netwar actor may aim to confound people’s fundamental be-
liefs about the nature of their culture, society, and government, partly
to foment fear but perhaps mainly to disorient people and unhinge
their perceptions. This is why a netwar with a strong social content—
whether waged by ethnonationalists, terrorists, or social activists—
may tend to be about disruption more than destruction. The more
epistemological the challenge, the more confounding it may be from
an organizational standpoint. Whose responsibility is it to respond?
Whose roles and missions are at stake? Is it a military, police, intelli-
gence, or political matter? When the roles and missions of defenders
are not easy to define, both deterrence and defense may become
problematic.
Thus, the spread of netwar adds to the challenges facing the nation
state in the information age. Its sovereignty and authority are usually
exercised through bureacracies in which issues and problems can be
sliced up and specific offices can be charged with taking care of spe-
cific problems. In netwar, things are rarely so clear. A protagonist is
likely to operate in the cracks and gray areas of a society, striking
where lines of authority crisscross and the operational paradigms of
politicians, officials, soldiers, police officers, and related actors get
fuzzy and clash. Moreover, where transnational participation is
strong, a netwar’s protagonists may expose a local government to
challenges to its sovereignty and legitimacy by arousing foreign gov-
ernments and business corporations to put pressure on the local gov-
ernment to alter its domestic policies and practices.
