I want to go over this report from a top-level perspective, because, while dunking on it is fun, we need academia in on understanding this domain.

https://twitter.com/br4s1d4s/status/1304078494071246849

@BelferCyber

First, I think that this report is has an interesting question: who is strong in cyberspace. I like the idea of making a broad framework, particularly one that could be used to approach ISIS, Hezbollah, or drug cartels as well as multinational corporations.

That leads to the first problem. What do they mean by "cyber?"

"Cyber" as a term of art, is assumed by the report. There isn't a definition or discussion of what this means -- and I don't think the report recovers from this.

I think assuming that the countries listed in this report all view cyberspace the same way is wrong, and that affects analysis when it comes to strategy as well as the NLP and machine translations used.

Second, I think the report bounces around in this as well. Are we talking about power in cyberspace or over it? It seems to be analyzing a country's use of their instruments of national power and then using the output of that analysis to assume a new instrument.

This double-imprecision gets the report into a lot of trouble. If you are going to say Japan outranks Iran or say that the DPRK has less "cyber power" than most think, you need to be explicit by what you mean by that - because these are ridiculous claims without explanation.

I think the "intent" analysis is way off. Operations in the Information Environment are novel because the capability is often the signal. The report over-weights overt and consistent signaling and doctrine in a way that isn't savvy and that skews the results.

This is like talking about the duration of naval tradition during naval arms race surrounding the HMS Dreadnaught, but it is happening constantly.

I'm not saying effort over time isn't important, but it isn't limiting.

Also, back to the definitional problem, I don't see the analysis of this signaling as being particularly precise, because it fixated on amorphous, US-centric keywords.