Kautilya’s Silent Wars in Cyberspace
By Don McLain Gill
On January 3, an email was sent from the Indonesian Embassy in Australia to a member of the staff of the premier in Western Australia. The attachment contained an invisible cyberattack tool called Aria-body, which had never been detected before and had alarming new capabilities. The hackers who use it can remotely take over a computer and copy, delete, create files and carry out extensive searches of the device’s data. The tool also has new ways of covering its tracks to avoid detection. Check Point, a cybersecurity company in Israel has identified Aria-body as a weapon wielded by a group of hackers, called Naikon, that has previously been traced to the Chinese military.
The changes brought by the increasing levels of digitalization have become one of the most dynamic challenges facing the world today. Since they operate in a hidden battlefield, cyber attackers can go beyond the realm of traditional wars. So much so that state-backed cyber-attacks tend to be more lethal than traditional military warfare considering that the latter abides to a certain degree on rules of war. Cyber warfare, on the other hand, goes beyond these rules as it stealthily targets critical infrastructures such as that of finance, health, defense, and telecommunication. This is a way for the attackers to fracture the state slowly and “silently” from the inside.
Looking into the concept of cyberwarfare and how it is carried out, Kautilya’s framework of silent war can be effectively applied. The Indian political thinker Kautilya, one of the earliest political realists, was the chief adviser of Emperor Chandragupta, the first ruler of the Mauryan Empire. His pioneering work, the Arthashastra is one of the finest treaties in the ancient Sanskrit science of statecraft. It covers a wide range of topics in foreign policy and military strategy, among them, the concept of silent war.
Silent Wars
The Arthashastra deals thoroughly with the necessary qualities and disciplines needed for a king to rule his subjects and to expand his kingdom. Today, his main variables, the king and the kingdom are seen to reflect today’s head of government and the state, respectively. Given its broad foundation for statecraft and strategy, Kautilya’s theory can also be applied to events and issues beyond his era. In his writings, Kautilya emphasized that in warfare, a king must use all means to win. Moreover, he categorized war into three types, namely, open, concealed, and silent. Open wars are traditional with armies organised against one another. Concealed wars can best be attributed to guerilla warfare where the enemy is surprised in attack. The third and most interesting are silent wars.
Silent wars occur when a king engages cordially with another and treats the latter with civility in the context of political and economic relations, all the while attacking him repeatedly using tactics of stealth. Silent wars are best won when the attacking king engages in secrecy while carefully picking out critical targets to destabilize another kingdom. No other political thinker and strategist of Kautilya’s time provided such an in-depth analysis on this form of warfare. Moreover, Kautilya emphasizes the role of three actors in engaging in war: the king, the army, and the people. Here he clearly expresses a non-traditional approach in fighting wars. By emphasizing on non-state and non-military actors, Kautlilya presents an approach that deviates from the common state-centric narrative.
Implications
The concept of silent war fits well into the phenomenon of cyberwarfare due to the lack of measures to monitor every activity happening in the vast cyberspace. China is seen to apply the core principles of silent war with its use and increasing expertise in cybertechnology. Over the last five years, China has greatly invested in its cyber activities and overall capacity to conduct cyber-related operations. China-based hacker groups have improved their technical capabilities to retrieve valuable data effectively and stealthily from critical institutions. China’s cyberattacks are mostly carried out against public institutions, private companies, government institutions, and the defense sector.
According to Check Point, Naikon has a record for hacking into government agencies and state-owned technology companies in Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar and Brunei while managing to stay off the radar. These attacks have highlighted the sophistication of China’s use of cyberwarfare against its neighbors. While maintaining a robust level of economic and political relations, China has simultaneously used cyberspace as a platform to conduct silent wars against its neighbors to achieve strategic objectives.
Kautilya’s silent war concept can thus be said to be extremely advanced for the period that it was written in. Silent wars can be very much incorporated today in the cyber era. Due to the vastness of cyberspace, no single actor has the monopoly over it. As a result, effectively mitigating the domain would be a herculean if not, impossible task. Furthermore, it can be expected that cyberspace will continue to become an avenue to carry out silent wars against states. As technological advancements continue to unfold, so can the use of silent wars. In addition, silent wars have become a favorable strategy among states considering that interstate relations in the economic and political realms will remain largely unhampered. While Kautilya’s silent war has been effectively applied in international affairs today, it is no question that the timeless concept will also be incorporated in the future of international relations.
Don McLain Gill is currently pursuing his master’s degree in International Studies in the University of the Philippines Diliman. He has written extensively on regional geopolitics and Indian foreign policy.
Cover Photo is by Cyber-Andi and is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
