Current warfare shows not asymmetrical but ontologically new situations.

The word asymmetrical leads to the prolonged false belief that there is still a balance in the pre IoT/AI situation that can be upheld.

Rob van Kranenburg postulates that the existing models of thinking about security in cyberspace are not necessarily the most appropriate or useful. In contrast to Bobrow’s focus on U.S. security policy, van Kranenburg argues broadly and philosophically that the emerging Internet of Things, with its “automated systems interacting in the physical world,” is altering the very basis of society. It is also altering the way society has organized itself economically, politically, and in relation to security, etc. and, as a consequence, the “nature of power” itself. He makes a distinction between the “real” enemy who can “redefine all that you hold normal, dear, and take for granted” and the “absolute” enemy that is more threatening because one is unable “to change convictions, alliances, and opinions” or one’s “ontologies: what you are, what you hold yourself to be, what you believe to be ‘normal,’ ‘just,’ ‘fair’.” The absolute enemy is difficult to confront, partly because there is “no clear definition of what a victory would mean—other than having things not happen,” but most importantly because there is no context or markers “to make an informed choice about the kinds of weapons that could either be used for defense or offense.”

Van Kranenburg argues that this change in ontological perception requires a change in how one makes decisions about the emerging digital world—moving from “analog” cause and effect to decisions made by negotiating “a network of varied and widely diverging skill sets that allow for conflict inside the network.” To do this, he advocates constructing a “new conceptual space” with “new notions of privacy, security, assets, risks, and threats, tailored to a reality of today, not a reality of yesterday or longer.”

Moreover, this is an urgent task and whoever succeeds first will dominate:
when it is time to act out of a deep knowledge that the current situation is untenable. Unfortunately, the analysis of the situation leaves different stakeholders with different timeframes.