The Ring of Gyges: Anonymity and Technological Advance's Effect on the Deterrence of Non-State Actors in 2035 - Why Groups and Individuals Attack, Deterring with Expanded Denial Strategies

This excellent report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. From the time of Plato, men have pondered how an individual would act if they were unidentifiable or anonymous. In The Republic, Plato uses the story of Gyges of Lydia, who found a ring in a cave and put it upon his finger to become invisible, to show how a man would act when he believed himself to be anonymous. Gyges used the ring to take over a kingdom becoming the first in a long history of men who altered their actions when they believed themselves to be unidentifiable.

Two thousand four-hundred years later, the problems of anonymity that Plato imagined through fiction are becoming reality relative to how they affect deterrence strategies. As technology proliferates and more people and things become connected through networks, individuals are gaining the ability to anonymously become highly disruptive, thereby creating a degree of sanctuary no matter where they reside. As the United States considers its future deterrence strategy for the 2035 timeframe, understanding how the rapid increase in technological know-how combined with anonymity will affect the behavior of groups and individuals is of paramount importance. Without an improved understanding of this dynamic among groups and individuals, traditional approaches to deterrence may become ineffective by 2035 as anonymity and technological advances constrain a state's ability to use punishment and increases the challenge of denial as currently understood and practiced.

Accordingly, this paper explores the effects of anonymity and technological advances on deterrence theory and recommends ways to make today's deterrence methods more effective in this future environment. It begins by examining the main themes of classic deterrence in the national security literature as they apply to groups and individuals. Next, it presents a basic model of group and individual behavior to explain how anonymity creates an ungoverned space that traditional deterrence strategies do not address. Finally, it recommends two approaches to deter groups and individuals in an anonymous world by 1) increasing the degree of transparency in the actions of individuals globally to reduce their motivation, capability and opportunity to launch attacks and 2) taking steps to immunize or improve the resiliency of the United States and its allies to deny would-be actors the benefit of their action. To understand why improved global transparency and immunization will become a pressing national security requirement by 2035, it is first necessary to examine the limitations of current deterrence theory when dealing with issues of groups/individuals and anonymity.

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