The Perfect Weapon

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age
By David E. Sanger
Published in June 2018
386 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 3/5

This book is an account of the beginnings of US Army Cyber Command. It chronicles how cyberwarfare came to play a major role in the United States’ foreign policy and strategic planning.

David E. Sanger is a well known New York Times journalist, and the head correspondent for Washington DC.

The Perfect Weapon is a very clearly written historical account of how cyberwarfare went from a neglected “side quest” during the George Bush administration to a mainstay of American strategy during the Obama administration. It perfectly captures how frustratingly incompetent the US government was during the early days of cyberwarfare, and how the American government was repeatedly caught off-guard by China and Russia.

I would like to start this review by highlighting a side point - how heavily influenced Sanger’s thinking is by the US government.

Sanger takes a very mainstream pro-government perspective. This somewhat stiffles his thinking. For example, he seems to believe that Edward Snowden is a traitor and that the US population would be better off not knowing that they were being spied upon. He goes as far to admit that he lets American intelligence officials review all of his articles, and censor them, before publication. In some cases, he proudly describes these censorship meetings in detail.

Although it isn’t the main point of the book, reading through the lines really allowed me to see firsthand how the New York Times is directly censored and influenced by the American government. Sanger doesn’t make any effort to hide this. In my mind, this is extremely discrediting, because I was taught that the role of journalists was to speak truth to power.

Once you accept this book for what it is - a sort of “officially sanctioned history” of US cyberwarfare, it is very interesting.

The US has had several incredible cyberwarfare successes. The most famous - and obvious - example is the deployment of Stuxnet. Stuxnet is a computer virus which caused serious physical damage to Iran’s nuclear reactors by making them overheat.

There are two types of cyberwarfare. One is obvious - sabotage, espionage, cyber-ransoming, stealing secrets, etc… This is what most people think about.

There is a second - far more insidious - type of cyberwarfare. This type of cyberwarfare relies on using social media to spread deceptive propaganda to get them to act in ways that damage an enemy government.

The Russian government’s Internet Research Agency is a semi-privatized online troll group set up by Yevgeny Prigozhin - the same person who also established the legendary Wagner Group. The Internet Research Agency would cause chaos by doing things such as using Facebook to organize a Black Lives Matter protest in Texas from afar; and organizing a white nationalist rally using 4Chan nearby. They would then observe to see if anyone showed up and if fights broke out. Their efforts may have had a significant impact on the 2016 election of President Trump.

In Sanger’s mind, influence campaigns organized by groups such as the Internet Research Agency justify government-encouraged censorship of social media. Although Sanger doesn’t directly make any policy prescriptions, he seems to envision a model where the government publishes vague “responsible social media” guidelines; and it's up to private companies to decide how to specifically enforce them.

This book was valuable to me, because it helped me get into the minds of the people who are driving US cyber warfare policy. Professionally, I am working for a Venture Capital syndicate which finances some projects which may have some cybersecurity implications.

I don’t recommend this book for casual observers because it's not great. But if you really want to go deep into cyberwarfare, this could be part of your journey. It just wouldn’t be the most important or first part.


Finally, cyberwarfare evolves quickly. 2018 is a very long time in the past in that world. This book has lost a lot of relevance post-COVID and post-Trump’s second term. I think it will be completely irrelevant in two or three years due to the implications of AI.

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