In the wilder versions that were put about, full-on cyber warfare would incapacitate an opposing military.
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And even if the armed forces somehow held together as they struggled with systems that no longer worked, the society behind them would collapse. Government services would fail, and there'd be no water or electricity. Hospitals would cease to function, and so on.
Well, Russia has a high reputation and long experience in cyber warfare, and also has reason to deploy all the destructive methods it can against Ukraine's information technology networks and systems.
But, 21 months after Russia launched its war, Ukraine is still there.
Nor does Russia seem be have been greatly affected by cyber weapons that Ukraine surely had ready before the invasion.
No one is saying that Australia and other democracies should drop their guard against cyber warfare, which blends into cyber crime and disinformation and also occurs in peacetime, consuming enormous government and corporate resources.
But so far in the Ukrainian war we have not seen devastating hacking incidents to rival the worst of what armed forces have long done with explosives.
Possibly the most serious cyber damage that's been reported in Ukraine has been a hack that disrupted part of the country's electricity grid in November 2022. US security firm Mandiant and Ukraine's main intelligence agency said Russian hackers had done it.
Far more serious have been waves of blackouts caused in an old-fashion way: missile strikes on the grid to blow up bits of it.
Russia and Ukraine are undoubtedly using network penetrations to collect intelligence and even sometimes to locate specific valuable targets for immediate attack. But "the prevailing trends suggest cyber operations have yet to make a material impact on the battlefield," researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington reported in July.
Perhaps the area of cyber warfare where Russia is making the biggest gains is disinformation, especially in less developed and non-democratic countries, to persuade people to support it or at least not support Ukraine.
But a senior vice-president of CSIS, James Lewis, looks at Russia's overall results in the war so far and says: "Cyber attacks are overrated. While invaluable for espionage and crime, they are far from decisive in armed conflict."
The think tank raises three possible explanations for Russia's failure so far to make a big difference with cyber warfare. One is simply that defences against such activity may be too strong. CSIS particularly points to help that Ukraine got from outside companies such as Amazon Web Services, which sent suitcase-size computer drives with which the government in Kyiv could back up its data.
It's not clear that those backups have been needed, anyway.
Another possibility is that Russia has been biding its time. But nothing in its behaviour in the physical war suggests that it's interested in moderation or holding much strength in reserve.
Finally, it's possible that Russia is mainly interested in the political opportunities offered by cyber warfare - all that disinformation.
But that also assumes that Russian President Vladimir Putin is happy to leave destructive cyber capabilities unused.
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None of this is prompting Australian authorities to tone down efforts to protect the country against cyber attack, whether by government or private operatives.
The Australian Signals Directorate, whose functions have widened from collecting radio intelligence to cyber security, has ongoing programs with owners of critical infrastructure to deal with threats.
The agency is also frank in saying it maintains offensive cyber capabilities, meaning it can enter, exploit and disrupt networks and systems in other countries.
What we do not know is whether those capabilities would have decisive military effect.
- Bradley Perrett is a regular ACM columnist with a focus on Australia's relationship with China, covering defence, strategy, trade, economics and domestic policy. He was based in Beijing as a journalist from 2004 to 2020.