// Comparison

Cybertactique vs The Hacker and the State: Which Should You Read?

Two cybersecurity books on Strategy, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.

Intermediate

3/52014

Conduire la guerre numérique

Bertrand Boyer

The tactical companion to Cyberstratégie — how cyber operations are actually conducted, from planning to execution — by a French officer and strategist.

Beginner

5/52020

The Hacker and the State

Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics

Ben Buchanan

Ben Buchanan's argument that state-on-state cyber operations are not deterrence-shaped (like nuclear) but signaling-shaped: countries use cyber to shape the environment, not to threaten escalation. Builds the case from declassified incidents.

Read this if

Readers who liked Cyberstratégie and want the operational level: how doctrine translates into conducting digital operations. Military and strategy-minded.

Anyone trying to think clearly about state-sponsored cyber: policy staff, threat-intel analysts, journalists, and security leaders who have to brief on "the cyber threat" without resorting to vendor decks. The single best academic-grade synthesis of the last twenty years of state cyber operations.

Skip this if

Technically-minded readers wanting tooling; this is operational art and doctrine, not a hands-on guide. From 2014, so the tech context has moved on.

Readers wanting forensic detail on specific operations. Buchanan synthesizes; for the procedural blow-by-blow on Stuxnet, NotPetya, or the SolarWinds incident, go to Zetter, Greenberg, and the post-incident reports respectively.

Key takeaways

The tactical/operational counterpart to Boyer's Cyberstratégie — the two read as a pair.
A French/European military-strategic perspective on conducting cyber operations.
From 2014: doctrine endures, but pair with newer material for the current operational environment.

Cyber is poorly modeled by deterrence theory: states use it constantly, below the threshold of war, to shape the environment rather than to threaten escalation.
The signaling/shaping distinction (espionage, sabotage, destabilization, election interference) is the right taxonomy for analyzing modern campaigns and is the book's most reused contribution.
Attribution and accountability remain genuinely hard, and that asymmetry is itself a structural feature of cyber statecraft, not a temporary condition awaiting better tools.

How they compare

We rate The Hacker and the State higher (5/5 against 3/5 for Cybertactique). For most readers, that means The Hacker and the State is the primary pick and Cybertactique is a useful follow-up.

Cybertactique is pitched at intermediate level. The Hacker and the State is pitched at beginner level. Read the easier one first if you're not yet comfortable with the topic.

Cybertactique and The Hacker and the State both cover Strategy, Geopolitics, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

Keep reading

Cybertactique

→ Alternatives to Cybertactique → What to read after Cybertactique