Gathering Clouds: Building Digital Strategic Depth in the Compute Age
Recent conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have revealed that data centers and cloud infrastructure now function as critical military and economic assets, making them targets for long-range strikes, drones, and cyberattacks. Defense planners are reconsidering how strategic resilience is defined when physical distance no longer offers the protection it once did.
Why this matters: When a country's cloud infrastructure goes down, so does a lot else — logistics, communications, financial systems, government services. That used to sound theoretical. It does not anymore. The lesson from recent wars is that data centers are targets, not just utilities. That affects how governments contract with cloud providers, where they build critical infrastructure, and what happens to civilian data caught in the middle. The next big question for privacy and digital rights is what protections apply when personal data sits inside infrastructure that a military considers a legitimate target.
Who should care: Cybersecurity · Privacy officers · Administrators
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