The Invisible World War by Kai London
A great deal of contemporary contest never reaches the threshold at which most organisations would recognise it as conflict. It arrives instead as an outage, a supplier failure, a data leak, a licensing restriction or a reputational incident. The Invisible World War sets out an analytical frame for that terrain — what is observable, what is inferred, and what an enterprise can reasonably plan against.
What the book covers
The sub-threshold spectrum
How cyber operations, information manipulation, economic instruments and infrastructure interference sit on a single continuum, and why organisations tend to see only the last link in the chain.
Attribution and its limits
Why confident attribution is hard, how analytic confidence is expressed responsibly, and how to make decisions that do not depend on knowing who was responsible.
Exposure mapping
Translating geopolitical developments into the specific dependencies an organisation actually holds — suppliers, routes, data, energy, connectivity.
Indicators and warning
Building an internal watch capability that distinguishes signal from noise without overclaiming intelligence it does not have.
Board decision-making
How to brief a board under genuine uncertainty: scenarios, thresholds, pre-agreed decisions and the triggers that activate them.
Resilience over prediction
Designing for continuity when the specific event cannot be forecast — degradation modes, fallbacks and rehearsed response.
The book is deliberately even-handed. It describes categories of activity and the analytical methods used to reason about them; it does not attribute specific incidents to named states or groups, and it does not forecast outcomes.
Who it is for
Board members and non-executive directors, CISOs and heads of risk, business continuity and supply-chain leaders, and operators of critical infrastructure who need a structured way to reason about geopolitical exposure without treating speculation as intelligence.
About the author
Professor Kai London — CISSP, CISM.
An internationally recognised cybersecurity executive, board advisor and Founder & CEO of Quantum AI Systems Security LLC, writing at the convergence of AI, governance and operational resilience. Honorary Professor and Researcher at UCL.