Armed-Attack Threshold: Schmitt Criteria Simulator

Historical Preset

Schmitt Factors

Severity (damage / disruption) 6.0

Directness & invasiveness 5.0

Military character 4.0

Attribution confidence 50%

Assessment

Composite Schmitt score

0.0 / 10

Legal classification

—

NATO members who'd agree (Monte Carlo, n=32)

0 / 32

How it works

The Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare draws on Michael N. Schmitt's factor analysis to judge whether a cyber operation is a mere "use of force" (UN Charter Art. 2(4)) or crosses into an "armed attack" that can trigger self-defense (Art. 51) — no state has ever formally invoked Art. 51 over a cyber operation, so this remains an analytical framework, not settled case law.

7 factors, each scored 0-10:
  Severity        — physical/economic harm, casualties
  Immediacy       — speed from cause to effect
  Directness      — causal chain length to the harm
  Invasiveness    — depth of intrusion into the target system
  Measurability   — how quantifiable the damage is
  Military char.  — resemblance to a traditional military act
  State resp.     — attribution confidence to a state actor

Composite = Σ(wk · fk) / Σwk,  weights favor Severity (x3) and
Military character (x2) per Tallinn Manual commentary.

  score < 5.0        -> below use-of-force threshold (gray zone)
  5.0 <= score < 7.0  -> use of force, Art. 2(4)
  score >= 7.0        -> armed attack, Art. 51 self-defense may apply

Immediacy, measurability and directness are derived from the sliders you control (severity, invasiveness, military character) using the correlations Schmitt's commentary describes between them — e.g. highly invasive intrusions tend to have more measurable, more direct effects.

The NATO panel runs a small Monte Carlo model: each of the alliance's 32 members is given a personal perceived threshold drawn from a Normal(7.0, 1.0) distribution (member states genuinely disagree on where the line sits), and "agrees" only if the composite score exceeds their draw. Article 5 requires consensus of all 32 — the simulator shows how far from unanimous a given incident would fall.

Factor bar height = score Threshold plane (7.0) NATO member agrees NATO member disagrees

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