Does this confuse causation? If governments are lauching large scale information gathering and hacking, doesnt this mean tensions are already high? Is Russian military equipment a better indicator of growing tensions?
I don't think they are implying causation, just a signal correlating with imminent military activity. If a signal like this started being useful however, it might lead to an unfortunate strategy of constantly hacking all the things, just to try and avoid giving too much warning by keeping things noisy. Some might say this has already occurred.
A private consultant tooting his own horn with no timeline corroborating his claims of causation. When exactly did the spikes happen?