Technology Transformation of 21st Century Warfare For India and Pakistan
How is increasing use of technology transforming modern warfare?
What will be the impact of widespread deployment of cyberweapons like Stuxnet worm used by the United Sates to cause extensively physical destruction of Iran's nuclear centrifuges? Will such weapons be used to destroy critical infrastructure of telecommunications, water and power and the economy of the enemy?
Will the boots on the ground be replaced by bots on the ground, in the air and on the water in the future? How autonomous will such bots be? How will the armed drones distinguish between combatants and non-combatants in war?
Will bio-hacking lead to new extremely lethal biological agents developed and deployed by terrorists and rogue individuals and nations?
How is the information technology changing the battlefield awareness with more effective command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I)?
Are India and Pakistan modernizing their militaries for technology-based warfare?
What are the key ethical issues raised by high-tech warfare? Will it make it easier for nations with advanced technology to start wars with impunity?
Vision 2047 host Farrukh Shah Khan discusses these questions with Riaz Haq in the following video:
http://vimeo.com/117678020
Vision 2047: Impact of Revolution in Military Affairs on South Asia from WBT TV on Vimeo.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2fo3yh_how-will-technology-change-warfare-in-south-asia_tech
How Will Technology Change Warfare in South Asia- by faizanmaqsood1010
As to the potential cyber component of any future wars between India and Pakistan, its dramatic impact could reverberate across the globe as the computers used in South Asia for outsourced work from the United States and Europe come under crippling attacks from hackers on both sides. Here is how Robert X. Cringeley describes it in a June 2009 blog post captioned "Collateral Damage":
"Forget for the moment about data incursions within the DC beltway, what happens when Pakistan takes down the Internet in India? Here we have technologically sophisticated regional rivals who have gone to war periodically for six decades. There will be more wars between these two. And to think that Pakistan or India are incapable or unlikely to take such action against the Internet is simply naive. The next time these two nations fight YOU KNOW there will be a cyber component to that war.
And with what effect on the U.S.? It will go far beyond nuking customer support for nearly every bank and PC company, though that’s sure to happen. A strategic component of any such attack would be to hobble tech services in both economies by destroying source code repositories. And an interesting aspect of destroying such repositories — in Third World countries OR in the U.S. — is that the logical bet is to destroy them all without regard to what they contain, which for the most part negates any effort to obscure those contents."
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
Pakistan Defense Production Goes High-Tech
Drones Outrage and Inspire Pakistanis
RMA Status in Pakistan
Cyber Wars in South Asia
Pakistan's Biggest Ever Arms Bazar
Genomics and Biotech Advances in Pakistan
India's Israel Envy: What if Modi Attacks Pakistan
Eating Grass: Pakistan's Nuclear Program
What will be the impact of widespread deployment of cyberweapons like Stuxnet worm used by the United Sates to cause extensively physical destruction of Iran's nuclear centrifuges? Will such weapons be used to destroy critical infrastructure of telecommunications, water and power and the economy of the enemy?
Will the boots on the ground be replaced by bots on the ground, in the air and on the water in the future? How autonomous will such bots be? How will the armed drones distinguish between combatants and non-combatants in war?
How is the information technology changing the battlefield awareness with more effective command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I)?
Are India and Pakistan modernizing their militaries for technology-based warfare?
What are the key ethical issues raised by high-tech warfare? Will it make it easier for nations with advanced technology to start wars with impunity?
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| Capacity For Revolution in Military Affairs Source: Laird & Mey 1999 |
Vision 2047 host Farrukh Shah Khan discusses these questions with Riaz Haq in the following video:
http://vimeo.com/117678020
Vision 2047: Impact of Revolution in Military Affairs on South Asia from WBT TV on Vimeo.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2fo3yh_how-will-technology-change-warfare-in-south-asia_tech
How Will Technology Change Warfare in South Asia- by faizanmaqsood1010
As to the potential cyber component of any future wars between India and Pakistan, its dramatic impact could reverberate across the globe as the computers used in South Asia for outsourced work from the United States and Europe come under crippling attacks from hackers on both sides. Here is how Robert X. Cringeley describes it in a June 2009 blog post captioned "Collateral Damage":
"Forget for the moment about data incursions within the DC beltway, what happens when Pakistan takes down the Internet in India? Here we have technologically sophisticated regional rivals who have gone to war periodically for six decades. There will be more wars between these two. And to think that Pakistan or India are incapable or unlikely to take such action against the Internet is simply naive. The next time these two nations fight YOU KNOW there will be a cyber component to that war.
And with what effect on the U.S.? It will go far beyond nuking customer support for nearly every bank and PC company, though that’s sure to happen. A strategic component of any such attack would be to hobble tech services in both economies by destroying source code repositories. And an interesting aspect of destroying such repositories — in Third World countries OR in the U.S. — is that the logical bet is to destroy them all without regard to what they contain, which for the most part negates any effort to obscure those contents."
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
Pakistan Defense Production Goes High-Tech
Drones Outrage and Inspire Pakistanis
RMA Status in Pakistan
Cyber Wars in South Asia
Pakistan's Biggest Ever Arms Bazar
Genomics and Biotech Advances in Pakistan
India's Israel Envy: What if Modi Attacks Pakistan
Eating Grass: Pakistan's Nuclear Program
Comments
Lt Gen Stewart told lawmakers that Pakistan’s army and paramilitary forces remain deployed in FATA and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
“Army ground operations in North Waziristan have cleared anti-state militants from most population centres, and we expect the military will continue targeting remaining militant strongholds in 2015.”
He noted that the TTP attack on an army-run school in Peshawar has emboldened military efforts against anti-state militants, including intensified airstrikes against TTP leadership and fighters.
The government and military are also working together to implement a national action plan against terrorism, which includes the establishment of military courts, he added.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/833002/us-expresses-confidence-in-pakistans-nuclear-security/
Pakistan Air Force (PAF) said the new aircraft were inducted into its premier No 4 Squadron at ceremony held at an operational PAF base in Karachi.
"With the addition of AWACS, Pakistan air defence is now able to look deeper in enemy territory, be it land or sea," the air force said.
The Karakorum Eagle Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) can detect aerial as well as sea surface targets at a fairly long distance regardless of their height, it said.
The aircraft maintains link with ground command and control centres to provide comprehensive air picture.
"After an early detection, AWACS can direct own fighter aircraft to intercept or neutralise the emerging threat, well before it can threaten our national assets. AWACS ability of detecting sea targets would also enhance the capabilities of Pakistan Navy," it said.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who was the chief guest at the induction ceremony, said the PAF has always proved equal to the task even in the most challenging times and has measured up to the expectations of the nation.
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Air Chief Marshal Tahir Rafique Butt termed the induction a significant moment for the PAF.
"Re-equipping the Squadron with this state-of-the-art aircraft will enable PAF to effectively counter all threats against Pakistan's aerial frontiers and add a new dimension to the National security," he said.
"Induction of Karakoram Eagle AWACS would revolutionise PAF's operational concepts. With its induction, PAF is transforming into a modern versatile and capability based force," Butt said.
http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/pak-inducts-china-built-eagle-awacs-into-air-force-115022601420_1.html
Though the exact location of the ceremony was not given, it is believed to have been held at PAF Base Masroor in Karachi as the prime minister was known to have been in the city that day.
Brian Cloughley, an analyst and former Australian defense attache to Islamabad, said AEW&C "is very good news for the PAF – and for Pakistan" because it "will dramatically improve early warning capabilities which up until now have been comparatively rudimentary."
The ZDK-03 Karakorum Eagle is a dish-based AEW&C system mounted on a Shaanxi Y-8F600 aircraft. Though never confirmed, it has been speculated that the dish houses an AESA antenna.
Four were ordered in 2008 with the first delivered in 2010.
Air Commodore Syed Muhammad Ali, a spokesman for the Air Force, confirmed all Karakorum Eagle aircraft on order have now been delivered, but could not say if more would be ordered from China.
The aircraft join No.4 Squadron, which was first established in 1959 with Bristol Freighter transports and Grumman HU-16 Albatross amphibians. The amphibians were used for maritime reconnaissance, search and rescue, and casualty evacuation alongside Sikorsky H-19D helicopters. The HU-16s were retired in 1968 and the H-19Ds in 1969.
The unit was then "number-plated" until officially re-equipped with the Karakorum Eagle.
The four Karakorum Eagle AEW&C aircraft join the surviving three Saab Erieye AEW&C aircraft ordered in 2005 and delivered from 2009. One of the four Erieye aircraft was destroyed in a terrorist attack on Kamra Air Base in August 2012.
That the Air Force operates two types of AEW&C aircraft for the same mission has been much commented on.
Analyst Usman Shabbir of the Pakistan Military Consortium think tank says the Karakorum Eagle's mission is "[b]asically the same job as Erieye but based in southern sector.
"To cover all the length of Pakistan we needed additional AEW&C aircraft and ZDK-03 was the answer due to political and financial considerations," he said.
Former Air Commodore Kaiser Tufail says the PAF was not keen on their purchase.
"The [Karakorum] Eagle was purchased rather reluctantly, under pressure of [then President] Gen. Musharraf, as a political expedient [Chinese appeasement], and not because of any reasons of technical superiority," he said. "It would have been more cost effective to manage a single type than these two vastly different ones."
Though he now believes attitudes have changed.
"Having said that, the performance of the Eagle has turned out to be surprisingly good, which takes some sting out of the initial criticism," he said.
Tufail says an absence of news of the fourth aircraft being delivered may mean it is undergoing installation of Link 16 datalink equipment to enable it to communicate with all of the PAF's aircraft, particularly its F-16s, and not just the JF-17 Thunders.
To date the Erieye AEW&C aircraft have been able to communicate with the Western aircraft in service such as the F-16, and the Karakorum Eagle with the Chinese aircraft such as the Sino-Pak JF-17, and perhaps the F-7PG.
http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/air-space/air-force/2015/02/28/pakistan-re-equips-squadron-with-new-aewc-aircraft/24140709/
An information and intelligence shift has emerged in America's national security state over the last two decades, and that change has been reflected in the country's educational institutions as they have become increasingly tied to the military, intelligence, and law enforcement worlds. This is why VICE News has analyzed and ranked the 100 most militarized universities in America.
Initially, we hesitated to use the term militarized to describe these schools. The term was not meant to simply evoke robust campus police forces or ROTC drills held on a campus quad. It was also a measure of university labs funded by US intelligence agencies, administrators with strong ties to those same agencies, and, most importantly, the educational backgrounds of the approximately 1.4 million people who hold Top Secret clearance in the United States.
But ultimately, we came to believe that no term sums up all of those elements better than militarized. Today's national security state includes a growing cadre of technicians and security professionals who sit at computers and manage vast amounts of data; they far outnumber conventional soldiers and spies. And as the skills demanded from these digital warriors have evolved, higher education has evolved with them.
The 100 schools named in the VICE News rankings produce the greatest number of students who are employed by the Intelligence Community (IC), have the closest relationships with the national security state, and profit the most from American war-waging.
National security-related degree programs cater not just to new technologies and education needs, but also to the careers of a regimented workforce, offering distance learning, flexible credits, and easy transfers to accommodate frequent deployments, assignment changes, and shift work.
Four categories of institutions of higher education dominate the VICE News list of the 100 most militarized universities in America: schools whose students attain their degrees predominantly online; schools that are heavily involved in research and development for defense, intelligence, and security clients; schools in the Washington, DC area; and schools that are newly focused on homeland security.
Twenty of the top 100 schools that instruct people working in intelligence agencies, the military, and the worlds of law enforcement and homeland security — including their private contractor counterparts — are effectively online diploma mills. Twelve are for-profit companies; several didn't exist before 9/11. The schools have become so important that two of them, American Military University (No. 2) and the University of Phoenix (No. 3), rank near the top of the list based on the sheer number of their graduates working in the Top Secret world.
Seventeen of the 100 top schools are in the Washington, DC area, reflecting the concentration of all things national security around the nation's capital. The University of Maryland handily outranks all other schools at number one, while Georgetown University (No. 10), George Washington University (No. 4), and American University (No. 20) — all considered among the country's 10 best schools for the study of international relations — rank among the top 25 most militarized schools. But post-9/11 growth in homeland security and a high demand for cyber training boost schools as diverse as George Mason (No. 5), Northern Virginia Community College (No. 16), and Strayer University (No. 8), a predominantly online school headquartered in Herndon, Virginia.
https://news.vice.com/article/the-most-militarized-universities-in-america-a-vice-news-investigation
http://pakistanpolitico.com/deepfakes-ai-digital-soldiers-challenges-of-cross-domain-coercion-for-pakistan/
Let’s begin by asking a question: Why would ANY state not want to achieve capabilities where it could advance its strategic interests by evading attribution or risk of escalation (at least initially), without firing a single conventional shot? As Bob Dylan would say, the times they are a-changin.
https://tnsr.org/2020/07/wormhole-escalation-in-the-new-nuclear-age/
I have formulated my response to this question in the light of Rebecca Hersman’s incredibly brilliant articulation of the new nuclear paradox in her article ‘Wormhole Escalation’. She explains the new nuclear paradox as follows:
“As states drive to compete and win at the sub-conventional level — in the gray zone — the risk of strategic crisis may increase, even as the risk of conventional conflict between nuclear-armed states declines.”
She looks at the changing landscape of escalation and how it will come about and be perceived between adversaries, and questions the validity or utility of Herman Kahn’s 44-rung escalation ladder, which until now was continuous and linear. The gray zone, in which AI generated, fabricated, deep fake news operates, complicates the universally shared conceptions of deterrence. Across the full spectrum of conflict, the cross-domain coercion tools available to states are numerous and impactful: through digital soldiers, “nuclear powers can now engage their adversary’s core strategic interests directly, coercively and below the traditional form of armed conflict as we all know it or have theorized about.”
1.The character of conflict is changing: Growing asymmetry between states who are advancing towards acquiring disruptive technologies will upset the levels of conflict and our understanding of it: sub-conventional tactics that are non-nuclear, information based, have the potential to achieve strategic objectives. The conflict is no longer about only territorial claims or land grabs inviting direct contact with the enemy. The conflict in the cyber domain is non-linear and has the potential to dissuade your adversary to choose a particular action, whereby it places you in coercion dominance. Your defined thresholds are bound to change. If your adversary is able to achieve strategic objectives, through contactless, human proxy-less (digital soldiers are proxies too), non-nuclear, technology, how would that shape your definition of armed attack or act of aggression? Pakistan’s nuclear thresholds, would need to be redefined and re-studied in that context to include how disruptive technologies will impact Pakistan’s conventional and nuclear responses. Offensive posturing or strategy against hostile use of technologies will need to be developed. Not only will the character of conflict change, but the size of conflict, and the nature of its destruction will also change. So Pakistan would need to think how to counter-strategize against this one in particular.
Rebecca Hersman
Increasingly capable and intrusive digital information technologies, advanced dual-use military capabilities, and diffused global power structures will reshape future crises and conflicts between nuclear-armed adversaries and challenge traditional ways of thinking about escalation and stability. This emerging security environment will require new concepts and tools to manage the risk of unintended escalation and reduce nuclear dangers.
https://tnsr.org/2020/07/wormhole-escalation-in-the-new-nuclear-age/
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The India-Pakistan crisis in February 2019, which culminated with widespread disinformation and highly escalatory rhetoric on both sides demonstrates the potential “out of control” nature of sub-conventional information warfare. In the immediate aftermath of the terror attack in India’s Jammu and Kashmir state that killed 40 Indian paramilitary members, an aggressive disinformation campaign was launched to link the incident to India’s upcoming parliamentary elections.27Notably, disinformation spread via WhatsApp that claimed that a leader of the Indian National Congress party, the opposition party, had offered a bribe to the suicide bomber’s family.28 Additional narratives were also disseminated, many of which portrayed the opposition party as “being soft on militancy”29 in Kashmir. Because Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party had 1.2 million volunteers operating the party’s social media campaign for the elections, misinformation and false narratives about the escalating crisis with Pakistan spread rampantly. In the days following the attack in Kashmir, Facebook removed hundreds of fake accounts linked to Indian political parties and Pakistan’s military. Yet, this disinformation campaign ultimately reached over 2.8 million Facebook users.30 What was once intended to influence domestic politics to bolster support for the Bharatiya Janata Party seemed to spiral out of control even as both countries came to the brink of a broader military conflict.
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These strategies of strategic competition in the sub-conventional domain may not be entirely new, but the tools that enable them have transformed the strategic significance of the unconventional battlespace and the coercive power of hybrid warfare. Fueled by technological innovation — particularly in digital media-based technology as well as cyber operations, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning — today’s competitive landscape is more complex and dynamic than before. The growing number of weapons in the sub-conventional arsenal include a range of kinetic and non-kinetic coercive tools, tactics, and strategies. The rise of the cyber domain; connectivity of global commerce, finance, and communications; speed and penetration of the internet; and prevalence and intimacy of social media that reaches nearly 40 percent of the world’s population have reshaped the competitive domain now commonly called the “gray zone”.3 Today’s proxies and surrogates look more like online trolls who wander freely inside one’s digital homeland, enabled by advanced cyber and disinformation tools and weaponized social media, rather than armed guerillas fighting internal wars with black-market weaponry in distant territories. Moreover, these new forms of influence and information warfare are not the exclusive domain of great powers. Rather, the accessibility of information technology suggests a leveling of the playing field for great powers, non-state actors, states, and non-government entities alike.
Rebecca Hersman
Increasingly capable and intrusive digital information technologies, advanced dual-use military capabilities, and diffused global power structures will reshape future crises and conflicts between nuclear-armed adversaries and challenge traditional ways of thinking about escalation and stability. This emerging security environment will require new concepts and tools to manage the risk of unintended escalation and reduce nuclear dangers.
https://tnsr.org/2020/07/wormhole-escalation-in-the-new-nuclear-age/
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Ultimately, misinformation and disinformation brought the most basic facts of the crisis into dispute. On February 26, the Indian Air Force (IAF) launched airstrikes against targets it said were terrorist bases in Balakot, Pakistan. In retaliation, Pakistan sent fighter planes over the Line of Control to bomb Indian administered Kashmir. During the resulting firefight, Pakistan shot down an Indian MiG-21 fighter jet and captured its pilot.31 Subsequently, India claimed that the IAF pilot shot down one of Pakistan’s F-16 fighter planes before his jet was downed. In an April 2019 Foreign Policy article, two U.S. defense officials stated that the United States had counted Pakistan’s F-16s and found none missing.32 The next day, Indian press refuted the U.S. report in The Wire, saying that radio signature confirmed the downed aircraft.33 Such an incident should have been easy to fact check, but instead the episode remains in truth limbo. This contradiction of facts in the F-16 case represents a wider rift in U.S.-India reporting of the incident, and possibly an information vulnerability that Pakistan could capitalize on in the future. In a Washington Post article, South Asia experts Sameer Lalwani and Emily Tallo stated, “This [incident] will no doubt raise questions both inside and outside of India about the [Indian Air Forces’s] conventional advantage if it is unable to punish a weaker adversary to reestablish deterrence.”34
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This crisis also raised troubling questions about the informational basis on which strategic stability rests. By creating and propagating their own alternative, and even incompatible, perceptions of victory, can states secure the benefits of de-escalation while forgoing the political costs of military defeat? This appears to have been the outcome of the 2019 Pulwama crisis, and yet this would seem to be a shaky foundation for sustaining strategic stability between nuclear-armed adversaries. Rather, in stability terms, such a “victory” may simply be borrowed time — a house of cards ready to collapse even more precipitously with the next crisis. Moreover, this dynamic suggests that information and influence campaigns can take on a highly competitive dynamic with each subsequent crisis raising the information escalation threshold — a form of “disinformation racing.” How India or Pakistan, or even China, might seek to use this chaotic stream of disinformation and its escalatory effect to its advantage in the future merits closer examination, as does the vulnerability of the United States to similar dynamics and pressures, especially when employed against partners and allies as a decoupling strategy.
https://propakistani.pk/2022/12/02/ignite-conducts-karachi-qualifier-round-of-digital-pakistan-cybersecurity-hackathon-2022/
Ignite National Technology Fund, a public sector company with the Ministry of IT & Telecom, conducted the qualifier round of Digital Pakistan Cybersecurity Hackathon 2022 in Karachi on 1st December 2022 after conducting qualifier rounds at Quetta and Lahore.
The Cybersecurity Hackathon aims to improve the cybersecurity readiness, protection, and incident response capabilities of the country by conducting cyber drills at a national level and identifying cybersecurity talent for public and private sector organizations.
Dr. Zain ul Abdin, General Manager Ignite, stated that Ignite was excited about organizing Pakistan’s 2nd nationwide cybersecurity hackathon in five cities this year. The purpose of the Cyber Security Hackathon 2022 is to train and prepare cyber security experts in Pakistan, he said.
Speaking on the occasion, Asim Shahryar Husain, CEO Ignite, said, “The goal of the cybersecurity hackathon is to create awareness about the rising importance of cybersecurity for Pakistan and also to identify and motivate cybersecurity talent which can be hired by public and private sector organizations to secure their networks from cyberattacks.”
“There is a shortage of 3-4 million cybersecurity professionals globally. So this is a good opportunity for Pakistan to build capacity of its IT graduates in cybersecurity so that they can boost our IT exports in future,” he added.
Chief guest, Mohsin Mushtaq, Additional Secretary (Incharge) IT & Telecommunication, said, “Digital Pakistan Cybersecurity Hackathon is a step towards harnessing the national talent to form a national cybersecurity response team.”
“Ignite will continue to hold such competitions every year to identify new talent. I would like to congratulate CEO Ignite and his team for holding such a marathon competition across Pakistan to motivate cybersecurity students and professionals all over the country,” he added.
Top cybersecurity experts were invited for keynote talks during the occasion including Moataz Salah, CEO Cyber Talents, Egypt, and Mehzad Sahar, Group Head InfoSec Engro Corp, who delivered the keynote address on Smart InfoSec Strategy.
Panelists from industry, academia, and MoITT officials participated in two panel discussions on “Cyber Threats and Protection Approaches” and “Indigenous Capability & Emerging Technologies” during the event.
The event also included a cybersecurity quiz competition in which 17 teams participated from different universities. The top three teams in the competition were awarded certificates.
41 teams competed from Karachi in the Digital Pakistan Cybersecurity Hackathon 2022.
The top three teams shortlisted after the eight-hour hackathon were: “Team Control” (Winner); “Revolt” (1st Runner-up); and “ASD” (2nd Runner-up).
These top teams will now compete in the final round of the hackathon in Islamabad later this month.
https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2023-07-08
Big wars are tragedies for the people and countries that fight them. They also transform how the world prepares for conflict, with momentous consequences for global security. Britain, France and Germany sent observers to the American civil war to study battles like Gettysburg. The tank duels of the Yom Kippur war in 1973 accelerated the shift of America’s army from the force that lost in Vietnam to the one that thumped Iraq in 1991. That campaign, in turn, led China’s leaders to rebuild the People’s Liberation Army into the formidable force it is today.
The war in Ukraine is the largest in Europe since 1945. It will shape the understanding of combat for decades to come. It has shattered any illusions that modern conflict might be limited to counterinsurgency campaigns or evolve towards low-casualty struggles in cyberspace. Instead it points to a new kind of high-intensity war that combines cutting-edge tech with industrial-scale killing and munitions consumption, even as it draws in civilians, allies and private firms. You can be sure that autocratic regimes are studying how to get an edge in any coming conflict. Rather than recoiling from the death and destruction, liberal societies must recognise that wars between industrialised economies are an all-too-real prospect—and start to prepare.
As our special report explains, Ukraine’s killing fields hold three big lessons. The first is that the battlefield is becoming transparent. Forget binoculars or maps; think of all-seeing sensors on satellites and fleets of drones. Cheap and ubiquitous, they yield data for processing by ever-improving algorithms that can pick out needles from haystacks: the mobile signal of a Russian general, say, or the outline of a camouflaged tank. This information can then be relayed by satellites to the lowliest soldier at the front, or used to aim artillery and rockets with unprecedented precision and range.
This quality of hyper-transparency means that future wars will hinge on reconnaissance. The priorities will be to detect the enemy first, before they spot you; to blind their sensors, whether drones or satellites; and to disrupt their means of sending data across the battlefield, whether through cyber-attacks, electronic warfare or old-fashioned explosives. Troops will have to develop new ways of fighting, relying on mobility, dispersal, concealment and deception. Big armies that fail to invest in new technologies or to develop new doctrines will be overwhelmed by smaller ones that do.
Even in the age of artificial intelligence, the second lesson is that war may still involve an immense physical mass of hundreds of thousands of humans, and millions of machines and munitions. Casualties in Ukraine have been severe: the ability to see targets and hit them precisely sends the body-count soaring. To adapt, troops have shifted mountains of mud to dig trenches worthy of Verdun or Passchendaele. The consumption of munitions and equipment is staggering: Russia has fired 10m shells in a year. Ukraine loses 10,000 drones per month. It is asking its allies for old-school cluster munitions to help its counter-offensive.
Eventually, technology may change how this requirement for physical “mass” is met and maintained. On June 30th General Mark Milley, America’s most senior soldier, predicted that a third of advanced armed forces would be robotic in 10-15 years’ time: think of pilotless air forces and crewless tanks. Yet armies need to be able to fight in this decade as well as the next one. That means replenishing stockpiles to prepare for high attrition rates, creating the industrial capacity to manufacture hardware at far greater scale and ensuring that armies have reserves of manpower. A nato summit on July 11th and 12th will be a test of whether Western countries can continue to reinvigorate their alliance to these ends.
https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2023-07-08
The third lesson—one that also applied for much of the 20th century—is that the boundary of a big war is wide and indistinct. The West’s conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq were fought by small professional armies and imposed a light burden on civilians at home (but often lots of misery on local people). In Ukraine civilians have been sucked into the war as victims—over 9,000 have died—but also participants: a provincial grandmother can help guide artillery fire through a smartphone app. And beyond the old defence-industrial complex, a new cohort of private firms has proved crucial. Ukraine’s battlefield software is hosted on big tech’s cloud servers abroad; Finnish firms provide targeting data and American ones satellite comms. A network of allies, with different levels of commitment, has helped supply Ukraine and enforce sanctions and an embargo on Russian trade.
New boundaries create fresh problems. The growing participation of civilians raises legal and ethical questions. Private companies located outside the physical conflict zone may be subject to virtual or armed attack. As new firms become involved, governments need to ensure that no company is a single point of failure.
No two wars are the same. A fight between India and China may take place on the rooftop of the world. A Sino-American clash over Taiwan would feature more air and naval power, long-range missiles and disruptions to trade. The mutual threat of nuclear use has probably acted to limit escalation in Ukraine: nato has not directly engaged a nuclear-armed enemy and Russia’s threats have been bluster so far. But in a fight over Taiwan, America and China would be tempted to attack each other in space, which could lead to nuclear escalation, especially if early-warning and command-and-control satellites were disabled.
Silicon Valley and the Somme
For liberal societies the temptation is to step back from the horrors of Ukraine, and from the vast cost and effort of modernising their armed forces. Yet they cannot assume that such a conflict, between large industrialised economies, will be a one-off event. An autocratic and unstable Russia may pose a threat to the West for decades to come. China’s rising military clout is a destabilising factor in Asia, and a global resurgence of autocracy could make conflicts more likely. Armies that do not learn the lessons of the new kind of industrial war on display in Ukraine risk losing to those that do. ■