Wars serve a political purpose. Without political purpose wars are only adventures. This fact alone decides the legality, morality and rationality of any war. War is rational, not an impulsive resort. Nations don’t go to war in anger. When they do they end up being like the US in Afghanistan. Recent history has numerous examples but for the discerning it is easy to see when a war served political purpose and when it did not. Usually the results will vouch for the authenticity of war.
The purpose of war has been multifarious over its long history. From conquering territories to spaces — Nagorno-Karabakh has only recently been fought over — the notion of war now corresponds to delivering pain and punishment, imposing behaviour and conformance to a desired conduct, causing an economic cost, to sometime imperial hubris. Syria illustrates the hubris while Iran exemplifies the combination of most of the rest. Kashmir is a territory that is still undecided and unless politics can find a way to resolve it militaries may get involved. Yet there is another kind of war that India continues to impose on Pakistan which is meant to serve other ends. Its hybrid nature combines low-intensity tools; pressure through conventional means at the LoC, and the fourth and fifth generation tools by using irregular forces and terror to apply pressure on the western borders even as communication and IT tools are used to assault Pakistan’s internal fault-lines.
What may keep the two nations from entering into a full blown conventional war is the fear of escalation and breaching nuclear thresholds which only means mutual annihilation. The fear of it keeps conflict restricted to other means. Even more importantly politics has failed for conflict to ensue. Wars fill in for political vacuum. What then is the notion of victory? Medieval pursuit still equates victory with gaining territory but it is essential to know that both ends and means in a modern war are now changed. To seek conventional ends with modern means is contradictory in itself. Both India and Pakistan justify huge standing armies on the basis of that one war yet to be fought over territory. Kashmir is a tough nut and while human rights are a valid moral imperative, politics rather than war should help crack it. It is time to review the antiquated notions of war in our region and adjust to changed realities. That is an even bigger political conundrum.
Because the purpose of war is now different so are the tools of war. Kinetic war is dangerous, destructive and irrecoverable in economic cost in a highly interdependent world even if nations are simultaneously adversarial. Under a nuclear overhang those are anyway unthinkable for fear of escalation even with circumscribed purpose. Then again if lesser destructive modern tools of war can serve political purpose and enable mechanisms of intended cost on the adversary those find popular currency. Mankind is possibly heading into space wars and space-based weapons but currently is one step short in interfacing technological advancements as tools of the new war. Parts of it are already in play the world over with profusion of technology.
In conventional wars men and material mattered. They still do but as the ultimate resort especially when pursuing medieval purpose. In such an environment modern tools take a backseat. When the US attacked Iraq in 1991 and began its air war with suppressing enemy air defences (SEAD) with electronic jamming as their initial campaign they were shocked to find that Iraqis for most part were still on the manually driven communication links and remained unaffected by the electronic beams from jammers meant to block them out. Ditto with the Al Qaeda and Taliban et al in Afghanistan: cell-phones proliferated later and satellite phones remained a useful exception for long between these groups as a secure means of communication but to begin with only the B-52s worked to effect. But that is some decades back. Militancy has now embraced tech-tools far faster than the competition and outpaced those defending against their nefarious designs.
Technology has progressed far more rapidly than human capacity to fully absorb its benefits yet every passing day enables man to do more, achieve more, faster and with most efficiency. Those who know science and technology can easy understand the quadrupling of each of these tenets every year in technology-based applications which now dominate our lives as they do wars. Were one to be able to get a glimpse of USA’s NORAD (North American Aerospace Defence) Command HQs one may simply see walls upon walls of glass screens lit with the state of airspace, and space above, anywhere in the US and adjoining regions. Technology enables replicating the same picture now in any other geographical location, even underground.
Alongside come the derived benefits of efficient and effective decision-making processes which are key to any war. The challenge is to make each of the source system in the information loop work on same language. More perfect the conversion, more perfect the patch-up. Looser the assimilation greater is the leakage which makes these decision-making tools susceptible to external interference. Modern male-ware seeks such seepages to find an entry and corrupt the system. The more we rely on technology which may be commercial and open-sourced — at times MILSPEC (Military Specification) too — we render ourselves to external disruption. Not too far back there were reports of major electric-grid shutdowns in the US.
A notion that “computer network vulnerabilities are an increasingly serious ‘business’ problem but that their threat to national security is overstated” is outdated. Expansion of the notion of security includes a nation’s social and economic landscape making cyber threats to both a cognisable concern. Elections are stigmatsed as stolen through injection of fake news and opinion manipulation and influencing choices for preferred options. The vulnerability of smart and automated electrical grid systems, logistic infrastructure, computer-based control operations in financial and stock markets and other social services systems which are now increasingly computerised, automated and integrated causing an entire city, system or market to shut or slow causing damages to the tune of millions to an economy is an established fact. Perhaps the only distinction that must be made is of soft and hard damage. The softer will be repaired in time but will force a lag in enemy’s system, the harder will need to be fully replaced and rebuilt. It really depends what is a state looking for as ‘effect’ when it chooses one or the other tool.
The usual groups of targets in a conventional war include opposing military forces, population centres, infrastructure, systems and leadership in that order for complete annihilation of an enemy. It needed the use of hard power to eliminate these in conventional wars and a serial application to reach leadership especially when relying heavily on ground forces. With cyber tools it is now possible to directly neutralise infrastructure and systems meant to facilitate a leadership to make decisions, imposing a lag and an incremental paralysis in a perpetual lag. Digital wars enable swifter and smarter application with effective results. It is time to make the shift.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 10th, 2021.
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