From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Fri Oct 02 2009 - 22:40:24 EDT
The New Faces of War
By: Nicholas Erwin-Longstaff
Posted: 10/1/09
Since the late 1990s the globe has become a far less violent place. The
number of wars, either civil or international, occurring in the world today
is fewer than any point in the past. This fact is hard to believe because
so much of the remaining violence in the world is well publicized and seems
particularly brutal in character. Nevertheless the world has become a very
different place, one where states will increasingly find non-violent means
to resolve their disputes.
Countries are no less competitive than before. The fact that Asia is
growing so rapidly means that inevitably the relative power of the United
States will be diminished. The slow decline of the old superpower and the
rise of a multipolar global order will, combined with the Earth's shrinking
natural resources, provoke an era of intense international competition.
While this competition will sometimes result in traditional forms of
warfare, it will far more often be resolved using new forms of coercion.
Whereas the military theorist von Clauswitz famously described 19th century
warfare as "politics by other means," in the 21st century we must reverse
this maxim: politics has become war by other means. Using the internet,
international law, high finance, political treaties, information technology
and the echo chamber of the global mass media, the great powers of the 21st
Century are already jockeying for positions in the emerging New World
Order. This article is a survey of how countries will compete in the 21st
century. These techniques are the new weapons of war.
THE END OF WAR?
Most readers will probably find it hard to believe that warfare - both
international and civil - is on the decline. After all, in the last decade,
the United States has conducted two high profile invasions, and more
Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan than in any other conflict since
the Korean War. If we lose our bizarre obsession with Western casualties,
the situation seems even more dire: in the Congo, for instance, endemic
fighting between seven different African states and dozens of local
militias led to more than five and a half million deaths, making "Africa's
Great War" the deadliest conflict in terms of lives lost since World War
II. In the late 1990s, Eritrea and Ethiopia even fought an under-reported
conventional war (one of the only examples of its kind in decades), using
standing armies to fight each other for territory. Indeed, it was only ten
years ago that India and Pakistan, bitter enemies both in possession of
nuclear weapons, went to war over Kashmir.
But as figures 1 and 2 suggest, these spectacular examples have masked a
sea change in international relations. War will still occasionally flare
up, especially in Africa where the trend toward non-violent competition is
far less pronounced, but other regions, such as areas of Latin America and
Asia, have already seen a massive drop in violence unimaginable even a
decade or two in the past. The global decline in violence is far from
complete - but it is still real and very significant.
CYBER WARFARE
The first interstate computer war occurred in between late April and May in
2007 after the government of Estonia ignored protests by the Russian
government and moved a World War II era monument to the Red Army known as
the "Bronze Soldier."
The response was immediate and unprecedented. Within hours, the digital
infrastructure of the tiny Baltic country was under full-scale assault.
Websites run by the Estonian President's office, the Estonian Parliament,
most other government ministries, two of Estonia's major banks, three of
the six largest national news organizations, and a number of firms
specializing in communication were all digitally attacked. Using techniques
such as "Distributed Denial of Service" (DDoS) attacks, whereby a web
server is overwhelmed by multiple, rapid requests for information, hackers
operating inside of Russia were able to paralyze most of Estonia's digital
infrastructure.
Estonia is one of the most "wired" countries in the world - Estonians are
accustomed to communicating, shopping, banking, and even voting online. The
attacks that began on April 27 threatened to bring the national economy
screeching to a halt. In an interview, Estonia's Minister of Defense, Jaak
Aaviksoo, described the attacks as "massive, well targeted and well
organized." These were, he continued, "attacks on basic modern
infrastructures." Speaking in another interview, he described the incident
as a "security situation" that "can effectively be compared to when your
ports are shut down at sea." NATO computer experts quickly arrived on scene
to assist Estonia and to try to learn something about its attackers.
Unofficially, it is no secret that many of the earliest cyber attacks were
traced back to Russian internet addresses, some of them identified as
coming from agencies of the Russian state.
The "Bronze Soldier" incident may have been the first war in cyberspace,
but it has not been the last. During the Ossetian War in 2008, Russian and
Georgian hackers battled it out in a widely reported internet "cyberwar,"
preceding and then parallel to the real world action. Last January, the
Central Asian Republic of Kyrgyzstan effectively had its internet access
shut down for a week by a Russian "cyber militia" at the same time that the
Russian government was putting pressure on Kyrgyzstan to close an American
military base. Early in 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported that
American Government officials were disturbed to learn that hackers
operating inside Russia and China had apparently been able to infiltrate
the computer system controlling America's electrical grid. At least in
theory, this gave these hackers the power to shut down the North American
grid.
To counter these threats, the United States Air Force has initiated new
training programs to bring it into the 21st Century. All enlisted personnel
and officers now learn about "cyberwarfare" in basic training, and since
2008, the Air Force's new Undergraduate Network Warfare Training at
Hurlburt Field in Florida has been enrolling roughly 100 students per year
in a six-month course designed to produce America's first generation of
"cyberwarriors." As a recent presentation from the Center for Cyberspace
Research explained, the Air Force "can drop a 2,000-pound bomb anywhere we
want… We need to be able to do the same thing in cyberspace…while
denying that ability to any adversary!"
But is it too late? Researchers at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre
recently uncovered a vast ring of infected computers that had been used to
harvest information from the offices of government buildings and embassies
around the world, as well as files on computers used by the retainers of
Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. The electronic spy
network, labelled "Ghost Net", is the largest of its kind ever discovered
and appears to be linked to the Chinese government. Ghost Net's software is
undetectable by most antivirus programs and even has the theoretical
capability to activate cameras or audio recording equipment connected to
infected computers, potentially allowing its owners to use a computer
user's own equipment to overhear conversations. In addition to these
specific threats, computer researchers have already demonstrated that, at
least in principle, it is possible to design software that will cause
infected computers to overheat and destroy their own hard drives.
Bill Woodcock, research director of Packet Clearing House, a non-profit
organization dedicated to tracking internet traffic, notes that though it's
easy to collect circumstantial evidence about who might be behind a cyber
attack, there is rarely definitive proof, which offers plausible
deniability for governments that choose to engage in cyber warfare.
Estimating the cost of a cyber attack to be "about 4 cents per machine", he
concluded that "you could fund an entire cyberwarfare campaign for the cost
of replacing a tank tread, so you would be foolish not to."
LAWFARE
Countries, NGOs, and corporations caught up in international disputes now
regularly launch legal complaints against each other to try to gain legal
advantage, silence critics, and rouse global sympathy, a practice sometimes
described as "lawfare." During the 2008 Ossetian War between Russia and
Georgia, for instance, both countries accused the other side of numerous
war crimes and challenged each other in the European Court of Human Rights
in Strasbourg and at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Thousands of additional lawsuits were then launched against Georgia by
residents of Ossetia who claimed Georgian troops had bombed civilian areas
indiscriminately and had attempted ethnic cleansing. These tactics are
often effectively combined with the use of "Media Warfare" to put pressure
on rival countries.
In a recent report on the 2006 war in Lebanon delivered to the UN's Human
Rights Council, Israel was accused of indiscriminately firing rockets into
civilian areas and of intentionally targeting civil households to punish
the local population for sheltering Hamas. American and Israeli politicians
allege that this is part of a decade's long pattern in which NGOs like
Human Rights Watch, the Palestinian Authority, and the governments of
Europe attempt to discredit Israel and limit its future options for self
defence. Conversely, the United States can be accused of manipulating
international law by shielding its Israeli client from the condemnation of
the international legal community.
Lawfare also takes other, less obvious forms. Consider patent laws: North
American and European corporations spend billions of dollars researching
technologies and drugs that they hope to sell at a profit to the rest of
the world. To protect their investments, these corporations take out
patents that are supposed to prevent other firms or countries from
"stealing" their innovations and then reselling them at lower prices.
But what constitutes a reasonable patent? Obviously the United States, a
net exporter of patented items, will have a very different idea of how
patents should be regulated from China, a country notorious for "stealing"
patented technology for its own use. In the future, will American lawyers
be able to slow Chinese growth by cracking down on this parasitic
behaviour? Will the developing nations of the world attempt to renegotiate
expensive patents on medicine and technology so that the gains can be more
equally distributed worldwide?
MEDIA WAR
During the 20th century, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both made
extensive use of foreign and domestic propaganda to achieve their goals.
What is rarely appreciated, however, is that the impulse to control the
hearts and minds of the population originated in the United States and
Britain during the First World War. First in Britain and then later in the
United States, the government used state-sponsored news releases to stir up
patriotic feelings and to encourage hatred of the enemy.
The origins of the modern "Media War" lie in the American defeat in
Vietnam, which convinced a generation of American military leaders and
policy makers that they had lost not because of military failure but
because of bad press. From that day on the Pentagon has been careful to
properly stage-manage all of its wars.
This became apparent during the first true "Media War," the Gulf War in
1991. The Pentagon carefully controlled the information and even the
visuals available to reporters. The carefully staged presentations given to
the media each day were calculated to convey America's awesome military
superiority and to make victory appear inevitable, while downplaying
civilian casualties. In the build up to the conflict, reports of Iraqi
atrocities, such as the false claim that Kuwaiti babies were being taken
out of their incubators and left to die, were allowed to circulate freely.
The media even acted as a smoke screen for American troop movements - days
and hours before the military action began, CNN was still releasing
confusing and contradictory reports about the movements of America's
carrier fleets, making it harder for the Iraqi military to anticipate when
and where the attack would occur. All of this resulted in a ratings bonanza
for the American mass media, and the war effectively created the breathless
24-hour reporting cycle pioneered by CNN.
A modern example of Media Warfare is the Ossetian conflict between Russia
and Georgia. In that conflict both sides used strategic accusations of
aggression and ethnic cleansing and attempted to sell their case to the
global media. Georgia was particularly effective at pandering to American
news outlets, though arguably with little to show for it, with President
Mikhail Saakashvili making numerous appearances on American cable news to
elicit sympathy and political support.
ECONOMIC WARFARE
After World War II the United States presided over the creation of an
international trade regime that would guarantee cheap imports and available
markets for American exporters. Other countries were pushed into this
arrangement, creating an excellent global environment for business. This
system was enshrined by laws and treaties, but what really guaranteed the
arrangement was the military and economic might of the United States.
As America's relative power declines, will the trade regime it has created
decline as well? For more than a decade now, state-owned Chinese firms have
been spreading themselves out through Central Africa and concluding
exclusive trade deals. Many of these agreements have timelines measured in
decades and effectively guarantee exclusive Chinese rights to extract
natural resources. These treaties ensure exclusive Chinese rights to
national resources and go directly against the American global project to
break down the barriers to foreign markets. Far from being an exception,
the Chinese are at the forefront of a global trend in which state owned
firms are becoming major players in the global economy. Will Chinese
mercantilism start the reverse of globalization? Can we expect billion
dollar, state-owned corporations to make purely economic investments, or
will national governments begin to seek political returns on their money?
Countries can attack each other's economies in many ways. They can try to
overproduce an export and then "dump" the excess in foreigner markets at
artificially low prices, effectively driving the competition in the other
country out of business. A state can slap import barriers (sometimes
official, sometimes covert) to cut into another nation's balance of
payments or as a way of giving domestic firms a greater advantage in the
global economy. A country could subsidize its researchers to develop
technologies that will make another state's exports uncompetitive. A state
can even use espionage (or cyberwarfare) to steal industrial secrets from a
rival and then share it with state firms.
During the last decade, the state has developed an unprecedented direct
stake in financial markets. Many countries now retain "Sovereign Wealth
Funds." These are state owned investment funds that use revenue from
stocks, bonds, and natural resources to make investments around the globe
on behalf of the national government. Many of these Funds control billions
of dollars and are almost completely opaque to outsiders. No one can say
precisely how they are run, and as with the state owned firms mentioned
above, it is impossible to guarantee that the funds are making investments
based on economic considerations rather than political ones.
Economic warfare in the future could take many forms. In recent years
Russia has taken to threatening Europe by cutting off its supply of natural
gas, but subtler methods of attack also exist. Sovereign Wealth Funds in
particular have the potential to become weapons of war. During the 1990s
George Soros, the manager of a Hedge Fund (a sort of giant, private
Sovereign Wealth Fund), demonstrated the potential power that large
investment funds can exercise when he used his "Quantum Fund" to create a
speculative run against the British pound. By buying and selling pounds
(largely with borrowed money) and giving strategic media interviews, Soros
single-handedly created a perception that Britain would not be able to
maintain fixed exchange rates, and the reaction of the market then made
that perception a reality. One man's billion dollar gambit may become a
future weapon of interstate competition.
In the future, a Sovereign Wealth Fund may buy up or sell off large
reserves of foreign currency, effectively hiding that currency's real
market value. By manipulating the price of currencies and commodities
through tactical buying and selling a Sovereign Wealth Funds could easily
distort market signals to their own advantage or as a way of hurting
rivals. Russia, a state that gained notoriety in recent years for propping
up its economy with high energy prices, might use its Sovereign Wealth
Funds to buy oil futures and create an artificial scarcity that would raise
energy prices. Carefully directed foreign money could even theoretically
create an asset bubble, the popping of which might damage the victim's
economy.
THE WARS OF THE FUTURE
The world has been changing rapidly for several centuries now. For most of
history, serious disputes between countries were almost invariably settled
by war. Then, a few centuries ago, some countries began the path to
becoming significantly more technologically advanced than the rest of the
world. These first modern countries, clustered in Europe, used their
position to plunder the rest of the world, taking its resources and
enslaving its peoples. In doing so, they inadvertently spread the
modernizing process. Today this trend is once again changing international
relations. Economic, historical, political and technological factors have
suddenly combined to affect one of the most spectacular changes in history.
War is becoming rarer. The wars that continue to occur are the exceptions,
however brutal.
But nations will still squabble. Indeed, without the superpowers to knock
heads and maintain order, we may discover that nations will come into
direct conflict with each other far more often in the 21st century than
they ever did in the 20th. That is why it is so important to understand how
non-military competition will define global relations. Even when nations do
resort to war, the military fighting will be brief (as in the case of
Russia vs. Georgia or Israel vs. Hezbollah) or low intensity (like the
Afghan insurgency, which is disruptive but can only win by discrediting its
more powerful adversaries). Instead, we can expect to see more showmen and
spin-doctors in government, more use of economic resources as threats or
incentives, and endless empty discourse about "human rights" and
international law. © Copyright 2009 The Strand