Many are arguing that global warfare is changing; but is it really, or is this part of a much longer cycle?

Small-scale attacks are usually a deliberate strategy by less powerful actors who do not have a choice: rebels and insurgents, global protest groups, and weaker states such as North Korea or Iran. Often, they seek to challenge America and her traditional allies, but to do so in a way that sits below the threshold of overt warfare — by operating in the so-called “grey zone”, as the Chief of the Defence staff, General Sir Nick Carter, outlined his annual address to the Royal United Services Institute. These actors do not want to provoke a response, particularly a military one.

For a minimal outlay, a small player (relatively speaking), can have an outsized impact on an adversary, where it otherwise could not. In warfare this is known as asymmetry. General H.R. McMaster, former US National Security Adviser, once said: “There are two ways to fight the US: asymmetrically and stupid.”

Suggested reading

Is Prevent producing terrorists?

By Mike Martin

But, in fact, asymmetry is a key, if not the key, dynamic that all sides try to utilise in warfare. It is the most effective way to have a psychological effect on (or to send a message to) your enemy. This, throughout the ages, has been the whole point of warfare.

There are two types of asymmetry: with overt military power (tanks, infantry, and suchlike), one wants to amass as much force as possible against a weaker enemy force to shatter its cohesion (think of the D-Day amphibious operations in 1944). With covert, or non-traditional military activities, one is trying to generate a large impact, often against a big target, with a small outlay. The best example of this in recent times is, of course, the attacks of 11 September, 2001 in New York, which reportedly cost al-Qaeda $400,000 to carry out (compared with the $6tn cost of the “Global War on Terror”).

The question of which type of asymmetry predominates waxes and wanes through the ages. Critically, it depends upon the types of technology used in warfare and their relative costs (and not necessarily military-specific technology, either), and not just the overwhelming dominance of one actor.

Today you can, for example, buy drones on Amazon, and shut down major international airports, as Extinction Rebellion threatened to do to Heathrow. You can also write malware in your bedroom, and cripple governments, as Ukraine found to its cost in the ‘Petya’ malware attacks of 2017. This is an accelerating trend: malware attacks against states have doubled from 2018 to 2019.

Suggested reading

Why we now know the pity of war

By Douglas Murray

Eras that have a democratic availability of technology lead to fragmented patterns of violence and warfare where it is hard to distinguish who is attacking, or what the psychological message is that they are trying to deliver.

This hasn’t always been the case. For much of history, the cost of technology, and hence its concentration in the hands of a few, made warfare an elite sport. The cost and complexity of dreadnoughts, huge battleships with extensive firepower, at the turn of the 20th century, meant that only a few states could compete. On land, the perfection of the chariot on the Russian Steppes from around 2000 BCE had a similar effect. The elite nature of warfare meant that who was fighting, and what messages they were sending, were clear. Warfare tended to be clear and concentrated.

But is this of more than passing, academic interest?

It is, because fragmentation in warfare makes it hard to make sense of what’s going on. And if you can’t make sense of what is going on then it is hard to make decisions. And wining in war is a question of wartime leaders making good decisions, in good time, about how to respond to the enemy’s moves.

Suggested reading

The War was not Our Finest Hour

By Peter Hitchens

It is very hard to make decisions in warfare and international affairs at the moment because we are in an era of ultra cheap and available technology. For the next 20 years or so this trend is likely to accelerate: think of 3D printers churning out weapons systems remotely; nano-drone swarms paralysing automatic air-defence systems; or mega-cheap genome sequencing enabling actors to create organisms that can make a city’s water smell of, say, pear drops, or turn it purple — what better way to create a psychological effect on your enemy?

It will become increasingly hard to pick apart actors and motives, leading to confused decision making and, most likely, strategic errors on the part of large, rich countries. This is already happening: look at American and European paralysis over Syria, or the inability of governments to respond effectively to the multiple protests that are occurring around the globe currently.

But where does this process end? Most probably with the complete reshaping of warfare brought about by artificial intelligence. Advanced proprietary AI — the type that rich governments are investing heavily in, assuming that it will give them the edge in conflict — will help to make sense of the fragmentation in the contemporary strategic environment; it will enable better decisions to be made with clarity; and warfare will become an elite sport once again.

The early internet was a pretty innocent undertaking. Its architects were similarly-minded, collegial academics scattered across a range of elite universities and defence science laboratories. They knew that computers needed a common language, a common series of rules, if they were ever going to be able to talk to each other. There were a number of competing visions, but one protocol eventually won. It emerged to define the internet: called TCP/IP.

Transfer Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol. Even its name is unimaginably boring. Hardly anyone knows how the protocol works, and the vast majority of people who rely on it every day don’t know that it exists. But this tangle of code is undoubtedly more important than any law, any charter or covenant, for enshrining the rights, at least online, that you enjoy today. Just a series of rules, TCP/IP was written into the way the internet worked, and it reflected that innocent time.

Suggested reading

Who commands the internet?

By Carl Miller

The internet, TCP/IP says, must be free to use. It is a network that any computer, anywhere can join. All the data that passes through the internet, it says, must be treated equally, and computers are entirely disinterested about what that data is. And because of the way that it works, the internet would have no reigning authority or centre. No-one would be – really could be – in charge of it. It was a vision for a free-wheeling, open, democratic network of networks.

As the decades have passed, however, the internet has grown beyond the wildest, most unguarded imaginations of the people who first built it. From an innocent network of researchers, it is now more likely to be seen as a playground for hate criminals, information warfare officers and organised cybercriminals.

And yet TCP/IP has maintained its innocent outlook, still letting anyone join, still treating all data as equal still, essentially, trusting people to be who they say they are. Its architects might have imagined the internet as an escape from the tawdry geo-political struggles that blighted offline life, but it is now a key battleground where those very conflicts are being fought.

As the internet has fallen from its state of innocence, protocols – those powerful, forgotten, mysterious things – are now part of that struggle. There is now a competitor to TCP/IP, a very different kind of protocol, that has been rising in popularity. 

Suggested reading

Analogue dictators are no match for digital detectives

By Ian Birrell

It is called Digital Object Architecture, or, another acronym, DOA. Created in the 1990s, by one of the original inventors of the internet, Bob Kahn, DOA has another way of managing information. Unlike TCP/IP, data isn’t anonymous. Everything on the internet gets its own, unchanging digital fingerprint, whether a device, document or a person. Everything gets an identity number that doesn’t change.

DOA has been used to manage libraries and online academic repositories. But it is now being proposed to make the internet more secure. Forged identity is one of the main reasons crime is so easy to commit on the internet, and DOA would likely help change that. A hacker would struggle to impersonate you, because they wouldn’t have your unique identifier. Likewise, a fraudster would struggle to pretend to be your bank. Your financial records, your medical data, your social media profile – everything could be tagged to ensure that only certain people could look at it. It would weave identity and security into the fundamental way that the internet works.

For its backers, however, DOA may solve an even bigger problem than cybercrime. The internet, as it stands, has always been very difficult for states to control. In order to work, huge databases may have to be built, where every digital object is uniquely tagged, and where information is added, tracked and queried. Whomever controls the DOA registry becomes the centralised gatekeeper to all the information, resources and devices on the internet. It would create an unprecedented concentration of power to control and manage online life. And who would probably own the DOA registries? Governments. 

Suggested reading

How technology sidelines the citizen

By Carl Miller

There are reports – confirmed and unconfirmed – that DOA has begun to be rolled out. China may have been first in 2014. In May 2016, the Russian Minister of Communications Nikolay Nikiforov, said “Russia is interested in designing alternative ways of addressing on the internet, such as the DONA [an authority to implement DOA]”. On 16 October 2016 South Africa signed an agreement to use DOA. It’s not clear who else is using it, and that, of course, is part of the problem.

Human rights always exist in tension with one another, and these protocols that run the internet are at the very centre of one of the most important of these tensions. It’s a lot harder for any State to control an internet governed by TCP/IP, but it’s also easier for criminals to flourish. DOA would likely make cybercrime more difficult, but the price would be that governments would have a level of control over digital life that at the moment they simply do not have.

More from this author

The man holding Putin to account

By Carl Miller

This is a big deal. Different governments will take different views on the right protocols for the future. Western governments will probably give DOA a wide berth, whilst others have already adopted it. If that’s the case, we might be heading towards the ‘splinternet’ – a fracturing in the basic way that the internet works across geo-political divides. Some countries will use one protocol, and others another.

But underlying any kind of geo-political fracture in the internet is, for me, a more fundamental concern. Historically, human rights need to be protected by more than governments. They need high public visibility and the aggressive, vocal advocacy of civic society.

Internet protocols may become one of the most important battlegrounds where we fight for our online rights, freedoms and responsibilities. But surrounded by an alphabet soup of international agencies, legalese and impenetrable technical verbiage, they are difficult to explain, to understand, to raise any kind of awareness about. For all but a small handful, they are simply too impenetrable and boring to feel angry about. And that is a huge, huge danger.

“Coverage of Mr Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever.” (1)

A recent review of CNN’s news coverage found 92% of it devoted to Donald J. Trump.

The details are astonishing. Of 13 hours, 27 minutes of actual news coverage on the day chosen, 12 hours, 19 minutes, was devoted to the Trump presidency. Everything else? “A mere 68 minutes – a little more than three minutes per hour” versus nearly 40 for Trump. And while CNN claims just to be doing the right thing (and it has been viciously attacked by Trump for its coverage), doing the right thing is also proving highly profitable. (2)

Taking a different tack, New York Times journalist Farhad Manjoo decided to try and spend a week entirely avoiding everything about Trump, and following other stories instead. “In one way, my experiment failed: I could find almost no Trump-free part of the press.” (3)

Manjoo goes further: “He has taken up semi-permanent residence on every outlet of any kind, political or not. He is no longer just the message. In many cases, he has become the medium, the ether through which all other stories flow.” Trump in sport, reality TV, fictional storylines.

Yet it’s not simply wall-to-wall coverage. The Washington Post newspaper, famed for its role in bringing down Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, has made an unprecedented move. It now has a subtitle, or a “strapline”, to use the British marketing term. It’s a Trump strapline: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” (4) The paper has redefined its identity for the Trump era. Have no fear, there will certainly be no darkness for Trump in the pages of the Post.  On a quick check today, 13 out of the top 14 stories on the paper’s website are on this one subject. If Democracy Dies in Darkness, what dies when the super-trooper shines every day and all day on this one fellow?

If the “Trump rate” is the extraordinary CNN 92%, what are they not reporting?

Five Stories

Here are five stories that have broken since the election in the technology field. Every one of them is important. Enormously important. Every one of them has had far less prominence than is due. Because of the Trump phenomenon.

1. China’s Quantum Quantum Leap

In a move with potentially enormous implications for U.S. and western science and security, China has – according to Scientific American – tested the spooky phenomenon known as “quantum entanglement” at a much greater distance than has been done before. Quantum mechanics is hard for us to grasp as it involves properties of matter that seem to make no sense, including “entanglement” – essentially, that a change made to the state of one particle will immediately affect another, even if it is at a great distance.

The Chinese experiment involved a satellite and stations on the ground more than 1,200km apart. According to Scientific American, the test “firmly establishes China as the front-runner in a burgeoning ‘quantum space race’ to create a secure, quantum-based global communications network – that is, a potentially unhackable ‘quantum internet’ that would be of immense geopolitical importance.”

“China has taken the leadership in quantum communication,” says Nicolas Gisin, a physicist at the University of Geneva. (5)

2. CRISPR: editing our genes

For generations, scientists, ethicists and the public have displayed anxiety as genetics has moved ever nearer to perfecting the methods that would enable us to make changes in humans – including changes that our children will inherit. While the motivation may be to cure disease, once changes can be made we all know that there will be pressure to get rid of features like shortness and fatness and baldness – and engineer in superior looks and intelligence.

Until recently, this has seemed far-fetched as only very limited efforts to make genetic changes have been possible. But fast progress in gene editing has now led to expectation of human use of the technology with the development of CRISPR – and on February 15, 2017, a long-running patent dispute as to who owns the technology was finally decided by the US Patent and Trademark Office. (6) In a clarion call in the May issue of Wired Magazine, futurist Amy Webb calls for a “national biology policy” that encompasses the ethical implications of the revolution in genetics. “The US currently has no co-ordinated biology strategy. As a result, CRISPR, along with other emerging technologies, is developing faster than our government’s ability to address it.” (7)

3. Automation and jobs

The threat of artificial intelligence/robot automation to human jobs keeps getting more serious (and being entirely ignored by governments). The latest worrying report comes not from some Luddite think tank but global consulting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Their conclusion, as reported in Fortune Magazine, is that “Nearly 40% of US jobs could soon be given to robots… Researchers suggested that automated bots could take nearly four in 10 (38%) jobs in the US, and take 30% of jobs in the United Kingdom, 35% in Germany, and 21% in Japan.” (8)

4. The sex robots are coming

In a July 5 report on USA Today Network, Mary Bowerman writes of latest developments in sex robots, as manufacturers of “anatomically correct” sex dolls add AI features. Retailing for between $5,000 and $15,000, these robots are programmable in complex ways – to shape certain of their features and to understand user wants. Their dissemination at decreasing cost has wide social implications (for example, there are already reports of a Japanese manufacturer selling child models). This dimension of the digital revolution has been creeping up on us with little public discussion or understanding. Is the future one in which we have sex with robots and reproduce through in vitro fertilisation? (9)

5. Cybersecurity . . . or not

Threats to computer security continue to grow. Two new reports show a wide variety of awareness and action around the world – one from a United Nations index to help differentiate countries taking them seriously from others that do not (50% have no formal national strategy in place), and another from IFSEC News. The core problem is that computers and physical equipment are increasingly linked up – “cyber-physical systems” is one term used in the trade. If instead of stealing your credit card details a hacker can bring down your home heating system, or take control of a power grid, the stakes just went up enormously. The “Internet of Things” is about just that: linking things and computers, with potentially enormous benefits in convenience and profitability – and risks just as great. (10)

Trumping the Darkness

The Washington Post’s slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” has (re)defined its mission in terms every reader will associate with the need to challenge the serial dishonesty and “fake news” of the administration and its most committed supporters. The Post is to be commended for its absolute determination to bring the truth to light. Yet there is much more to democracy than politics, and much more to politics than the doings and sayings of the political class.

The irony is plain to see. The Trump administration shows little interest in either science and technology – or indeed the arts – which are all being targeted for big spending cuts; so why play along by making editorial choices that starkly parallel the one-dimensional universe of the White House?

At the heart of Washington’s current tragedy lies the fact that the administration has been able to shape the news-reporting agenda – in disagreement just as in those areas where the press has been supportive. Trump’s absolute dominance of the media focus is the one area where supporters and critics alike are continuing to work together.

We quoted at the start Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times: “Coverage of Mr Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever.” It’s also eclipsed these five vitally important stories – vital, not least, to the greatness of America.