Tag: futurology

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A real military first

„From this place, and from this day forth begins a new era in the history of the world, and you can all say that you were present at its birth.“ — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We haven’t been there, we didnt see it, and we don’t know the place.

But as far as we can tell, one of the first days of July 2009 saw the first successful attack against a military target by a computer virus, or rather, a worm.  And I am not talking about defacing a couple of websites with a DDos attack by a couple of disaffectes script-kiddies like the “cyber attack” on Estonia in 2007.  The attack in the Summer of 2009 was different in several aspects, if we interpret the available information correctly:

  • It was conducted by an goverment agecy or an entity capable of mustering similar intelligence ressources
  • It was conducted by someone not caring about polital or economical fallout, if the source of the attack became public – which points to a government agency rather to a company
  • It targeted a specific installation instead of randomly attacking publicly accessible website
  • It required “boots on the ground” in order to plant the first code into the targeted network
  • Its outcome remained a secret for more than a year

I am talking, of course, of the Stuxnet worm, whose existence was publicly acknowledged only a couple of weeks ago, and which seems to have been targeted at the Iranian nuclear program.  The action at the intersection of computer security and intelligence means few reliable informations can be found, but a few deductions can be made from the available news.

It looks like Iran was the target. Going for the enrichment facilities with its several thousand identical machines seems to make indefinitly more sense than targeting a reactor which completion hinges on the consent of its russian builders. Having several thousand targets makes it more likely to be able to reach a significant number of them with a virus or a worm. And from what Wikileaks and other bits and pieces on the tubes tell us, someone indeed succeeded in hampering the Iranian efforts to enrich Uranium, even if they were unable to stop the program completely.

Obviously the attack was leaked after its successful conclusion, though of course in a way that did not really enable anyone to effectively lay blame on the attackers or identify the precise angle of attack. Most likely, the attack wasn’t a singular effort but bar of a concerted strategy to hinder the iranian efforts. Which, considering the fact that its president has repeatedly sworn to wipe Israel of the map,  publicly denies the Holocaust and generally speaks of the West in a langauge usually reserved for barroom brawls, is the most decent thing to do, as long as most countries seem to be weary to sacrifice their trade relationships “just” because another madman might get some nukes.

Whatever the final outcome, July 2009 sets a patern we will most likely see repeated in the future, of attacks on infrastructure and research and government facilities, conducted by intelligence agencies on behalf of governments with the capabilities to physical access to said infrastructures. Lets hope that most of those fights will end as unbloody as Valmy for a long time.

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Establishing trends in warfare

(This Article is part of an unfinished series of thoughts about modern thinking about military development)

The most striking notion about war is, that every singly development tends to influence all other factors involved in determining the capabilities of an army. A change in the ability of moving cross country a certain equipment might lead to changes in the application of firepower, since a wider raange of terrain must be covered, or require different apporaches of providing supplies. This may in turn lead to different tactics alltogether, thus passing a certain threshold in the availability of a weapon may change the face of battle completely, as happened with the advent of rifled guns in the American Civil War, or the mass production of machine guns in the First World War.  And since more and more tools get added to the arsenal of the armed forces with each passing decade, each future invention effects needs more consideration and will have effects reaching even further than the last one. Of course, in most cases those effects can be discarded sa neglible, but for all the surprises that happened in the doctrines with every new weapon introduceed.

Anyone trying to predict future developments, too, faces the possibility that the whole web of connected factors that result in combat performance or simply victory turns into inconcernible mess if one pulls at the wrong threads first. Since war is an art more than a science, there is no given system or logical order of subjects in which to dissect the topic. The best an aspiring philosopher of war can do is to pick out the terms and sort them to his own logic, hoping that the inevitable omissions will not deter his readers from following.

This list of posts is mostly concerned with the question how warfare will develop in the future, so it seems to make most sense to first talk about those factors that are least likely to change, and proceed from there to the more frequently developing aspects of warfare. As we’re not concerned here with a definition of war itself, we shall start with basics and proceed to the specifics from there. This means talking about the constants of warfare, namely the space and time in which he is wrought, first. Afther that, we shall examine trends in the tools that humans use to fight, its weapons and technology. A third chapter will be devoted to take a look at the effects of warfare on humans itself, their bodies and their mind, before we shall in the last part of this series try to gauge how war I the future will shape those entities that define and accompany us for most of our lives: institutions of society, armies and governments of course, but of course also topics as science, economy, and morality.

While this series started out as a couple of blog posts, ther eis a distinct possibility that it might collapse under the weigth of its aspirations. So the author appologizes in advance, should he delay any publication or fall short of the expectations raised hereby.

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The future of military fiction II

(This Article is part of an unfinished series of thoughts about modern thinking about military development)

Behold the genius: Human minds in battles of the future

Science Fiction is a literary genre that deals with the question how we can remain human in the face of change. It examines the forces of nature and those we unleash upon ourselves, and how new developments in technology and sociology affect us as individuals as well as society. Science Fiction is, even in the most dystopian and crual worlds it creates, essential a progessive and liberal genre. Even the most vivid descriptions of torture only possibly through new technology, even the most terrifying narrative of a future totalitarian state contrasts is still told from a viewpoint that upholds individual freedom and dignity to be the most valuable forms of human existance.

In this, science fiction is quite the opposite of its often belittled evil twin, the fantasy genre, in which the possibility of a rational explanation of the universe has been suspended. Often enough, the turn towards the subconscious or the occult is accompanied with the related racism, sexism, or other rather sorry views on the universe. This dichotomy between science and fantasy has been eroded in past years, but still the underlying ideas in creating such worlds apply.

Its only logical, then, that in describing future conflicts, science fiction strives to place man and his capabilities into the center of the battle again. Otherwise there would be little use in describing battles: A combat between autonomous robots would have little interest save for its consequences for the humans effected by its outcome. So its computer-enhanced, but human brains that decide the battles of Revelation Space, it is a small – if genious – boy that decides the vast battles for dozend of systems in “Ender’s Game”, not to speak of all those previously discussed movies that essentially show “skill” in handling the machines being more important than any technological advantage.

In order to explain this prominence of human capabilities, writers resort to quite imaginative ideas – if they bother to explain the phenomenon at all. One way of course is to resort to the absence or inabilities of machine minds. In Frank Herbert’s “Dune”-universe, thinking machines have been banned outright. In “Fools Mate” a small but very instructive story by Robert Sheckley published March 1953 in “Astounding”, one side defeats the other by attacking in random and suicidal ways, thereby paralyzing the opponents computer, who keeps looking for the presumed strategy behind the attacks while his forces are defeated peacemeal.

In other novels, space combat essentially takes the character of old naval battles, with battleships and cruisers exchanging broadsides, such as the renowned “Defiant” from Niven and Pournelles “The Mote in God’s Eye”:
“No robot could cope with the complexity of decisions damage control could generate, and if there were such a robot it might easily be the first item destroyed in battle.” Granted, this was 1974, when computers were still the size of Asimov MULTIVAC, and far removed from todays networked gadgets, still the absurdness of the statement shows what is to me the underlying rationale: If you take humans out of the battle, battles become boring.

Unless, of course, the computers themselves are sentient and have feelings, in which case new and pretty exiting fights can be imagined, such as the marvellous dialogue between a sentient battleship and its commander at the climatic battle at the end of Ian M. Bank’s “Excession” The little chitchat ends with the battleship ejecting the captain into space as he refuses the ship’s suggestion to surrender.

We will get back to Banks and the culture later. I hope, though, that I was able to show that the tendency of science fiction to put humans at the pivotal points of battles is a result of the very questions science fictions asks: What will happen to us in the future, how will we cope? In the next installments of this series, I would like to compare this outlook on the future with a more professional approach, to whit: The military’s view itself about the future, and general tendencies in military development which can be identified even today.

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The future of military fiction

Yesterday we went to see „Avatar“ (no not this one),  James Camerons new gazillion-budget-show of aliens and the usual military vehicles and battles. A funny ethno-circus with characters drawn with a butchers knife and a black and white-view of the world that made my brain hurt. Proof again that a gripping story told well is all it needs to make a good movie, and that the most spectacular special effects can’t make a bad story fly.

The Wrath of the Red Baron

Cameron follows the “classic” SciFi style of depicting battles in the future basically as close-up melees between mechanized humans and aliens. As soon as the movie leaves its realistic looking spaceship,  it all boils down to a melee or even hand-to-hand combat.

Needless to say, “Avatar” here follows the lead of World War II fighterplane combat as seen in countless other movies like Star Wars or both Battlestar Galactica series. I assume the logic is that you need to sacrifice realism to enhance the viewing experience, as some rockets impacting out of nowhere – i.e. with a speed quicker than the human eye – would simply dissapoint viewers and feel unemotional. Or rather produce the wrong emotions: You only get the grief and the sadness of people dying, and not the heroism the public seems to long for.

This quest for heroism borders on the absurd if you see aliens riding on horses charging mechanized infantry armed with automatic weapons – a move so suicidal it was deemed a folly way before World War I, and despite the popular image of Polish Hussars in the September of ’39, never happened since.

“Whatever happens we have got / The Maxim Gun, and they have not”

Now even written military fiction in general is prone to produce ideas that seem absurd or comical at best a couple of years later like George Chesney’s “Battle of Dorking” (published in 1871) in which Great Britain succumbs to a Prussian invasion. A century later, the militia-inspiring “Vandenberg” depicts a bunch of guerillas in the US defeating a Soviet occupation force. On the more technical side, both “amateur” and professional soldiers have a long history of failing to grasp future developments. For every Jan Gottlieb Bloch who accurately depicted the horrors of trench warfare there are three writers like Loyzeau de Grandmasion or Douglas Haig, the former insisting in “moral factors” being able to overcome machine-gun fire, the latter insisting on the viability of cavalry charges in the face of entrenched infantry – in 1922. Modern prophets or warfare haven’t fared too well, either – take for example a look at MacNamaras “whizz kids” trying to get a grip on the war in Vietnam with tables and efficiency percentages, body kills and the first widespread use of computers, a tragedy repeated in the second Iraq invasion of 2004 to no avail. On the fictional side, we return to the introduction of this post – the absurd dogfights of Star Wars or the ironclad-style braodsides that are exchanged between spaceships in Star Trek.

In the following posts, I would like to examine some threads of military development and, by simply extrapolating them, identify some unchangable basics of warfare, if any of those can be found and described.