The Technological Boom and the War Typology at The Beginning of a New Millennium

 

By Sebastian Sârbu.

 

The technologies have been, there are and forever shall be at the hottest very core of the armed confrontation. To some extent they are precisely those which revolutionize the military art itself. The relationship, however is neither univocal nor biunivocal but one with lots of tangled ins and outs. The war theory, the time honored experience in military campaigns, the actual requirements of the fighting space and among all these, the level of the technical offer are coagulated factors which jointly shape up a certain evolution of the military strategy.

The technology boom issue and its impact on the military field, given the current requirements, make up a highly attractive research field, of interdisciplinary nature, dwelling at the very junction point of technical, economical and military sciences.

Beside the economical, scientific and technical potential, the military potential makes today and shall be tomorrow an essential means for reaching the basic political and strategical aims of each state. It is therefore justified the world states’ preoccupation at the onset of the third millennium for the present and the future of their own weapon making industries, for boosting th efficiency factors of the military technologies, for further developing of the basic components of the modern war and the updated of battle engagement systems at tactical, operational and strategical levels.

At the question whether we are facing now a genuine revolution in military matters, that is for the military in a broader sense, the answer could not be but affirmative. Such a revolution has known many cycles and many stages based on the great scientific discoveries and their military implementation, on the brand new highly performance weaponry which in its turn incurred serious mutations in the both concept and the waging of actions of war.

This is why the latest breaking discoveries in weaponry – data acquisition from satellites, infrared beam driving, laser and microwave remote guidance and the Global Positioning System (GPS), the creation and usage of high precision weapons, of the integrated weapon array systems a.s.o. – gave birth to another just out-of-the-box face of belligerence.

The contents of the contemporary military technology revolution may be deduced from the mere relevation of the features which make it specific and from the directions where it evolves. So we may highlight the following major features with direct impact on weaponry:

-all encompassing character (wide scope), since it exerts a major bearing on all weapon categories and warfare means (conventional, nuclear, cosmic, mass destruction, intelligent ammo etc.);

-fast paced development, since within rather short intervals of time, inside the same warfare means family pop up brand new weapon generations with enhanced features (armored cars, jet fighters, helicopters, missiles, air defense guns, high precision search and destroy systems, remote man & alert systems etc.)

-up scaling to cosmic dimension by production of space based weaponry (satellite mounted weapons and anti-satellite, space shuttles) with the purpose of exploiting this space, mainly from the military vantage point.
At the same time one may identify also the actions vectors within the contemporary military technology revolutions:

-the considerable expansion of the destructive effects of the weapons and warfare means by the effective usage of all the sources available: nuclear, thermonuclear, light and chemical;

-upscale the performances of the long range ballistic missiles, as the major means of carrying the destructive payload to the intent target, of the warfare radioactive and chemical substances;

-intensive and extensive implementation of the latest breaking discoveries in electronics, micro, nano electronics and lasers to the purpose of enhance technical – tactical indicators of the warfare means;

-upgrading of the technical – tactical indicators of the “intelligent weapons” (quite remarkable results were scored with: all kinds of missiles, jet fighter borne missiles, torpedos, anti tank mines, artillery shells, remote controlled jet fighters, drones etc. ) in order to be able to carry out warfare op missions of increasing complexity;

-intensification of preoccupations to build radiation-based warfare means and microwaves-based weapons with worsened destructive effects on personnel and warfare machines;

-intensification of research in the artificial intelligence field for larger scale sharing of expert-system usage (informatics experts-the most important artificial intelligence products) and robotics implementation in the military field;

-using the bio-technologies as warfare means which allegedly could eventually scale up to a genuine “genetic warfare”.

The revolution in weaponry is a certain. In just a couple of years only, a giant leap was made regarding the shape and effect of the hits, from massive to precision, from uncertainty to certitude, due to the latest breaking, highly performance technologies in the fields such as intelligence, research, pattern-recognition and hit.

The mutations occurred within the society call for a true revolution in approaching military concepts, a revolution capable to sync up and gear to the new economical and technological functions. Science and communication shall be the main engines of the XXIth century. Intelligent tools make intelligent weapons. No prove out best the actual modus operandi the Desert Storm warfare operation was run in the Persian Gulf which may be termed as a “warfare of mind (spirit) against matter”.

Actually in the confrontation in the Persian Gulf – as Newt Gingrich put it – “the world witnessed for the first time a warfare between military systems from the Third Wave and a Second Wave machine”. The “Desert Storm” operation mainly consisted in Iraqis annihilation by Americans and their allies, mostly due to to the fact that the Third Wave systems merely proved overwhelming. While the highly sophisticated anti aircraft artillery, belonging to the Second Wave, were no match in the confrontation with the stealth jet fighters from the Third Wave.

The armies in the Second Wave’s trenches were merely run over and steamrolled by the aiming and logistic systems sprung off the Third Wave” The entire deployment of the warfare was utterly upturned.

The war, the way of conducting the fight in such a conflict – in terms of economy, geopolitics and ethics – shall have multiple and profound side effects for both armies and their countries worldwide. The way of deploying shall utterly change the very nature of belligerence itself. The military doctrine is about to change, and to change quite radically. Today, “if we listen carefully – as A. Toffler said – no matter whether the terms are being formulated in Chinese or Italian, in French or Russian, the mainstay topics (of the military doctrines that is) remain those of the Air vs. Terrestrial Fight and the Air – Terrestrial Operations”.

In the military ops shall be employed high precision weaponry, able to “surgically destroy” specialized, carefully picked targets with minimal, “collateral damages”. The laser guiding bombs, the long range missiles, the stealth jet fighters “invisible” (anti-radar) etc. are all weapons which, by their capacity to penetrate high threat zones, shall echo the military men’s thought in the contents of the concepts on “deep inside battle”, “forbidden” and the importance of information and the smart weapons. The classical frontline vanished. The battle and the operation shall further deepen everywhere seeping in all dimensions: distance, altitude, time.

The military conflict in future is focused on values, whose content is based on qualitative features, rather than those still quantity based, namely: de-mass; selectivity, “ fine and accurate ”, of the aims and targets; “smart soldiers”; the creativity and the initiative, to be developed at a high degree by both militaries and civilians; compact combat units, weapon systems with more fire power and higher precision; more autonomy for commanding officers at all echelons; system integration; vast electronic infrastructure multi-branch and complex; maneuvering speed etc.

The usage of these values shall turn armies, not into just a machine but in an “wider scale internal feed-back system, communication and self-adjustment tuning”, which is actually “a thinking system of its own”. Also, as we mentioned above, the way of waging the battle, the warfare in itself, shall suffer major significant mutations – whereof a possible other alternate typology thereof.

The type of warfare for which prepare the countries, their armies, the command headquarters, the military everywhere, the cadets and rookies in the military education institutions is not the present war, but the war in the future, more exactly, in the next decade, that is the war of 2010- 2020.

The future warfare is not easy to identify and defined. Because, as it is just a political instrument, the war shall always configure along its own flexible co-ordinates, blending together features of the political and social philosophy with the armed combat laws and principles or from alternative types of confrontation.

It is widely considered that war is deemed as a means of un-block. A strategic situations, but the continuity elements and the discontinuity elements inside the space of confrontation, the appearance and development of the asymmetric components, terrorist, identity and globalization or anti-globalization widens the sphere and its contents, turning it into a dynamic reality, and make it almost indispensable to the planet, the main belligerent actors looming more and more so the Good and the Bad, the Good side of the bad and the Bad side of the good, in an infinite spectrum of conditioned possibilities and probabilities, and not so just in the classical dichotomy framework Yes – No. Throughout the analysis of war or wars in the making for which we are currently preparing – as shape of shapes of a permanent or perpetual warfare situation – one should keep an eye open on the following typology:

a) The classical warfare, to become in the next 10 – 20 years, High Tech Warfare, assuming its already known form, and Net Based War. It is unlikely that the classical war would altogether vanish from the panoply of any armed preparation. Most of the highly developed countries in the NATO (but also those from outside the Alliance) see this war in a rather dynamic, complex mode.

b) The perpetual warfare, as an expression of classical warfare and asymmetric united, with the following flavors:

– the geophysical warfare; information war; psychological warfare;
– the media war; the economic warfare; the cosmic war;
– the „cultural” war; the genetic warfare.

The geophysical warfare consists in a system of actions focused on triggering “natural” phenomena, calamities and catastrophes with adverse effects on the human life, localities, agricultural lands and estates, communication systems, with the purpose of reaching some important goals, counting also the total destruction of the enemy’s potential and resources.

The information war is based on controlling the information vectors.

The psychological warfare, is aimed mainly on discouraging the enemy, on creation of some panic-inducing situations, uncertainty, false perception of the reality.

The media war, currently is the major means of conducting the perpetual warfare and especially the psychological warfare.

Media is displayed as information carried, as a dialogue space, as a tool and means for expressing the truth. The mass media however is more than just that. They are or may be instruments and means of info-manipulation, a terrific weapon the mighty ones may always use, one way or another.

Basically the economic warfare is mere fight for economic survival, for prosperity and dominance.
The cosmic warfare, is an extension of the confrontation theaters and of the means of confrontation across information, media, economic and military ranges.

The „cultural” warfare, does not refer to the clash of values as the misnomer sometime suggests but rather to a clash of interests hooked to the cultural production support.

In a way the genetic warfare, is an asymmetric flavor of the perpetual warfare. Such a war has no strategy nor doctrine to back it. Some aspects related to this are still manifest today, taking the form of biological warfare or the one involving mass destruction weaponry, human DNA cracking, etc. Under expert focus are, under the form sub of some instruments meant to genetically enhance the species, a plethora of methodologies, practices and products obtained by genetic engineering, by cloning.

c) Military actions taken against organized crime entities, drug smuggling and other asymmetric threats.
d) Post conflict military operations.

The warfare type to be assumed and modeled in the military education and the army instruction should be the Net Based War (NBW), which is copying from the society the efficient action mode, as a mere cost effective business like any other business. In other words, what society has learned from the army is fed back today according to some intricate ddeterministicinner working, to the military field.

The nuclear technology, the top tech, the nanotechnology, the information technology all these are to be found today, in-built into high precision weapons, while the projects in store for the years to come are even more ponderous.
In future the warfare would be mainly strategic. This trend of changing the war’s physiognomy began its dynamic grow within the last decade.

Alike the non conventional technologies, the non-conventional warfares should not however replace the classical, conventional, war as we know it. The time honored strategic type both concept and target, is the ,,total war”. Certainly the non-conventional warfare may annihilate the enemy without the classical military means especially in the globalization context. The debate remains open.

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