The New Faces of War

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!"