BIG READ: The changing nature of war and warfare technologies

Russia’s war on the Ukrainian people continues to headline the news in that northwestern quadrant of the globe, with most of the reportage focusing on the “many-sided economic shock” and the conflict as “multiplier of disruption in an already disrupted world” — as the Financial Times presented its coverage during the final weeks of May.

Situated, however, at the nexus of historical, military-strategic, technological and ethical considerations, the war in Ukraine is the first big conflict in the 21st century involving the “big powers” that have dominated global politics for the past 100 years or more — at least since the fateful June 28 1914. It’s worth a brief reminder.

On that day Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, presumptive heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old who, by one account, carried out the assassination as part of Serbian efforts to unite Bosnia with Serbia. For the next three decades, until 1945, Europe was at war, with a two-decade interlude in which, it may be said — and I share the view — the adversaries simply took a breather before they returned to the battlefields in 1939. The historian Ian Kershaw pithily referred to this interwar period as Europe dancing on a volcano. Let’s set that brief historical perspective aside.

Almost two decades ago, when I taught war strategy and intelligence, I sometimes started the first day of a semester with the question: “What is progress?” Undergraduate zeal usually threw up predictable tropes, as well as cautious silences. I then make it a little more complicated, and ask: “Have we made progress over the past 100 years?” That’s when doubt creeps in among the students, but they settle, albeit cautiously, for “yes, kinda, sorta ...”.

That’s when I spring the surprise. “I put it to you that we have made technological progress (in warfare), but have we made moral progress?” Part of the class would go silent, others would shuffle in their seats and one or two (truly) bright sparks would get the moral and ethical dilemma I placed before them. I then follow it up with the claim that, during World War 1 most of the killing was done with basic and, in many cases, single-shot rifles.

By the end of World War 2, thanks to scientific advances, we had learnt how to kill more people, quicker and “easier” when bombs were dropped on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I then suggest that we had made technological progress, but this did not mean we made moral or ethical progress. We have only become better at killing each other.

In ethical terms the war in Ukraine has turned on its head what David Grossman referred to sometime in the mid-1990s as the protocols of atrocity. We are permitted, in war, to target some people but not others. War needs to be conducted proportionally and not kill indiscriminately. Well, it’s safe to say that at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Vietnam and again in Afghanistan, the US felt no compunction about killing civilians. An argument can be made that the Allied firebombing of Dresden was unnecessary and gratuitous violence on a civilian population of a city that was irrelevant to Hitler’s war.

These ethical questions have been raised again as a result of Russia’s war and attacks on civilians. Among very many examples, one Ukrainian small business owner in the Kherson region, Olexander Guz, showed the BBC evidence of torture by Russian invaders. “They put a bag on my head [and told me] that I would not have kidneys left,” Guz said.

There is an abundance of evidence on how the Russians have targeted civilians in Ukraine. Another aspect of Moscow’s invasion is the way that, as I suggested on these pages about three months ago, Russia entered the war using “traditional” or “conventional” military hardware and technology, which was much more effective and lethal during World War 2.

In a study, “Force Design 2030”, published by the US department of the navy, Gen David Berger highlighted the ways that traditional war remains “platform centric” and heavily (as well as expensively) reliant on tanks, ships and fighter planes — albeit that they are technologically advanced. But, as the kids would say, that is so last century.

Berger insisted, in March 2020, that a new age of war had arrived. “We must acknowledge the impacts of proliferated precision long-range fires, mines, and other smart weapons, and seek innovative ways to overcome these threat capabilities.”

Berger’s words would echo when we saw the way that Ukraine used decidedly unconventional hardware to take out traditional (platform-type) weapons. In defence of its land and people, Ukraine’s signature land weapon has been the Javelin antitank missile. Combatting aerial attacks, the Ukrainians took out aircraft with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. One standout example of unconventional methods was Ukraine sinking the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva (with a lot of help from US intelligence) using a Neptune antiship missile.

It’s worth sharing a lengthy conclusion by Phillips Payson O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine makes clear that we still live in World War 2’s shadow in other ways too. The Russian military, for example, shares many similarities with the great armies of that period. The country’s ground forces are built around large numbers of heavy armoured vehicles, most famously tanks, and concentrations of heavy artillery.

“Much like the German Wehrmacht’s plans for attacking the Soviet Union in 1941, the Russians expected to blast holes in Ukrainian lines with their big guns, and then move tanks and armoured personnel carriers through the gaps to make rapid advances, with Russian fighters and bombers in support. Even the Russian navy, with its large surface vessels not too dissimilar in shape and size from those you could have seen in the Pacific or North Atlantic in the early 20th century, was discussed as a force capable of launching an amphibious assault on the Ukrainian coast, much as the Allies did on D-Day in June 1944.”

These passages sound reasonable, and O’Brien (along with people such as Christopher Coker of the London School of Economics) is certainly an outstanding scholar of war military strategy and history. One of the best-developed examples of the extensive reliance on conventional platforms was given by Gen Tommy Franks, who led the US military command overseeing operations of the US war against the Afghan people which, he explained, included an estimated 393 aircraft and 32 ships.

However, the most stunning “achievement” of the US in Afghanistan (I do not for a minute share the view that it was a just war; that its cause was just, and that it was conducted proportionally) may well be the first, and several subsequent drone attacks on the people of that beleaguered country. Nobody in the US military-industrial complex —  well, maybe a few privileged officers — could imagine that a small, propeller-driven spy plane named Predator, controlled from McLean in Northern Virginia, and snuck into the Afghan skies, missed its target, Taliban leader Mullah Omar, killing a handful of civilians.  

In the context of the war in Ukraine there certainly is a lot of evidence for the idea that “unconventional” methods have been effective against traditional warfare platforms. It has raised questions among Western intelligentsia and more forward-looking military types about the continued efficacy of conventional “platforms” — tanks, fighter planes, large-scale aircraft carriers and naval vessels in general.

They see the need to shift from this “platform-centric” approach to warfare as a necessary cultural challenge. In the ordinary grunt smart enough to work at a bank of monitors and direct killing machines 8,000km away, or small Switchblade drones that can destroy tanks from high in the sky.

It may be at that point that conventional armaments began to (seriously) lose at least some of their value, and that war slowly became less of a “human thing”. It will change beyond our imagination as we start on a road towards a time when autonomous weapons systems make their own targeting decisions, and when women and men will collaborate with a next generation of military robots on battlefields.

How will humans cope with being in lockstep with machines on the battlefield?

In my research (more like deep interest and intrigue) into artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, I found it intriguing and revelatory that we may reach a future in which humans and machines are fused, as it were. Coker, from whom I have learnt much about military history and strategy, philosophy and ethics, explained that there are already attempts to improve human performance on the battlefield through “re-engineering soldiers through pharmacology (drug use), neuroscience (brain implants) and molecular biology (re-engineering the human body)” and investing in advanced robotics, machine learning and AI.

“The two, we are told, will be imbricated: reconfigured soldiers will partner with intelligent, autonomous machines.”

Imbricate, by the way, is just a fancy term for describing how things overlap.

“But more than overlapping may be involved. Humans and machines won’t be overlapping, as much as fusing: allowing a soldier, for example, to access information directly into the brain through neural implants rather than having to use a computer screen.”

Somewhere in his book, War is a Force That Gives us Meaning, Chris Hedges, who was a war correspondent for 15 years, made the observation that soldiers on the ground tend to fight for and defend one another first and foremost. On the battlefield and in the trenches they are less concerned with the large geopolitical objectives of politicians, and of corpulent generals safe behind lines. Imagine a soldier in the trenches (or the battlefield) fighting to defend her robot comrade — or vice versa.

If we sit back and travel along a continuum of intelligence (acknowledging that there are multiple, often conflicting definitions or AI and of intelligence itself), it becomes easy, and exciting, to imagine future wars in which new technologies supersede heavy hardware such as tanks or fighter jets. It becomes plausible to consider that we may be reaching the end of the tank or the fighter jet.

The conclusions that I reach about this robo-dystopian future is that new technologies, already so part of our lives (for most people who can afford it, smartphones to GPS systems are already extensions of our persons; exoskeletal computers are not too giant a leap of the imagination), will inexorably continue to transform the way we think about and engage in warfare.

It is conceivable that cybernetic technologies may well someday dissolve (human) soldiers into a cybernetic system

With this as precept, it is conceivable that cybernetic technologies may well someday dissolve (human) soldiers into a cybernetic system, and coupled with advances in neuroscience and AI, the military would be able to measure and control the thoughts and emotions of soldiers on battlefields. Should this come about, and there is little reason to doubt that it will, soldiers and robots would be expected to coexist in the battlegrounds of the future.

It will be especially disastrous if the time comes when we subcontract our ethical choices to machines. This could change our relationship with technology, and in the process probably devalue our humanity and change our subjectivity as well as the existential dimension of war and warfare.

Having tied issues of ethics, warfare, technology and conventional military platforms in a tidy knot, what then, would I tell my students, today? Have we made progress? The advice I always gave them after the trick question, and which remains valid, is to always question the question. So, if you’re asked whether we’ve made progress, it’s never bad to reply: progress of/with what?

The lessons from the Ukrainian war throw this discussion wide open and, at least on the surface, affirm the belief that every war establishes its own (unique) identity. What has become clear over the past several weeks is that conventional “military platforms” such as tanks, fighter planes and seagoing vessels can be destroyed by better, more effective, use of smarter weapons. In this sense there is progress, but let it remain in the back of our minds that we have made progress only at fighting wars more effectively and efficiently.

• Lagardien is the author of ‘Too White to be Coloured, Too Coloured to be Black’. He has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank, in the secretariat of the National Planning Commission and was dean of business and economic sciences at Nelson Mandela University.