There was a time when having bronze weapons gave armies a massive technological advantage. Then iron showed up. Projectiles capable of striking from a distance came next, and then they got more sophisticated. Chemical weapons, bigger bombs, heavier armor. All have played a role in the conflicts of the past and still do today.
While technological advances in traditional forms of weaponry will always put a group (be it a nation, a separatist faction, or a private army) at an advantage, the weapons of war have changed in the past 30 years in a fashion unlike any other in history.
This isn’t to say that old-school weapons aren’t still paramount. They are. Just ask the Russian military how strong a small band of soldiers with decades-old, shoulder-mounted anti-tank missiles can be.
But Frances Townsend — former homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush from 2004 through 2008 — and others put forward a theory that warfare is no longer simply attached to the physical damage a force can do with ballistic or hand-to-hand combat weaponry.
Future wars will be fought not only on a battlefield but in the ether of the computer-driven interconnectivity that increasingly is a vital part of modern society.
“What we are seeing, although we see more of the horrific pictures of physical destruction, we are in a world of what has essentially become hybrid warfare,” Townsend said during a recent video interview with the Center for the National Interest. “It’s not just the attack part of cyber, but we have seen an increase in Russian disinformation.”
And that disinformation becomes complicated because it doesn’t necessarily need to come from one trackable source.
Townsend said that while U.S. technology companies have done a good job of clearing off disinformation, in this particular case the disinformation being put forth by Russia, both externally and internally to its own people about the happenings in Ukraine, is being magnified by a Russian political ally: China.
“China has allowed Russia to use their platforms and put out disinformation and they have denied the ability for those who want to put information and pictures up about what is really going on. They block them,” Frances Townsend said. “So there is this tension, and it is a tension of values and it is a tension of technology. And I think this is going to be a standard part of warfare going forward, and not just in Russia.”
The theory adds a new dimension to proxy wars, a strategy the United States has utilized to varying effect over the past 60-plus years. In arming the Afghani mujahideen during the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by Russia, the U.S. saw how effective a proxy war could be, with a superior Russian force being bled out by determined resistance fighters coupled with U.S. weaponry.
The U.S. also found out how ineffective proxy wars can be when not properly gamed out. It sunk itself into an unwinnable conflict in Vietnam from roughly 1965 (when the first significant U.S. troop presence was deployed) the exodus of U.S. troops in 1973, and the subsequent fall of Saigon, forever altering the U.S. public’s perception of warfare.
While the United States learned some lessons from Vietnam, clearly we still have much to learn after more traditional military endeavors in Iraq (for the second time) and (again) Afghanistan over the past 20 years did not go as planned.
Some of that was due to not thinking about the potential implications of what seemed to be fairly straightforward actions. In Iraq, the initial idea was to sift out weapons of mass destruction and install a democratic-friendly government. In Afghanistan, it was to ferret out potential terrorists being harbored in the country and (again) install a democratic-friendly regime.
It would be hard to qualify either action as a success.
Frances Townsend sees some parallels in how the U.S. is handling potential cyber threats. In the CFTNI interview, Townsend explained how an antitrust bill before Congress, Senate bill S.2992, also known as the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, could inadvertently arm potential cyber adversaries with just what they need to cause chaos.
“The very well-intentioned members of Congress, they have not held a single hearing on the national security implications of these bills,” Frances Townsend said of the two major antitrust bills on the table currently in Congress, the other being the Open App Markets Act. “Not one. I just think it is crazy because there are clear national security implications.”
Townsend said there are also questions about who should be responsible for providing the necessary defenses against these attacks.
Townsend explained that she’s well aware that there must be regulations around intellectual property, and the potential threat of cyberattacks can’t be a driving force in closing off innovation. But, she stated, the “$500 billion in stolen IP” that she said China is responsible for annually puts U.S. technology companies at a competitive disadvantage and is a “cheap way” for China to catch up to U.S. cyber capabilities — not just for commercial use but also for more nefarious endeavors.
“We are talking about state-sponsored attacks,” Townsend said. “And the real question in my mind is that we are expecting private sector companies to have a level of cybersecurity to protect themselves from state-sponsored attacks. Who’s responsibility is that? If the Russians cross our border, who is going to deal with it? The federal government, not the private sector.”
Townsend raises an interesting point. While a traditional invasion of physical space may be something the United States and other countries have clear and defined strategies to defend against, the rules and modus operandi surrounding cyberattacks are more muddled.
This is especially troublesome in private sector-driven economies like the United States and most of Europe, where strong efforts are made to separate the duties of private industry and the state. The responsibility to handle these issues gets confusing, and that confusion breeds inaction.
Townsend added that while recognition of the issue has been widely accepted in several past administrations, we have yet to deal with the problem in any meaningful way.
“I think [cyberattacks] are the great threat of our generation,” Frances Townsend said. “This is not brain surgery. We have just not come to grips with this and wrestled it to the ground. We are more vulnerable for not having dealt with it.”
