Algorithmic Warfare & Cyber dominion
Algorithmic Warfare & Cyber dominion
The new 21st century has brought about a paradigm shift in the manner that nations are preparing and waging war (algorithmic warfare). The conventional understanding of war, based on land, people and sheer firepower, is becoming an obsolete model as technology begins to advance exponentially and the realm of war becomes of the domains of data, algorithms and automation. This transition raises in-depth concerns beyond military tactics and raises questions of the utility of legacy defense infrastructures, moral limits and international geopolitical stability.
Computerizing Warfare
The war has become more of precision, autonomy and surveillance in the new age.
The old-fashioned armies that used to win through sheer quantity and force would now be overrun by the ones with AI-based intelligence, cyber capabilities and self-driven drones.
Thus, the idea of Algorithmic Warfare in which the decision-making process is not performed by generals, but by machine-learning models which have been trained with petabytes of information is a paradigm shift.
AI not only contributes to threat detection but also in target selection, both are tasks that were previously only the domain of human judgment. This is not a tactical evolution only. It is a strategic evolution. Countries are competing to have the advanced digital battlefield and those who are left behind would be rendered redundant.
Cyber dominion and the new battleground
The digital world is infinite unlike the traditional battlefields. Domination of cyberspace is becoming as important as air superiority was before. Nations conduct hybrid attacks, which are a mix of on-line spying, fake news, infrastructure hacking, and AI produced propaganda. They are silent, non-tank, non-plane, bombless attacks and are capable of crippling entire economies and chain of command.
This uncontrollable warfront can bring onboard new players: technology firms, cyber-criminal gangs, and artificial intelligence (AI) research centers and even rogue algorithms. War, which was a necessarily state affair, has now been a decentralized competition of innovation.
Effects on conventional Defence Industries
With the military going digital, conventional defence industries are now in a critical identity crisis:
Tank and Artillery Production: As chave become quite accurate and guided by satellite, heavy armed divisions are less applicable in most battlefields. The demand of cumbersome, fuel guzzling tanks goes down steeply.
Aircraft Carriers and Manned Jet: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and the hypersonic missiles are now more agile, less expensive and survivable than manned fighters. The big vessels are turning into an easy target of low-cost, AI-controlled swarms.
Ammunition and Explosives: The explosives and the ammunition can be replaced by the digital forms of weapons (malware, ransomware, logic bombs) that would destroy the infrastructure in a more unobtrusive and effective manner, changing the priorities of investments.
Defense Employment: Defense as a whole with all production chains, engineers, machinists, and military logistics, may become obsolete. The defense labor market needs to switch to software development, cyber warfare and AI engineering.
Will Ground Troops Be Eliminated?
The question thus arises, in case war is waged with machines or algorithms, what is the future of the human soldier?
The response is kind of subtle. Asymmetrical warfare leans more and more to the application of technology but at the same time ground troops remain important in the contexts where the human presence cannot be substituted, namely in peace keeping operations and counterinsurgency actions, in urban warfare and symbolic control of a territory.
In state-to-state warfare, which is high-tech it is possible that there will be no necessity to maintain large standing armies. Countries can move to working with advanced rapid-response forces with the support of exoskeletons, artificial intelligence connected helmets and combat intelligence vests.
The future warfare environment can be characterized by human-machine teaming, with the soldiers cooperating with semi-autonomous groups.
However, hundreds and thousands of traditional military personnel might not be required anymore. The downsizing of military may lead to economic and social turbulence in the countries that had the army as the primary employer. This entails the need to reconsider military education, the re-education programs and service models of the nation.
Ethical Dilemmas and Strategic Dilemmas
Outsourcing life and death decisions to AI opens a very ethical dilemma. Does responsibility of a machine lie on who?
Is it possible to make a code that differentiates between the combatants and the civilians?
Due to the black box nature of AI systems, and notably of deep learned systems, the feasibility of explainability is a problem that violates the principles of the international humanitarian law.
Furthermore, the opponents who have more computing power would feel more room to attack AI on the systems they are opposing.
How will two AI systems behave when they encounter totally unexpected escalation in the absence of human input?
The potential of error is exponentially greater.
The Geostrategic Re-Positioning
It is not merely a military change but a geostrategic one: a move to tech-dependent warfare. Lesser countries with a well-developed technological base can be able to intimidate bigger forces. This fact has been demonstrated by the cyber attacks of the countries that lack any significant military power, such as North Korea or Iran.
International alliances can shift in form regarding the technological agreement instead of historical accord. Ethical, data-sharing rules and cyber defense mechanisms might be the key features of the strategic blocs of tomorrow.
Getting ready to be a Singularity
Correspondingly, the future of technological singularity, one in which machines outsmart humans, brings the question of existentiality. Will the warfare by then be something that can be identified as such by humans?
With AI soon equally able to implement, but also to devise strategy, the conventional concepts of command and accountability, as well as victory may become a thing of the past.
The military strategy will change to usage of system control rather than winning of battles. Being able to control communications, energy grids and satellite constellations can give way to victory over any battlefield.
The conflict is changing, the trench to the code, the bullet to the byte. With algorithmic war becoming a reality, countries need to review their priorities, reorganize their forces and rethink defense.
Old industries are required to change or die. Armies have to be responsive, moral and technology savvy. There is risk in this transition, there is also opportunity. What makes war in the future so uncertain is whether the future is that of destruction or dominance using intelligence.
With this new era, it is no more, “how strong is your army but how smart is your system“.
