![]() Instead, tech geeks in Silicon Valley and shareholders in Bentonville, Ark., would wrestle with everything from microchip shortages to how to retool the logistics and allegiance of a multinational company. The hub of any war economy wouldn’t be Detroit. The civilian players would also be different than those in 1941. Just as the Internet reshaped our notions of borders, so too would a war waged partly online. While many leaders on both sides think any clash might be geographically contained to the straights of Taiwan or the edge of the Baltic, these technological and tactical shifts mean such a conflict is more likely to reach into each side’s homelands in new ways. It added a cybersecurity major to develop a new corps of digital warriors, and also requires all midshipmen learn celestial navigation, for when the high tech inevitably runs into the age old fog and friction of war. Naval Academy illustrate where things might be headed. But unlike the ISIS’s of the world, great powers can also go after high-tech’s new vulnerabilities, such as by hacking systems and knocking down GPS. defense contractor but a group of South Korea student engineers.Īn array of science-fiction-like technologies would likely make their debut in such a war, from AI battle management systems to autonomous robotics. The winner of a recent robotics test, for instance, was not a U.S. And now off-the-shelf technologies can be bought to rival even the most advanced tools in the U.S. within five years, with new projects ranging from the world’s fastest supercomputers to three different long-range drone-strike programs. These platforms are not just vulnerable to new classes of weapons like long-range missiles, but China, for example, overtook the EU in R&D spending last year and is on pace to match the U.S. forces can’t count on that “overmatch” in the future. It has not always translated to decisive victories, but it has been an edge every other nation wants. forces have been a generation ahead in technology, having uniquely capable weapons like nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. is that last year, the Pentagon’s weapons tester found nearly every single major weapons program had “significant vulnerabilities” to cyber attack.Ī total mindshift is required for this new reality. Similarly, we’d learn “cyber war” is far more than stealing Social Security Numbers or e-mail from gossipy Hollywood executives, but the takedown of the modern military nervous system and Stuxnet-style digital weapons. The lifeblood of military communications and control now runs through space, meaning we’d see humankind’s first battles for the heavens. But a 21st century fight would also see battles for control of two new domains. fought a peer in the air or at sea was in 1945. Unlike the Taliban or even Saddam’s Iraq, great powers can fight across all the domains the last time the U.S. has grow accustomed to and, in turn, others think reveal a new American weakness. Many Chinese officers have begun to lament out loud what they call “peace disease,” their term for never having served in combat.Ī great power conflict would be quite different from the small wars of today that the U.S. But it points to how the global context is changing. policymakers and a highly nationalist domestic audience: A 2014 poll by the Perth U.S.-Asia center found that 74% of Chinese think their military would win in a war with the U.S. ![]() This may be a bit of posturing both for U.S. “A U.S.-China war is inevitable” recently warned the Communist Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper after recent military face-offs over rights of passage and artificial islands built in disputed territory. The worry is that the brewing 21st century Cold War with China and its junior partner Russia could at some point turn hot. Indeed, it’s likely China’s alleged recent hack of federal records at the Office of Personnel Management was not about cyber crime, but a classic case of what is known as “preparing the battlefield,” gaining access to government databases and personal records just in case. ![]() China built more warships and warplanes than any other nation during the last several years, while the Pentagon just announced a strategy to “offset” it with a new generation of high-tech weapons. and a newly powerful and assertive China are engaged in a massive arms race. Russian land grabs in Ukraine and constant flights of bombers decorated with red stars probing Europe’s borders have put NATO at its highest levels of alert since the mid 1980s. Yet that risk of the past has made a dark comeback.
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