Drones and Cyber: The transformation of warfare in the twenty-first century

When war is mentioned in the minds of people, they tend to imagine armies in uniforms, front lines, and decisive battles. However, this is hardly how modern warfare appears. Modern war can be conducted in various forms, including a distant attack on a city's power grid using a computer, a mercenary group acquiring military assets in a failed nation, or an anonymous, undercover cyber attack. No statements or armies on the march, but the consequences can be felt: institutions are undermined, infrastructure is destroyed, and civilians are victims. The war of the present day has shifted out of the battlefield and is conducted via networks, proxies and deniability. In this article, I will discuss the transforming nature of warfare and why our international institutions and legal frameworks are struggling to keep pace. In order to see how war is changing, we have to first look at the structure we inherited which still has an implication on international law, military organization, and world political norms. Closest to this classical conception is the work of Carl von Clausewitz, who viewed war as a political instrument that is used when diplomacy has failed. According to this model, war is a state-centered rational action that is directed to attain specific political objectives.

Traditional war presupposes the involvement of sovereign states and the use of national armies that are clearly commanded and operate on recognizable battlefields. It assumes comparatively matched foes, conventional weaponry and official combat zones. There exists explicit division between war and peace, soldiers and civilians, battlefield and civil life. The conflicts are supposed to have discernible start and finish dates, which are regulated by the demands, treaties and ceasefires. Notably, this model further presupposes that war can be controlled by rules that are manifested in legal regimes like the Geneva Conventions.

Hybrid warfare is going a notch higher. A hybrid war is characterized by the integration of military forces, cyber-warfare, disinformation, economic pressure and unofficial actors by states to pursue their objectives, quite frequently without formally declaring war. The most notable example is the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia, in which the so-called little green men, unmarked troops, were deployed to seize key facilities in the city with no apparent direct link to the official military actions of the Russian forces. This, along with cyber attacks, causes disruption of communications and propaganda campaigns to inundate social media and news outlets to mold the opinion of people. And everything occurred so fast that NATO and Ukraine were taken by surprise. Hybrid warfare is deliberately perplexing. The aim is to generate a fog of war to an extent where the enemy is paralysed and they are unable to devise a counter tactic as they do not know what is really happening. 

Close to it is the concept of the gray zone, whereby states resort to aggressive behaviour that is just below the line of conventional war. The greyzone operations are aimed at coercion, intimidation as well as destabilizing an enemy without causing an official military engagement. It is difficult to react to grayzone operations since they take advantage of legal and strategic loopholes between war and peace, offense and defense, state and non-state. However, guerrilla warfare, proxy wars, hybrid and grey zone warfare, it remains the same trend. The strategies are mixed, and the old rules are being redefined. Such general trends are supported by the new technologies, which also impact the battlefield.

The most controversial revolution that has occurred over the past few decades has been the emergence of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones. Previously used mostly in the reconnaissance, drones nowadays are an important part of offensive operations, giving continuous control of a certain area, where the presence of troops can be a politically disastrous decision, making it possible to strike high-v value targets thousands of miles away, which are not officially at war with their states, and extending the battlefield around the world, which allows states to project force where they are not officially at war. However, drones come with concerns of accountability.

What will occur when war is remotely controlled and individuals are not in the decision-making process? The mental impacts of drone warfare. What are the implications of the use of drones to drone operators? And what of civilians who are under the constant watch and in safety of being attacked and collateral damage?  Does the use of drones lower the perceived political cost of war on decision makers, and result in the increased use of force in international relations? This is sometimes termed as a PlayStation mentality by those who oppose it, in which killing becomes too abstract and the proliferation of violence. More drones are no longer the arms of strong nations. Other non-state actors such as militants are also building their own drones. In case drones are the new, then lethal autonomous weapon systems or LWS may well be the future. They are machine robots that have AI capabilities and are able to pick and interact with the targets without being controlled by humans. Those who support these systems believe that they can change the rules of the game when it comes to warfare as they can more easily respond to incidents and cause fewer casualties and smoother processes. 

The third major technological movement revolves around the fact that a digital battlefield has risen. This new space is in two main forms. The cyber war is a non-kinetic (non-physical) attack in which the states or their proxies strike against the infrastructure, communication or economic targets of other states.The cyber attack did not require a direct physical attack in Iran as it disabled centrifuges in its nuclear program. Equally, the recurring cyber attacks by Russia on Ukraine have hit its power grid systems to banking systems resulting in massive disruption.

However, to other people, such as most ethicists and international lawyers, they represent an existential risk. The fundamental issues are focused on three general areas. First, accountability. Who holds the responsible party when an autonomous weapons system murders a civilian? The machine, the commander, the programmer. Second, they pose an escalation threat as well. What will become of an autonomous system of weapons unable to interpret a signal properly or increase the rate of a conflict more than humans can respond? And at the bottom of it, there is an ethical question. Is it right to leave the choice of life and death to machines? The core of this argument lies in the fact that there is a question of valuable human control and whether this is ever possible with the evolution of such systems.

The third major technological movement revolves around the fact that a digital battlefield has risen. This new space is in two main forms. The cyber war is a non-kinetic (non-physical) attack in which the states or their proxies strike against the infrastructure, communication or economic targets of other states.The cyber attack did not require a direct physical attack in Iran as it disabled centrifuges in its nuclear program. Equally, the recurring cyber attacks by Russia on Ukraine have hit its power grid systems to banking systems resulting in massive disruption. And cyber war can also find its way into public trust and political legitimacy through attacks on election infrastructure or disinformation campaigns as was the case in the 2016 US presidential election.

 Whereas cyber war attacks systems, information war attacks perceptions, and thus attacks the truth as itself. An example of information warfare attack that states and non-state actors can use to weaken their opponents is through social media campaigns, false news, and propaganda. The intention of such attacks is not to destroy. It is meant to create political division, disorient the masses and destabilize the opponent. Cyber and information attacks unlike ordinary warfare are not easy to identify, they are relatively inexpensive to execute and below the official definition of war. And still they are able to influence the results of elections, ruin trust of the people, and cause violence, without even one troop stepping across a border. 

So, these technologies, drones, the autonomous systems, and the cyber activities are not merely tools. They are transforming the rationality of war and putting questions such as who is entitled to use force? What is the start and finish of the battle field? And what is an act of war? And as such technologies trickle down to non-state actors, commercial enterprises, and totalitarian nations the boundary between war and peace is becoming increasingly difficult to delineate. In the traditional conception of war, the state is a monopolist on the justifiable employment of force. That monopoly is, however, disintegrating today not only due to insurgents or terrorists but also due to the increasing war of the military actors posing privately. The involvement of the private actors in war is not a new phenomenon. 

The effect of the same has been the advent of what many analysts termed as marketized warfare in the twenty-first century. Within this space the ability to exercise force is no longer the monopoly of states. It is possible to outsource military force, deliver violence even across borders, as well as privately-owned companies working in areas that were previously the domain of state military forces. This trend, like drones and cyber capabilities, challenges the centuries-old assumptions regarding war.