The United States launched its experimental USAF X37B space plane on April 24, which is capable of doing Mach 20 and has been described as the first step towards the militarisation of space. The Russians claim they have a similar programme. Simultaneously, the US is developing missiles that travel at Mach 5 and would be capable of reaching anywhere in the world in an hour with their conventional payload. This Prompt Global Strike programme has the Russians and the Chinese worried as the US prepares for dominance in a possible non-nuclear world. These are the big ticket items being designed by the US to protect itself in the future where the emphasis is on size and speed.
Miniaturisation is the other catchword in military technology. At today’s rate of progress, we will see doubling of progress every 10 years, which will be the equivalent of a century’s progress. American scientists like Ray Kurzweill predict that by the end of 2020, artificial intelligence would be indistinguishable from human intelligence. Given that there are no limits to human creativity, to the power of ideas and also to human depravity, the use of this power will have wide consequences for mankind. As Winston Churchill once said: “The empires of the future will be the empires of the mind”.
America’s defence department has begun to use technology that creates virtual-reality surroundings in which to train their soldiers. Cellphones are being introduced in clothing that project sound directly to the ears. Computers in a few years from now will become essentially invisible. They will be embedded in our furniture and environment.
Smarter weapons that “think” and are designed for precise missions to maximise damage and minimise own-side casualties is the trend. The state-of-the-art Predator-armed UAV could become rapidly out of date with this new minitiarised technology, where future UAVs would be the size of a bird and much more lethal. The Pentagon’s research has been towards Future Combat Systems — smaller, lighter, faster, more lethal and smarter. The US Army plans Brigade Combat Teams, with unmanned robotic systems where a battalion of 120 military robots is fitted with swarm intelligence software to enable it to mimic the organised behaviour of insects. They are even developing Smart Dust, which are devices smaller than birds and bumblebees, not bigger than a pinhead. Once developed and deployed, swarms of millions of these could be dropped in enemy zones to provide detailed surveillance intelligence and also support offensive military operations.
In another part of the world, in West Asia, the Al Qaeda began its new audio production which enables downloading jihadist propaganda to iPods for believers. A prospective jihadi no longer has to go to a remote madrasa in Balochistan or Fata (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) in Pakistan to imbibe this fervour. He can get it online. These two events — the X37B and iPods for jihad — only means that while the exponential growth of science and technology might make life comfortable for us, it does not necessarily make us more secure. Ironically it also means that the US spends billions to protect itself while the terrorist merely takes the low-cost spinoffs from this technology to harm the West. In turn, the West spends trillions more to develop techniques to protect itself against these attacks.
In March 2007, the CIA began working on a digital library of national intelligence information that would have everything from raw data to analytical information. This is expected to be even bigger than the Library of Congress, which today is the world’s largest, with 120 million books/journals stored on 850 km of shelves, with 10,000 books added daily. Besides, there is such tremendous information overload that agencies have difficulty keeping track of the electronic traffic that is out there. Sixteen US intelligence agencies employ 45,000 analysts to track and analyse this traffic. The first text message was sent in Britain in 1992, while more than four billion messages are sent daily now. This does not take into account Twitter and other social networking sites. There are 1.6 billion people online today, and 60 per cent of the world’s population of 6.6 billion uses cellphones, up from 12 per cent in 2000. Huge amounts of this work has been outsourced in the United States to private companies who collect and transmit the data to produce the finished product of intelligence. A new intelligence-industrial complex, similar to the earlier military-industrial complex, operates in the US.
Intelligence and surveillance will also increasingly be electronic. It is no longer necessary to use “plumbers” to break into opponents’ headquarters as Richard Nixon did in 1972; all this can be done online, without any legalistic rigmarole. However, so can the terrorist access computers through WAN (wide area network). Technology makes this possible. Cyber espionage has become the new game. The Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto detailed how a China-based operation, which it called the Shadow Network, pilfered documents from the highest levels of the Indian defence ministry, National Security Council secretariat, diplomatic missions and think tanks such as the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. The attacks were all over India, targeting Indian military formations and Air Force bases. The base of operations was Chengdu, in the heart of China.
China began developing its cyberspace doctrine and capabilities since the late 1990s as part of its military modernisation programme. This doctrine of active defence, under which China should be ready to respond to aggression immediately, emphasises the development of cyberwarfare capabilities. The focus of this strategy of asymmetric warfare requires developing capabilities that circumvent US superiority in command-and-control warfare. The idea is to weaken the critical importance of the cyber domain to America’s military and economic power. Chinese hackers succeeded in high-level penetration of target computer systems, data has been stolen from foreign governments, financial and commercial institutions. Non-governmental organisations like the Falun Gong and Tibetan groups in India were not spared either.
Pakistan too had begun to develop its cyberwarfare capabilities in 2000 with a project interestingly named Operation Badr. The idea was to raise 313 “Java Mujahideen architects” across the world and 10,000 developers. Whether this is just an obsession that Pakistan’s military rulers have with religious symbolism or it signifies battles of another kind is difficult to say, but it is also difficult to ignore — considering the contribution the Pakistani state has made to terror in India and globally.
The future, with all its possibilities and dangers, is upon us. One wonders if we are ready to handle this.
Source : Asian Age , 29th April 2010 , Vikram Sood ( Former Head of RA&W)
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