A different kind of war

Putin and his cronies have recently rattled their nuclear sabres over Ukraine, in a rather pathetic effort to frighten the West into stopping their support for the latter and thus hopefully achieving some sort of Russian success in the conventional war.

Given that no Western nation has increased their nuclear alert levels it’s clear that they don’t take this threat of nuclear war seriously, and I think they’re correct (circumstances can change of course).

But there are other ways to wage war. We’ve already seen how much a part of warfare drones have become in Ukraine, a capability that has built up steadily in the last twenty years and, like planes in WWI, has gone from mere observation in the battlefront to combat and whose capabilities are sure to expand given that a $10 million tank can now be destroyed by a $300,000 drone.

But one thing that has not been considered very much is the prospect of a full-scale Cyber War. If this sounds less harmless then read this:

The event that would come to be known as “Cyber Harbor,” or “Cyber 11th,” started small. One morning, the “autopilot” mode on some Tesla cars started going haywire. First, dozens, then thousands of cars began veering into oncoming traffic all across the country. Emergency rooms were swamped with crash victims. Then, office workers in dozens of industries watched in shock as their computers began spontaneously deleting files. It took about 24 hours for officials to realize that these scattered problems were connected. The power grid was next: Blackouts began in California and soon rolled across most of the U.S. The Internet started crumbling as well. Routine communications became impossible.

It took only a few days for grocery-store shelves to go bare. Gas stations put out “No Fuel” signs. Even if supplies of food and gas were available, trucks couldn’t deliver them. The country’s banking system had collapsed; with credit cards and ATMs disabled, truckers had no way to buy diesel fuel. The backup generators powering hospitals, police stations, water-treatment plants, and other critical infrastructure eventually drained their fuel tanks and went silent.

There is also an eerie similarity to nuclear warfare in that you can’t really defend against this sort of attack either because to do so involves a degree of rebuilding our IT control networks and systems far beyond even what’s required to build a missile defence. As with nuclear warfare the best that can be hoped for is to make it clear to potential attackers that you have the same weapons and they have the same vulnerabilities.

But what if an enemy calculates that dragging the West down to its level would enable a second war, more conventional, to be won? The old nuclear First Strike scenario but without the radioactivity?