War in the “Phygital” – Who is ready?
As we enter the final 18 months of 2nd decade of
the new millennium, we are all trying to not only make sense but also trying to
operate in the “new” world that we have created, especially in the last 30
years or so. The marketing term for this world, coined in this decade and it seems
trademarked as well is called “PhyGital”[1]. This is an expanded, merging
expanse of our world – combining the physical with digital. It is looking
radically different than the world we started with in 1989. Started - as
1989 was also a phase-change year or a leap for our world. In 2019, we are
completing 30 years of “Cold-War-Minus” era compared to the 40 years of
Cold-War previously.
Coming to war and
warfare – cold and red-hot and all degrees in between on different temperature
scales - we are grappling with a new substrate to play-in and play-with. Our
world now is an eclectic-mix of geosphere, biosphere and information sphere. It
is new exhilarating experience of always on and always connected. It’s not our
favorite chessboard that gave us metaphors to form the objectives, strategies,
tactics and organizations of the game we played in geosphere. The wars
character has changed. All our assumptions, rules, strategies, interactions
need to be relooked if not reformulated in the world that we have now and is
rapidly emerging. Many have already pointed out on the emerging world order,
for example, an interesting take [2]is
from application of what is called network theory on geo-political sphere. It
is a transition from Chessboard to the Web that defines the last two decades,
at least – perhaps a transition from game theory to network theory. Let us
first look at our new invention – a new substrate in the information sphere. To
do so we have to go back to 1989.
“Cold-War-Minus” World (1989-2019)
Let
us assume you are in 1989. Suddenly, you open your eyes and you have come to
2019. What will be your new world experience - nuclear doomsday scenarios of
the 1960s-1980s, have they actually occurred, demolished my world, and rebuilt a
new planet or is this an alien planet?
In
1980s and early 1990s, students were asked by their parents and teachers to
think about their profession in life. Today we hear profession word from the
teachers and parents but the students are talking about pursuing their passion
not necessarily a defined profession. In 1989 it was all about
"competition" - how do I compete? It became "how do I
collaborate" - now it is becoming “how we co-create”? In 1989 it was
"Me too" today it is "Me only"? One can ask how can these
two co-exist - “Co-create” and “Me-only”? This is the beauty of the new world –
multiple me-only attitude people can come together to co-create if they seek
synergy. There definitely are more conflicts as well – perhaps with different
hues. Yet the choices are available to all. In 1989 it was "buying a
car" (or buying anything) - it became "selecting a car" today it
is "I am demanding my car". In 1989 it was all about
"consuming", today it is shifting towards "embracing". In 1989 it was all about "watching from
the sidelines", today it is all about "immersing in the action".
In 1989 it was my street today it is my world – the global village. The era of
technological driven globalization indeed defines the last 3 decades.
Globalization
indeed helped to a great extent to connect the world through technological advancements.
Yet, there are backlashes to the globalizing driven freedom. Amy Chuha in her book “World on Fire” [3]describes
"globalization has created a volatile concoction of free markets and
democracy that has incited economic devastation, ethnic hatred and genocidal
violence throughout the developing world." Unipolar world of 1990s, under
the supervision and supreme control of the US, steam-rolled protected smaller
economies into opening-up through globalization. Some years back an article in New Yorker noticed, “When we persuaded
developing countries to open their doors to us, we also opened our doors to
them. Now they’re walking through[4]." Well, when doors are opened, traffic
is both ways.
1991
Gulf-War, was an unprecedented display of modern military prowess through
information technologies and beaming of live war operations in our drawing
rooms announcing the arrival of a Uni-polar world. The single power at the top dictated
its goals of globalization and “establishing-democracy” as the operational
weapons for creating or maintaining the world-order. A decade later, 9/11
demonstrated what the networking capabilities in the hands of a cunning foe can
unleash. US then was engaged in a war-on-terror.
Also, US continued to focus on Russia in 1990s and even early 2000s and was so
engaged in its war on terror that it missed the rise of a new power – the People’s
Republic of China – rather US considered China as an extended economic system
of the free-world albeit with different characteristics. China was able to hide
from the USA, was it unipolar superpower’s ego or America’s intellectual opaqueness [5] or
the fascinating Chinese ingenuity, or sum of all these factors, we may not know.
US under belief in its own cleverness
and goal to transform China into a democracy like what they did to USSR, could
not see the continuous Chinese surge to replace US as a superpower - what is
now being called a hundred year marathon[6]. Since
2013, China under the new President Xi, has evolved a new initiative of reviving the ancient silk routes
termed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)[7]. If US wanted to export democracy as free
economic system in 1990s, China wants to export its own infrastructural connectivity
with Chinese characteristics of co-development, as they term it, to the world
at large. However, the initiative is developing into a potential strategic
geo-political game-plan for the next 30 years of the marathon.
The
physical landscape is in for a change as per what is emerging as analyzed
above. However, there is another type of
geography that we have created in the “Cold-War-Minus” World of last three
decades – it’s the Digital or Cyberspace.
Cyberspace
– Invention of the “Cold-War-Minus” world
We have created a
new “geography”, a new “planet” with its own terrain, topology, rivers,
mountains, dense and dark forests, oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, ponds and
“geological” variations and diversity, on planet Earth. The natural “geosphere”
– the natural earth that we all belong to and the natural “biosphere” –
biological diversity and scale of life in the geosphere gave rise to us –
humans – with consciousness levels and ability to think – which is
unprecedented as in not found elsewhere or not known before scientifically – at
least in the Universe that we have peeped into so far. The nature – through Darwinian “natural selection” and “creative
quantum leaps” - with an arrow of time
indicating the increasing complexity as the general direction of evolution -
created its own “noosphere” [8]
- a space of human thought. Just as biosphere changed the geosphere, noosphere
changed not only the geosphere but biosphere as well. The noosphere created its
own territory of socio-political-cultural-scientific-technological diversity of
thoughts and manifestations in geosphere, biosphere and noosphere itself –
resulting in evolution of multiple cultures, societies and political constructs
of organizing ourselves into different shapes, forms and structures. Some 500
years back Europe started organizing the countries with own military
capabilities as nation-states. These nation states were organized much better
to create structures, processes and systems through application of science,
technology and industry. The identities of the nation – belonging to a nation –
a nationality – divided us by boundaries on geospheres as borders.
We have built our
own new sphere – call it cybersphere or cyberspace. In creating this new
sphere, a new fundamental called “information”, besides two other fundamentals
of space-time and energy-matter, has been established in our manifested
world. The sphere of information is
unlike geosphere, biosphere or socio-political-cultural sphere which divided us
into identities, borders and nationalities. This sphere is a unifier – at least
that is what the early promise was of globalization. It differs from the previous spheres as it
engulfs all of us by connecting us to each other in multiple dimensions in near
real time. Yet, it was entirely invented and manifested through human thought,
imagination and collaboration. It is “artificial” in that sense compared to the
“natural” geosphere and biosphere. It is a “unifier” as it connects unlike other
noosphere inventions such as religion, political ideologies and even nation
states, that divided us by providing us with man-made identities and icons to
indicate a-belonging-to.
The cyberspace as it
is called had a transformative impact on the world. Singer and
Friedman in their book, “Cybersecurity and Cyberwar – what everyone needs to know”[9], describe “Cyberspace
is the realm of computer networks (and the users behind them) in which
information is stored, shared, and communicated online”. The book further
list down the key feature of cyberspace as - an information environment made up
of digitized data that is created, stored, and most importantly shared. It is
not the data alone, but it includes the networks of computers, infrastructure,
Internet, Intranets, and other communication systems that allow information, organized
as digital data, to flow.
Fundamentally, this new space is digital. It is made up
of digits or to be more precise bits – binary digits. To encode, information,
it seems, a simple switch of “yes” or “no” is sufficient. Just by the
combination of these switches – bits – we can build information constructs of
enormous complexity in the abstract. When this understanding met with our
ability to move electrons rapidly within natural materials, we were able to
create machines of enormous ability. Our ability, curiosity and ingenuity in
exploring the “physical” has resulted in our ability to create this “digital”
substrate that connects us to others and allows us to communicate, collaborate,
converse and do commerce at a level of convenience, speed, range and depth that
is transformative. This digital substrate is the invention of the last 30
years.
Emergence
of the Phygital
The physical sphere – the geosphere,
biosphere, energy-matter in time and space, and the digital spheres – the bits
and the electrons, have been separated to a great extent and their interactions
controlled and interdependence managed through well-established protocols.
However, these differences and demarcations are getting more and more nebulous
as sensor-embedded and connected devices have started emerging – the
cyber-physical systems - the industry 4.0 became the Fourth Industrial Revolution
(4IR). We are transforming our playground into a substrate that will bring new
complexity and uncertainty of levels that we have not seen before. The
phygital [10]
has started entering business and commercial sectors. The phygital will create what
we call the sixth
wave of innovation which will be based[11]
on (a) Things becoming Nano, Networked, Autonomous and Hypersonic, through (2)
Computational approaches based on Algorithmic intelligence and Quantum
Computing, and thereby providing (3) ability to synthesize reality, biology and
energy. The law
of increasing intelligence of technical systems
[12] informs
that the systems that we have been calling smart have already started improving
to the levels of brilliance. Brilliant systems are self-learning and
self-adapting. The cyber-physical systems with algorithmic intelligence operating
up to hypersonic speeds (more than 5 times speed of sound) and till the nano-scale
levels will make the phygital substrate ultra-complex. Evolution
has ridden its arrow of time with increasing complexity as key direction and we
perhaps are the conduits for this complexity vector. Complexity of today will
be a toy shop for the ultra-complex phygital substrate of the future.
Evolution of Warfare
with Revolutions in Military Affairs
Since
1990, after the end of Cold War, US Army started using the term “VUCA world”
for increasing Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and
Ambiguity[13]. Whether
the world today has become more VUCA compared to the world of say last century,
is difficult to answer, though one can argue that the current world will always
be a VUCA world for its residents. One thing though is clear the VUCA level of
the world today is sufficiently higher than the existing tools, methods,
strategies and thinking available to deal with it. Technological Systems and
their evolution have been seen as a transformative impact on war-making
capabilities and is captured in a popular term – Revolution in Military Affairs
(RMA). A Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) creates a paradigm shift in
the nature of military operations by either making the core capability of a
dominant player irrelevant or creating new capability in some new dimension of warfare
or both. The RMA combines new technology, organization and doctrine to employ
new operational concepts to achieve the above.
The
military history students may recall how a device called Machine Gun created a new model for land warfare and destroyed the
massed infantry forces in the open – the way wars were won before. The German Blitzkrieg rendered obsolete the
static defense of prepared positions by infantry and artillery and the Carrier Battle Group by USA and British
created a new model for naval warfare. All these inflexions in the way wars are
conducted have been termed as creating a Revolution in Military Affairs.
Long-range
precision fires, information warfare, system of systems, network centric
warfare and cooperative engagement capability are key potential manifestations
of the new RMA. When one looks at the model of a new RMA, one sees a
culmination of synergy between new technologies, new devices and systems, new
operational concepts and new doctrine and force structure. For example, the
ICBMs in decades after WWII combined advances in fusion weapons, multi-stage
rockets and inertial guidance to provide hitherto unknown dimension of
inter-continental strategic warfare by developing the capability of accurate
delivery of high-yield nuclear weapons across continents.
Since
the Gulf-War of 1991, RMA being perfected and propagated by USA combines
advances in C4ISR systems and long-range precision munitions with new
operational concepts of network centricity, information warfare and continuous,
rapid, joint and whole-theatre operations was reflected in the new devices
showcased as, for example, Military Drones. It has been proposed that the
actual firing and engaging with the enemy systems - will be completely
overtaken by automated systems. Humans will retain (remote) control through
strategic decisions about where and when to strike for achieving war
objectives. The 7th Revolution in Military Affairs[14] – called the Autonomous/Robotic war will
become more and more pronounced as we move to the third decade of 21st
century.
A
previous article[15] identified 15 dimensions of warfare including
the Cyberspace and Economic Warfare. Further, we are witnessing a change in the
character of warfare in these dimensions along with strategic switching from
one dimension to another as an offset strategy. An eminent Chinese scholar - Yan Xuetong states that the ongoing
trade war between not so sincere and genuine friends – US and
China - since 1998[16]
indicate that the world is headed towards a
Bipolar Order that is different from cold war of the past in many aspects.
However, the most important aspect this “strategic competition” differs is in
the form and shape it is taking in an unchartered territory of cyberspace
and digital economy. We are moving towards an uncertain, unstable and
chaotic state of the world affairs with everyone having mistrust of the
superpowers as well as the multilateral treaties and structures.
First known weapon of
the Phygital – The Stuxnet and its life cycle
The
new munitions that conduct war in the phygital have ingredients that are
markedly different from weapons of purely physical or purely digital substrates.
The key ingredient of such systems is – well – computer programs. Those little
sets of instructions that people call code – not any secret military code – but
working instructions for various machines to pass on different flags, messages,
symbols, or data to other machines so that certain sequence of operation is
started, altered, degraded, disrupted, corrupted or stopped in a particular
deterministic, predictable and pre-defined manner. Purely digital substrate
weapons – the viruses and worms, that are instructions for disrupting the
existing programs of digital space – are indeed weapons of the cyberspace. However,
when they are designed, developed and deployed for the specific purpose of
disruption of the physical domain via the cyber-physical interfaces these become
the weapons of the phygital.
“Stuxnet”
[17] computer
virus reportedly
disabled centrifuges in an Iranian uranium-enrichment plant around 2005-2007. This
was discovered around year 2010. It was
a “worm” program designed apparently by US and Israeli scientists to take
control of the centrifuges at the Iranian plant and make the centrifuges run at
very high or very low speed to disrupt the working of the plant. It was
successful till due to a programming error it escaped the controlled operation
and was discovered. The Stuxnet is the first instance of nation state (well,
apparently) carrying out cyber-attack. Different variants of the Stuxnet worm
have been operating – for example one called Duqu was discovered some time
back. Further, as these programs have escaped their controllers, they are now
freeware available for others to study, comprehend and make into their own
cyber munitions. Inadvertently, we have once again created a new dimension of
warfare, just like we created the horrific nuclear dimension in 1945. What was
unleashed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was destruction of such power that although
the power unleashing it claimed to be shivering afterwards, yet due to its lust
for power made it to amass more of it in qualitative and quantitative terms.
Today, many nation states and even non-state actors want to acquire a nuclear
bomb for deterring others or threatening others.
Stuxnet was unleashed to the world as a new dimension of
warfare, that may not have similar destructive power of a nuclear weapon, but
it will have a considerable impact on the phygital substrate as it evolves and its
implications in many hues and mutations are emerging. If Stuxnet and its many
variants including Duqu were not enough bad news, the new worm – a bigger,
multi-functional and some say order of magnitude more (20 times) complex than
Stuxnet – called Flame started destructive information gathering across many
countries. Coming from the same set of principles and given the complexity
involved this cyber
flaming of the phygital is
something that should have been thought through more and deeper than it seems
has been.
Cyber Flaming the phygital is not a cool idea. These worms and
their well-designed architecture are fantastic template for everyone to use for
their own small cyber fission flames. We now need to be prepared to face
cyber flame attacks from as many numbers and type of “have-nots” and cyber-junkies
as we can think of. Worse, since we are building more and bigger systems which
are more and more based on software - in fact, software defines the
functionality of these systems – now we need to be prepared for Cyber Flaming
of these systems. All our data that we thought is secure, will be cyber flamed
and suddenly, the trust deficit online increases that has been built anyway on
weak foundations. Much worse, the next Osama Bin Laden may not need to hijack
airplanes. He has to build cyber flame systems that can eat up mission critical
data at the synchronized time points – after all, the worm waits for right
moment to attack its prey.
Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame
are the new weapons of warfare. These operate in the phygital. Above all these
are characterized by low or delayed detectability, extreme levels of
deniability and absolutely safe and remote levels of destructibility. As recent reports indicate [18]the
Stuxnet was in the making since 2002 and there are new evolutionary versions
active today again. Further, these weapons conform to the most important aspect
of weapons and war in the new and emerging world – the deniability of their
usage. Indeed, these weapons are DEADLY[19].
Software is the Achilles
Heel of Phygital
Software
enables functioning of various hardware elements of a military system (or any
system or system-of-systems or ultra large scale systems) to respond and
actuate destructive - reactive as well as proactive - actions against specific
changes in and around the immediate environment in time and space. Just by
pre-coding a mesh of carefully written set of instructions stored on various
forms of electronic organization called “media” or “memory” – has given the
military and to the world at large unprecedented capabilities. The act of
“programming” the machines includes a set of rules – called protocols to talk
to each other and also “process” inputs in the form of data and facts represented
by pre-defined symbols. It has come about not by manufacturing the “steel”
bullets but by writing well-defined instructions called algorithms into
machines that talk to each other in a deterministic (more or less) manner to
act against potential threats.
Yet,
software is the Achilles heel of the current systems. For starters, the reliability
of software is a perennial problem – unsolved so far. Software has this amazing
ability to remain “buggy” despite been checked by multiple human eyes and
brains of species called programmers, testers and also their automated code
checking tools. Further, to the great horror of any military commanders, a
perfectly normal and working software system – which was working absolutely
without any trouble for many years – can fail and lead to a catastrophe just
because a particular path/condition that the environment never gave trouble to
the system before, suddenly gets activated in the light of a unique input –
which most crisis situations will create. Further, since the software based
systems use open source, openly available, commercially available underlying
software components – operating systems, communication protocol stacks, network
routers, applications, GUIs, compression algorithms, security protocols,
database management systems, etc, the field of cyber weapons – which exploit
the inherent weaknesses of these known software systems – is the potential
course of the underdog in the fight against technologically superior forces. These
“black swans” that software-based systems are much more prone to, are the “soft
belly” (pun not intended) of the new world. This vulnerability is much more
pronounced in mission critical systems such as military systems, space
vehicles, satellites and nuclear power plants or nuclear reactors that may
produce fissile material.
Political and military evolution in the Phygital – Need for new
thinking
One
of the ways to create the next RMA is to create Counter Software Systems
– these are specifically designed capabilities to maximize the possibility of
failure of software-based systems thereby causing the destruction in the physical
systems.
The key threat of war in the phygital includes the device of
the current/emerging RMA – if the UCAV or military drones or the robot weapons
are potentially cyber flamed. A set of micro devices (electronic spiders) that
roam the battlefield – air, sea and land – and just impregnate the C4ISR
systems, drones and precision munitions – so that either the bits that make the
“instructions” and the bits that make the memory are not only erased, corrupted
or destroyed but are “re-programmed” in a manner that the commands that drone
handlers are giving the drones just turn against them. A Phygital Frankenstein - may be!
In an earlier article[20] – a three pronged strategy was
proposed – avoid foreign embedded software weapons, create counter software
systems and also to evolve to more intelligent systems. One must add new ways
to think and design our responses in the new wave of innovation in the phygital
substrate.
We
are in a repolarizing world reflected in strategic superpower competition between
US and China in an unfathomable cyberspace and phygital territory that will
give rise to new type of bipolar world. Further the phygital world is
transitioning to the sixth wave of innovation through creative destruction of
established economic systems. This is a sure shot recipe for increasing entropy
of the repolarizing world. Also, the warfare and wars in the phygital world,
contrary to an emerging war-less world view, are already mutating to
manifestations that are not only opaque to our existing lenses and capabilities
but are more deadly. We propose that a new theory of political objectives and
comprehensive detailing of national interests should be developed. A tall order
indeed, alas, it is necessary now!
[1] https://www.gchicco.com/2013/05/08/the-new-terms-that-describe-the-physical-digital-space/
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Chessboard-Web-Strategies-Connection-Networked/dp/0300215649?SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&tag=duckduckgo-ffab-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0300215649
[3] https://www.amazon.com/World-Fire-Exporting-Democracy-Instability/dp/0385721862
[4] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/01/28/the-tata-invasion
[5] https://www.ft.com/content/f10ccb26-a16f-11e9-a282-2df48f366f7d
[6] https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Year-Marathon-Strategy-Replace-Superpower/dp/1250081343/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2TIQLWVPWREXW&keywords=hundred+year+marathon&qid=1562837950&s=books&sprefix=Hundred+year+%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C1569&sr=1-1
[7] http://www.indiandefencereview.com/news/the-chinese-twin-silk-roads-can-india-shake-off-its-lethargy/
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere
[9] https://www.amazon.com/Cybersecurity-Cyberwar-Everyone-Needs-Know%C2%AE/dp/0199918112/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1465408825&sr=1-1&keywords=cybersecurity+and+cyberwar+what+everyone+needs+to+know
[10] https://www.digitalistmag.com/customer-experience/2017/08/17/its-a-phygital-world-05276965
[11] http://www.crafitti.com/sixth-woi.html
[12] www.aitriz.org/triz-articles/inside-triz/596-law-of-increasing-intelligence-of-technical-systems
[14] https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/issues/Winter_2017-18/5_Hoffman.pdf
[15] http://www.indiandefencereview.com/news/war-as-a-multi-dimensional-whole-a-framework-for-india-in-a-repolarizing-world/
[16] http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1157022.shtml#.XSN1quFpitU.linkedin
[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
[18] https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/new-twist-in-the-stuxnet-story/d/d-id/1334511
[19] http://www.indiandefencereview.com/news/deadly-targets-of-multi-dimensional-warfare/
[20] http://www.indiandefencereview.com/news/can-india-create-the-next-revolution-in-military-affairs/
