Same War, Different Days: Is Hi-Tec War All That Different?

Same War, Different Days: Is Hi-Tec War All That Different?

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It’s been said often that the modern warfare is nothing like that of the past since in the past, war was between two trained armies, whereas today we have moved on to an age of wars between countries and terror groups with semi-military fight forces, if at all. That is how we think of Israel’s battle with Hamas, Syria’s battle with the rebel forces, The U.S. battle against the Taliban in Afghanistan and so on.

But it might be possible that this “modern warfare” is only a temporary anomaly. Peter Warren Singer claims, in an article published in Popular Science, that although this understanding is not completely divroced from reality, the future, he says, will in fact be a return to the past – back to the wars where a country is fighting against a country. In the article he specifies a range of examples showing that, without a doubt, the world is indeed returning to its “old ways”. A first example is the tension between China and the United States, which has existed for a while now. Every so often different media reports appear on one’s new weapon, capable of making its way all the way across to the other side of the planet, when the other has developed a counter-weapon to answer the new threat. This conflict is in no way restricted to the physical domain, but has leaked to the cyber space as well. A good example is the attack on the U.S. government office personnel files where four million government employees, past and present, had their personal information stolen.

The power struggle between these two giants has brought about an arms race much like the one between the U.S. and Soviet Russia in the last century, only today, although the United States and Russia are still battling it out, China has entered as a third player in this intimidation game and is involving even more countries such as Japan and the Phillippines – both U.S. allies. The different countries see this and are forced, along with coping with insurgent elements and different terror groups, to look to the future and prepare themselves for “classic” wars against countries that pose as a threat or might be in the future. And so, the U.S., for example, has started searching for a new generation of technologies to be used to deter or prevent parallel technologies from reaching other, hostile counries like Russia and China. Those countries, in turn, naturally search for a response for those very same technologies the U.S. might find or develop. That is how an arms race is created, such as a number of people have predicted in the past years, which could lead to a third world war that, should it happen, will include more countries than ever before.

This is not to say, of course, that a third world war is certain, but fighters in the various armies around the world who will be in the front lines should anything happen are refusing to take any change and are preparing for any possible outcome. The war, then, is not expected to change and a national military will stand against a national military, as has often happened in the modern age. But the battle itself will reach new heights, both in the technology that keeps advancing and evolving and in the battlefield itself, which could very well be the cyber space. But preparing for that international clash has to include innovations on all possible fronts.

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