About ten years ago something in my opinion monumentally important happened.
Militaries around the world basically redefined where they thought warfare
could happen. Air, sea, land, and space had always been the theatres of war, but then
joining them was a new theatre: information. Now information had always
been used in war, of course, it's always been a tool of war, it's always been part
of deception, it's always been part of political warfare, but something else
happened there. Militaries began to see it then as a space that warfare could
happen within and they began to talk about information manoeuvre, information
dominance. We see it happen almost every election we see happen in the wake of
immediate events. I mean very clear now what's happening right now is that
states around the world have mobilized their information warfare capabilities
to try and control the public understanding of coronavirus. There have
being Chinese state-affiliated networks that have been identified and taken down
that are spreading conspiracy theories saying 'this is from the States' and
there's been plenty of other state linked networks which are wrestling in
the other direction as well. Well over the last kind of 15 years or so we've
just transported so many different parts of our lives online. Our politics, our
social lives, our romantic lives and of course that means that conflict too is
going to transport into that realm. It's a place of power, its a place of
wealth and and by extension therefore it's never going to be a place where
either States nor militaries can stay out of. Conflict in the digital realm
takes all the forms of various operations of power taking place in other parts
of life as well. So it can go from the kind of very subtle economic inducements
and incentives and bribery. Then perhaps it gets a bit more coercive and we begin
to look at the kind of world of kind of hacks and and and forcing ways into
networks. It can be about attitudes and information so it can change the kind of
things that people see and therefore what they believe and of course it can
actually take kinetic forms as well. So conflict in its myriad spectra are kind of
transported and find new digital versions of itself. One of the most
famous examples of Cyberwarfare was probably the attack on the Natanz
nuclear facility by a program called Stuxnet.
It was designed essentially to make it look like everything was absolutely fine,
but then to increase the enrichment more and more and more and more until the
machines actually began to overheat and malfunction. That's just one kind of
example really of how through cyber-weaponry you can actually affect
kind of physical installations around the world. I think that around those
small number of sophisticated kinetic kind of warfare though there is a much
wider much more common kind of cloud of fuzzier versions and especially kind of
information warfare and conflict what happens using messages and on social
media platforms and that is targeting kind of beliefs and attitudes as well as
a nuclear facility there things become much much less certain. Of course
it isn't just States that can do cyber warfare or certainly not information
warfare. The barriers entry into this whole world are actually extremely low and
there's plenty of information, don't try and find it necessarily, out there online
to teach you how to do these kinds of things as well and that means that
there's been this kind of like almost like a strange and visible gold rush
into this new area and joining States are adventurers extremists, politicians,
disaffected individuals, all of whom can see that this is a kind of like a new
way of gaining power and money and influence and control over this
important part of our lives now online. Now I think it's inarguable that
conflict happens online, I think we can all see conflict every day. I think what
is more difficult to understand is whether this conflict constitutes a new
form of warfare. Warfare is a very rules based activity weirdly. It's very legally
bound and it has certain conditions to it. Conditions such as; it's often states
that do it, it has to have a criteria of violence, and it often starts and stops at
definable times and often the kinds of conflict you see in the cyber realm
actually don't really have such clear definitions or conditions to it at all.
Often it is done by lots of different kinds of people
without being declared and there are certainly no peace resolutions which are
drafted, there's no debates over it on the UN
Security Council. And so for all these reasons I think it kind of dwells
in this kind of fuzzy middle area where some people can kind of draw out more of
the kind of aspects of it which related to warfare and others actually continue
to say that it doesn't has those fundamental important elemental things
which warfare needs to have.
Hope you like the video and if you did please do
like and subscribe to the Imperial War Museums YouTube channel.