The contrast between war and peace has ever been among the starkest known to humankind. War was violent, bloody, and left visible scars on society; peace, a time of quiet safety. Today, new technology has ushered in an era of a new kind of conflict. It’s a war that, on its surface, looks like peace; it can be waged constantly, and it will be invisible to most in society. This kind of conflict might be called a cool war, one that is so inexpensive, because of its invisibility and deniability, that it may be that some powers find they can never stop fighting it. In consequence, even seemingly basic constants like war and peace should be approached with an open mind, and with the kind of foundational questions with which we must challenge and examine every new development of this new era. This, like the other examples cited, echoes watersheds like the onset of the Renaissance. In the fourteenth century, it might have seemed impossible to imagine an end to the feudal system, knights, and the horse, the culture known as chivalry. However, by 1477, the rise of the use of pikes and infantry proved devastating, leading to a decisive defeat for knights fighting in the old style in the Battle of Nancy. At the same time, newly emergent states were creating professional armies, which were cheaper to maintain and easier to equip with new technologies.
As we have discussed, change moves more rapidly in the current era. We can already see signs of the modern-day equivalents of the Battle of Nancy, the first skirmishes in cyberwar, in warfare depending on unmanned smart weapons, like drones, and other hints of what may follow. These changes raise the prospect of a new era in which warfare is constant, in which the line between war and peace is forever blurred or obliterated. In this era of cyberwar, nations may seek not to destroy one another but to weaken institutions, to wound or impede enemies without killing them. It will be invisible, but it may also elevate tensions between nations in such a way that the invisibility itself will be dangerously deceptive, raising the prospect of more traditional conflict even as it seems to sidestep it or obviate the need for it.
In this new era, not only will the Internet be used as the delivery system for cyberattacks, it will be essential to all other aspects of warfare, from intelligence gathering to recruiting fighters to spreading propaganda that might influence the outcome of elections or tilt public opinion to assessing damage. At the same time, it will be the ultimate target, the vital organ that, if shut down, can paralyze or destroy an economy or a political enemy. Thus, the terrain of the network—defined by infrastructure, regulations, and concentration of resources and capabilities—becomes as critical as geographic terrain. In politics, security, and business, understanding that terrain and the new rules of power that pertain to it will become especially important. So, too, will understanding how elements of the network impacting its speed, ease of use, and security influence the conditions for success or failure of those on the network.
Historically, power was achieved by ruling the waves, as Britain once did, or, as more modern conflicts have required, through air superiority. In this new era, those with the greatest understanding of networks and cyberwarfare, the greatest resources to command this new terrain, will have the power. At the same time, those who are most dependent on the network—likely also to be the most developed countries—will become more vulnerable due to this very dependency.
We might call this the network paradox, a phenomenon by which joining a network can both strengthen and create new vulnerabilities. A corollary to the paradox, however, might be called the network power paradox, in which the network both empowers all those on it and enables a constant shifting of that power, creating more independence and capability than ever before, both for those at the fringes of the network (at the bottom in the traditional power distribution) and for those at the center or top in traditional hierarchies of power. In such a connected world, the flow of influence courses in every direction. The opportunities, along with the security threats, abound for us all. The very nature of power, the very nature of conflict itself, are more broadly distributed and dangerous.
A compelling example of just how subtle this new technological warfare can be is the United States’ efforts to challenge oppressive and extremist narratives. In 2009, at the height of Iran’s Green Revolution, Jared Cohen, a member of former Secretary Condoleezza Rice’s policy-planning staff at the State Department, advocated for an aggressive social media campaign supporting the message of pro-reform groups and counteracting the repressive regime in Tehran. As the regime sought to isolate those who challenged the rigged elections, Cohen helped devise a plan to assist protesters in Tehran to remain connected to the international media. Reaching out to his connections at Twitter, Cohen asked them to delay a scheduled site upgrade to keep the protesters plugged in. Twitter complied. He almost lost his job for breaking with protocol, but Secretary Clinton jumped to his defense. (But think about how quickly the use of Twitter became broadly operationalized by all who wanted to influence public opinion and shape the fate of political movements.)
Cohen left the State Department within the year, taking posts at both the Council on Foreign Relations and then with the newly founded Google Ideas, now called Jigsaw. In an article in Foreign Affairs and later one he coauthored with former US Deputy Secretary of State William Burns in Foreign Policy, Cohen offered strategic advice to governments to challenge ISIS’s online machinations and the likely proliferation of such techniques across militant groups in this era, as well as on the overall need to develop digital diplomacy as a core strategic capability of the US and other governments. An array of tools lay at the disposal of world governments, including targeted counternarrative campaigns, akin to antibullying ones. He promotes research into software to identify and weed out digital terror propagandists and empowering law enforcement and online forum moderators to do the same. These proposals challenge the sensitive divide between security and freedom on the Internet, but offer a glimpse into how Internet users and governments can collaborate on issues such as e-counterterrorism.
Given the shifting equation of power, the previous example illustrates that big companies, too, can gain power in ways that give them extraordinary influence. Consider the companies with billions of users or those that control information or key technological monopolies or near monopolies but have greater resources and global reach than many countries. Who can influence more people: a major power, like the United Kingdom, or a company like Facebook? The power that used to control the waves, or the ones that dominate the airwaves and the mind share? With an economy in which the building blocks of economic value are bits and bytes rather than acres of fertile land or vaults full of gold, whoever is best able to monetize data, make connections, capture intelligence, or create new forms of value wins and gains resources and strength. Indeed, the winners are more likely to be those who can gain the virtual high ground in multiple ways. (In 2016, the media company I run honored Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, for Google’s impact on the global landscape by naming the company “Diplomat of the Year”—because we came to the conclusion that tech companies were doing much more to impact international relations than most if not all traditional national states.)
We have also seen how relatively small groups, including terrorist networks or private hackers, can wield power that once only countries had. They can disrupt or shut down economies, muster armies, steal vast sums, or wage massive and effective propaganda wars.
Who holds power is shifting. The nature of power is shifting. How power is used is shifting. When Harvard’s Joseph Nye wrote his famous book Soft Power in 1990, the Internet as we know it had yet to be launched. Cell phones were the size of bricks. Technology was available only to the few. The changes that have taken place in the quarter century or so have redefined what soft power is. It is no longer just the alternative to sticks and economic carrots, an auxiliary concept to the practice of geopolitics. It has become the primary mechanism of power, the mobilizer of masses and of those who wage asymmetric conflict, and the shaper of belief systems. As we consider the advent of big data and artificial intelligence, it is easy to imagine a world in which he who wields the best algorithm will be able to defeat whoever fields the biggest army, a world that my colleague Rosa Brooks perfectly encapsulates in the title of her excellent book How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything.
Yet again, this is a domain in which the understanding of changes and their implications is often very great both within and between governments and between governments and the private sector. An area of such importance requires that we rethink how we choose people for top government jobs, and how we shape alliances and weigh adversaries. But, of course, all our decisions must begin with seeking to understand the profound nature of what is already afoot.
The twenty-first century will be the era of network warfare and, therefore, increasingly the era of automated warfare, multiplying the power of the best-equipped armies in unfathomable ways. Sound far-fetched? This is currently a central focus of many of the military’s best minds. A former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, recently described for me a program he had been involved with at Harvard that considered the decision-theory issues behind swarms. Specifically, his program looked at how large groups of connected, perhaps autonomous or semi-autonomous drones might be sent to handle critical missions. These fleets would communicate among one another to reassess conditions, reassign targets when members of their group are hit or malfunction, and work together with less and less human management required.
If tech superpowers, without so much as a single human on the ground, could have the ability to deploy swarms of smart drones, smart machines, or robot waves of cyberattacks, controlling all this from far beyond the reach of defensive conventional weapons and ground-bound armies that could easily devastate these poor societies with little relative risk to themselves, we must ask: What is to stop actors across the Internet from using these tools of digital and physical destruction unceasingly? Just how out of control can this become, and what can be done to limit the negative consequences for safe usage of tomorrow’s technologies for social, economic, and political purposes?
The new reality is that threats will come at all of us faster than before, from all precincts of the network. Naturally, forces with greater resources will have greater power to dominate, and those on the fringes will primarily have greater power to disrupt. The Net enables power to swiftly transfer from node to node or ad hoc alliances to emerge quickly as actors seek strength through collaboration.
In a 1998 article, I addressed the contradictory phenomena of the new era:
The revolution . . . breaks down hierarchies and creates new power structures. It amplifies the capacity to analyze, reduces reaction times . . . and can be a tool for amplifying either emotions or rationality. . . . It can make the United States so strong militarily that no one dares fight her in ways in which she is prepared to fight, while enabling opponents to take advantage of new options in asymmetrical conflict. It cedes some state authority to markets, to transnational entities, and to nonstate actors, and, as a consequence, produces political forces calling for the strengthening of the state. It is the best tool for democrats and the best weapon for demagogues.
The article was published six months before Google was founded, six years before Facebook, and nine years before the iPhone—too early to assert what certainties the then-budding revolution would bring. Now, nearly two decades later, there is one clear certainty: contradictions are themselves an essential aspect of this new era, and should inform us as we seek to command a virtual landscape, one that we have made but whose form keeps shifting and whose horizons we cannot see.
We are now in the midst of what we might call the Cool War. Why cool? It’s warmer than the Cold War, because it involves near-constant offensive measures that, while falling short of actual warfare, regularly seek to damage or weaken rivals or penetrate defenses. In the Cool War, these offensive measures are primarily enacted through Web-based warfare.
The speed with which change has come in the field of Web-based warfare is remarkable. In 2007, there was not a single page in the official threat assessment of the Directorate of National Intelligence addressing cyberthreats. By 2011, a report from the US Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (ONCIX) indicated that certain countries (they cited traditional US rivals, like Russia and China) posed “significant and growing threats” to America’s security and economic vitality through their cyberintrusions. That report asserted that those two powers “will almost certainly continue to deploy significant resources and a wide array of tactics” to try to level the playing field between themselves and the United States. At roughly the same time, the world was coming to know more of US capabilities and activities in this area. In 2010, we first learned of Iranian centrifuges being infected with a virus that seemingly had been introduced from abroad. By 2011, US officials like White House arms-control expert Gary Samore were giving winking acknowledgment that the US might be behind the spread of that virus. In 2012, the New York Times revealed that the virus was related to the Stuxnet worm as part of a joint US-Israeli intelligence operation called “Operation Olympic Games.” In June 2013, Edward Snowden, a former contractor for Booz Allen working on US intelligence community projects, began to reveal documents that laid out the full scope of what the US National Security Agency was doing to spy on both US citizens and hundreds of millions of people around the world. After Stuxnet and Snowden, it was clear that we were not in Kansas anymore. We had entered a new world defined and threatened by new kinds of digital-era conflict and intelligence activities.
As David Sanger, a pioneering New York Times journalist covering these issues, said to me, “The day after Stuxnet was like the day after Hiroshima. We had the technology, and no one else did. But within a matter of a few years, that had changed.” So had the nature of warfare and of peacetime—and, by extension, of modern diplomacy.
The Cool War has been as active and constant as any of the other, more public areas of digital disruption about which we make movies and out of whose protagonists we create heroes. It is just more shadowy. Cool War heroes look like the members of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army unit 61398, the Shanghai-based operation revealed to be behind many cyberattacks on US companies and government agencies. One such attack evolved into a major intrusion into the US Office of Personnel Management, which stole data on more than 23 million government employees.
Via these attacks, the Chinese gain access to valuable insights into how the government works—or into the intellectual property of US companies that helps their own companies become more competitive. This puts them in a better position to conduct more damaging attacks—akin to the Stuxnet intrusion—should they someday wish to.
We do it to them, and they do it to us. Countries and nonstate actors and individual hackers everywhere are getting into the act. It may seem less dangerous than out-and-out military confrontation, because the goal is not to destroy the enemy but to spy on them and, in certain instances, degrade them. These new technologies make it possible to reset the risk profile of conflict, making it seemingly safer and thus more tempting for tech superpowers. Of course, such attacks raise the tensions between societies and keep them constantly at odds. When you drop a bomb on a country, it not only devastates its target but it also disintegrates. However, when you launch a worm against a facility, that worm or its elements remain intact and discoverable, and thus reusable by the victim of the attack. In other words, while cyberconflict may avoid hot exchanges, it has produced almost constant escalation.
While it all may seem more benign than the era in which my generation and those before it grew up, the era in which global thermonuclear war was a threat all the time, it is not. Because being engaged in constant conflict raises the possibility of escalation and errors, and those nuclear weapons have not gone away. The potential for devastating conflict between major powers is greater than it has ever been.
Contemplating this new form of conflict, one cannot help but be struck that, as in the nuclear age, technology has been advancing faster than the public’s understanding of its implications. Do we understand the rules of the new warfare? When we can strike back with force? Do we understand how to negotiate the end to conflicts that neither side is willing to acknowledge are taking place?
Cyberintrusions will become ever more effective and difficult to defend against in the world of big data and the Internet of Things that we are entering. With the combination of ubiquitous sensors and data-gathering mechanisms, unlimited memory, and massive processing capabilities, the planet’s ocean of data is growing ever larger. Much of that data is owned or controlled by the private sector. This adds a wrinkle, given that only through public-private cooperation and a kind of openness and exchange that has yet to evolve can the data assets of a nation be protected.
One striking example of the new challenges we face is the famed North Korean attack on the Sony Corporation. The attack was apparently intended to dissuade Sony from releasing the movie The Interview, an American comedy that made fun of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un. While the attack was sophisticated and, in some ways, unprecedented—leaving Sony computers in smoldering ruins and seeking to directly influence the public discourse in the United States—what may have been most notable about it was the response offered by the United States. President Barack Obama, the first US president who has had to deal with cyber issues as a top national-security priority, was flummoxed as to how to respond. It was difficult to prove, at least in ways that could be made public, that North Korea was behind the attack. Further, it was unclear what the United States should do in response.
Obama chose, in characteristically cautious fashion, to describe what had happened as “cybervandalism.” The reason for the careful word selection was clear. If it were called an attack, it would demand a commensurate response with an attack by one country on another (even though this was likely an attack from a country on a corporation). But we are living in an age in which the rules and doctrines about such conflicts are woefully underdeveloped at best. It is unclear whether a nation that is the victim of a cyberattack has (or should have) the right to respond with traditional use of force. It is unclear what standards of attribution might be required to justify such actions. It is even unclear what nations may wish to characterize as attacks.
For example, in the wake of China’s hack of the Office of Personnel Management, revealed in 2015, US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper asserted before Congress that he did not wish to characterize what had happened as an attack. Why? Because he wanted to make it clear that such trolling for data was what governments could and should be able to do in this new era.
Clapper was taking advantage of the fact that we are in a definitional phase. Everything is new. The rules are unwritten. The terminology is ill-defined. There are no doctrines. The downside of all of this is a deterrence deficit; countries are left vulnerable to future attacks because it is unclear what the penalties for those attacks will be. This, in turn, creates greater danger of future attacks. At the same time, it creates for those in the defense and intelligence communities an opportunity to help shape views on what is acceptable or not.
Naturally, their goal is to define parameters as broadly as possible, to give themselves plenty of room to work. But is that in our interest? How does it affect international relations in the long term? Does it make the world safer or more dangerous? How does it impact the role governments play in our lives? How do we reconcile differing views on what is acceptable in different parts of the world? What kinds of advantages will those who choose not to play by the rules enjoy? Do we need new globally agreed-upon standards? New rules of warfare? The digital version of the Geneva Convention? Do we need new institutions to manage global disputes in this area, much as the International Atomic Energy Agency is supposed to do with nuclear proliferation?
True transparency on the battlefield is another major challenge for the future of war. Effective war reporting helps keep the public aware of current battlefield realities—realities that will be evolving and which the public at large must contend.
Despite President Obama’s vow in May 2013 to increase transparency on light-footprint drone campaigns, the only thing that we can be sure of is that the number of innocents killed is at least one. The results are confusion and an incomplete public debate on the nature of these wars. Media and research institutions on the left and right have published incongruous figures of drone-strike casualties in countries like Pakistan and Yemen. Leaks and reports often relate incomplete knowledge and selective details about the various operations under way around the world. Reporting based on unsubstantiated comments may infect the national psyche with nefarious, sensationalist narratives.
While the new era appears to be ushered in on government opacity and public confusion, the revolutionary technological tools of our time are already offering examples for lifting the heavy curtains of secrecy and enabling the wider conversation we need to confront the truth of war in the twenty-first century.
They also are providing tools for insurgents to remain connected and to leverage their power. A good example can be found amid the rubble and despair of the crisis in Syria, and is that of a group of heroic journalists and others fighting the Islamic State called Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS). The underground group is dedicated to reporting on the cruelties of living under ISIS rule in its Raqqa stronghold at any price. The future RBSS members looked on with horror as the Islamic State imposed its order on the city, forcing women under the veil, targeting children for brainwashing and recruitment, and crucifying and otherwise executing their enemies.
Since then, RBSS members have sent photos, videos, and reports to their contacts on the outside, reminding the world that underneath the ISIS threat are imperiled innocents. The group has provided credible information to the outside world, including accounts of the human impact of American and Russian bombing campaigns, which it believes are only afterthoughts, acceptable collateral in the greater war strategy. It released reports on a captured Jordanian pilot a month before ISIS released its infamous video of him being incinerated while trapped in a cage, and revealed a failed US hostage-relief effort weeks before the White House or Defense Department acknowledged it.
As you might expect, telling the world about daily life under the rule of a terrorist state comes with great risks. RBSS has made it onto ISIS’s radar, and now faces the threat of grotesque violence for their bravery. Many have been arrested and executed, their killings recorded on social media to send a chilling message to those who would shine the light of truth on ISIS’s practices. In response, some RBSS members have fled, and are supporting the group’s mission from the relative safety of Western cities. They continue their dangerous work to this day, a model for resistance under repression, and for digital reporting. They have tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, and their posted videos on YouTube have been seen by hundreds of thousands worldwide. They may be under siege and at risk, but they are being heard and mobilizing global opposition to their brutal enemies.
I met with one of their leaders in Washington last year, when the company I run, Foreign Policy, was awarding those leaders one of our Leading Global Thinker Awards. I will never forget the sense of sadness and loss in his eyes. He looked as though he might be forty, though he was twenty-four, gaunt, with a dark beard. He spoke of death as though it were a close acquaintance. It had already claimed his brother, and it was that loss that gave him the spirit to put his own life at risk. He did not expect to live to an old age. He said he had known love once, but did not expect to again. My partner, Carla, was so moved by his story that she gave him the bracelet she was wearing. He immediately put it on, touching it gently. He gazed around the garish Washington ballroom and wondered aloud whether he would ever go back to Syria again. But when the topic turned to the mission of RBSS, whatever sense of loss or wistfulness one could sense immediately vanished. There was clear resolve in his voice.
There was, in the broader context, something else. There have always been brave voices like his and those of his comrades. But they had a new weapon that made them visible enough, powerful enough, influential enough that their impact was being felt in faraway capitals like Washington. It was technology. Courage plus technology could bear witness to atrocities and mobilize opposition as never before. Indeed, numerous organizations, including the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the United Nations, have begun to see new technologies as opportunities to stem the tide of genocide and abuse in ways that have never been possible—because we now live in a world in which the vast majority of citizens carry a television studio in their pockets, a means of sending live images everywhere, so that never again will distance and horror serve as a shield to protect the depraved.
Because the stakes involved in war are so high, disproportionate resources are devoted to developing new technologies of destruction. The argument is repeatedly made that only through greater destructive capacity can we be made safer; what we have learned is that the world always becomes more dangerous. Wars may be fewer and farther between today than at any time in the past, and while that is a development to be celebrated, we have also seen the proliferation of the most dangerous and destructive technologies and new approaches to warfare that could raise tensions and the risk of unintended military consequences.
Is the world of cyberwarfare safer or more dangerous than those we have seen in the past? Will swarms of drones and robot armies save the lives of soldiers, or only save the fighting-age people of rich countries while increasing the risk of conflicts that cost lives in poorer regions?
In this high-stakes area, again, our best defense against the worst possible outcomes is asking the right questions before it’s too late. These questions must be posed by our governments and militaries, updating the law and international norms to provide safeguards against new forms of total war. They must be asked by our journalists, reporters, and experts, probing into the realities of digital and high-tech warfare for the facts and dynamics worthy of greater public conversation—and fighting and resisting the efforts of some to use information warfare to carry the fog of war into daily life through the spread of disinformation and the devaluation of truth. And, finally, we in the public at large must recognize and take advantage of the fact that the same tools that make this new warfare possible and empower nonstate actors like terror groups can also empower each of us and all of us to raise questions, spread our views, and create political movements to pressure leaders into thinking about what kind of future we collectively seek, what kind of peace we want our children and grandchildren to enjoy, before embracing all the new and complex tools for the wars of the future.