Impact of Technology on Modern Warfare in South Asia

[RiazHaq]

Haq's Musings: Revolution in Military Affairs: Cyberweapons, Robots and Communications in South Asia

How is increasing use of technology transforming modern warfare?

What will be the impact of widespread deployment of cyberweapons like Stuxnet worm used by the United Sates to cause extensively physical destruction of Iran's nuclear centrifuges? Will such weapons be used to destroy critical infrastructure of telecommunications, water and power and the economy of the enemy?

Will the boots on the ground be replaced by bots on the ground, in the air and on the water in the future? How autonomous will such bots be? How will the armed dronesdistinguish between combatants and non-combatants in war?


Will bio-hacking lead to new extremely lethal biological agentsdeveloped and deployed by terrorists and rogue individuals and nations?

How is the information technology changing the battlefield awareness with more effective command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I)?

Are India and Pakistan modernizing their militaries for technology-based warfare?

What are the key ethical issues raised by high-tech warfare? Will it make it easier for nations with advanced technology to start wars with impunity?

Vision 2047 host Farrukh Shah Khan discusses these questions with Riaz Haq in the following video:

Haq's Musings: Revolution in Military Affairs: Cyberweapons, Robots and Communications in South Asia

As to the potential cyber component of any future wars between India and Pakistan, its dramatic impact could reverberate across the globe as the computers used in South Asia for outsourced work from the United States and Europe come under crippling attacks from hackers on both sides. Here is how Robert X. Cringeley describes it in a June 2009 blog post captioned "Collateral Damage":

"Forget for the moment about data incursions within the DC beltway, what happens when Pakistan takes down the Internet in India? Here we have technologically sophisticated regional rivals who have gone to war periodically for six decades. There will be more wars between these two. And to think that Pakistan or India are incapable or unlikely to take such action against the Internet is simply naive. The next time these two nations fight YOU KNOW there will be a cyber component to that war.

And with what effect on the U.S.? It will go far beyond nuking customer support for nearly every bank and PC company, though that’s sure to happen. A strategic component of any such attack would be to hobble tech services in both economies by destroying source code repositories. And an interesting aspect of destroying such repositories — in Third World countries OR in the U.S. — is that the logical bet is to destroy them all without regard to what they contain, which for the most part negates any effort to obscure those contents."
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[RiazHaq]

Noam Chomsky discussed the film “American Sniper” at an event held by the Baffler, last week in Cambridge, Mass. The noted linguist, philosopher and political commentator discussed the film, and drew comparisons with the mentality of Chris Kyle (the American sniper whose memoirs are the basis of the film), that of drone operators, and the American public for ignoring the drone war.

“In the memoirs he describes what the experience was like, so I’ll quote him,” Chomsky said. “His first kill was a woman, who walked into the street with a grenade in her hand as the Marines attacked her village. Chris Kyle killed her with a single shot, and he explains how he felt about it.”

“‘I hated the damn savages I’d been fighting,’” Chomsky stated, quoting a passage from Kyle’s memoir. “‘Savage, despicable, evil — that’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy savages. There was really no other way to describe what we encountered there.”"

Chomsky admits he has not seen the movie, but read many reviews — including laudatory reviews in the New Yorker and New York Times, along with a scathing review in Newsweek by Jeff Stein.

“Getting back to Chris Kyle, he regarded his first kill as a terrorist — this woman who walked in the street,” Chomsky stated after discussing Stein’s review. “But we can’t really attribute that to the mentality of a psychopathic killer, because we’re all tarred by the same brush, insofar as we tolerate or keep silent about official policy.”

Noam Chomsky discusses terrifying “American Sniper” mentality - Salon.com