If an anti-satellite weapon, its use would destroy hundreds if not thousands of satellites in orbit including those from Russia making low-Earth orbit unusable for the foreseeable future. So much for Starlink’s constellation of telecommunications satellites and its many competitors. And so much for the International Space Station (ISS).

The speculation is that Russia is putting a nuclear bomb into low-Earth orbit. But some are saying the Russians could be deploying a nuclear-powered satellite or a nuclear-powered orbiting platform that could be weaponized. If a bomb or nuclear weapon platform, the Russians would violate the United Nations’ 1967 Outer Space Treaty. They are the successor state to the USSR that along with the United States and other countries agreed to the peaceful use of outer space, the Moon and other celestial bodies.

Maybe all of this is a distraction from the reality that the U.S. Pentagon is on a new path to counter Earth-based Russian progress on weapons development with its nuclear plans. If you haven’t heard about the nuclear gravity bomb, it’s because the U.S. government doesn’t talk up a weapons program that is designed to kill millions in seconds.

The nuclear gravity bomb being developed for deployment is the B61-13. It can be launched from aircraft. A directed version could be developed for deployment on land-based missiles or submarines. The B61-13 will minimally have the destructive force of 24 Hiroshima atom bombs. The Hiroshima bomb killed 140,000. Multiply that number by 24. That’s over 3.3 million killed, and millions more injured or dying from radiation sickness.

The U.S. has been undergoing a massive rebuilding of its nuclear arsenal. What’s the justification? Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea all have nuclear bombs capable of killing millions. So the U.S. needs to replace its million-killing weapons with new ones to keep up the pace in a scheme called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). The less provocative term being used is nuclear deterrence.

Stephen Young wrote about MAD in an essay that appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on February 13th. He stated:

“The mutual assured destruction precept of deterrence theory is ludicrous. For such a system to make sense, it would have to work perfectly and for all time. If it doesn’t, then we are all dead. What human system has ever worked perfectly for any significant length of time?”

In 1962, the U.S. detonated a nuclear bomb 400 kilometres (250 miles) above the Earth. At the time it destroyed a third of the satellites that were orbiting the planet. The U.S. continued to consider developing nuclear-armed antisatellite weapons throughout the Cold War, but the strategy was abandoned. No country since, whether a signatory to the UN treaty or not, has deployed or exploded a nuclear weapon in space.

The justification for Russia to consider nuclear weapons deployment in space could be to disrupt Starlink which the Ukraine has been using during the Russian invasion of its country. So far, Russia has been unable to disrupt the Starlink network. If they could, the Ukraine would be fighting blind.

Getting back to the B61-13 gravity bomb. Its development can only be justified if the U.S. was expecting to fight and win a nuclear confrontation with Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, or some yet-to-be-identified nuclear-armed adversaries. And why a gravity bomb? The two atom bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War Two were gravity bombs. They are simple and relatively low-cost, although the $1.2 trillion the U.S. is spending over the next 25 years to modernize its nuclear deterrent doesn’t sound low cost to me.

One thing is certain. Anything the U.S., Russia, or China develops will be matched because that is how the MAD game is being played. Young summarizes the insanity of MAD:

“That horrible reality is the basis of the world’s security system. If everyone can kill everyone else, and no one can be safe from that threat, then—in the supreme irony of nuclear deterrence—everyone is supposed to be safe.”

Wars Past and Present are Brutal

When Japan first launched its war on China in 1931 with the conquest of Manchuria, and then in 1937 on the rest of China; when Italy began its war of conquest in 1935 in Ethiopia; and when Nazi Germany began the European war with an assault on Poland in 1939, the average person away from the frontlines of these conflicts didn’t see the collateral damage. The average person saw newsreels of marching troops, airplanes taking off, the aftermath of bombings, and refugees fleeing with their possessions in tow. There were fewer images of death in the newsreels back then.

Imagine if the technology we have at present would have been available then. What would young people have said and done? What would they have said and done in witnessing on their mobile phones the assault on Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled by Nazi Germany? And what would they have said and done witnessing the Allied war response to Germany and Japan’s aggressions and crimes against humanity?

The list of past atrocities committed in and out of war is miles long.

• Japan’s rape of Nanking,
• Germany’s Final Solution,
• The Bataan Death March,
• The Amritsar massacre by the British in India,
• The Ottoman Armenian genocide,
• The Soviet Ukraine Holodomor,
• The Rwandan genocide,
• Italy’s civilian repression and mass executions in Ethiopia,
• The London Blitz,
• The nightmare of the Dresden bombing,
• The firebombing of Tokyo,
• The dropping of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Modern Technology Has Given Us a Front Row Seat

With cell phones in hand, how many of these past horrific events would have blanketed the Internet making us voyeurs to carnage and destruction? The difference between now and the past is that we live in an age of ubiquitous always-on communication. We also live at a time when most wars are brushfires and not global conflicts like the one that ended 78 years ago.

But when you delve into the recent past we have civil wars in Libya, Syria, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen. Go back further and we have had wars between Israel and the Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians and Egyptians. Then there is America’s fateful war in Vietnam and Cambodia. In all of these, there are the same images of inflicted pain, destruction and death.

Even the “righteous act” of freeing Europe from Nazi Germany produced collateral damage to the very people the Allies were attempting to liberate. The D-Day assault on Normandy, including the Allied bombings preceding and after June 6, 1944, killed 20,000 with 5,000 more collateral French civilian deaths on the day of the invasion. The bombing of German and Japanese cities throughout that war, not including the two atom bombs, caused 600,000 civilian deaths in the former, and 200,000 in the latter.

The two contemporary wars making the headlines of Western media have produced thousands of collateral civilian casualties. Since February 2022, when Russia launched its war on Ukraine, more than 10,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed. Since Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, Palestinian deaths have exceeded 20,000 civilians and militia, and Israel has seen 1,200 civilians and several hundred taken hostage. We have bore witness on television, online and in the news media daily to the suffering in both of these conflicts.

Wars Are a Product of History 

The challenges are numerous for young people in trying to understand the whys and wherefores of the wars they are witnessing. These conflicts are an assault on their senses. The issues behind them are subborned by the emotions they bring out. It is easier to side with the one being attacked than the one attacking. It is easier to accept “facts” on the Internet that have no historical foundation.

What’s Behind the Ukraine Conflict?

Let’s look at the history behind the Ukraine conflict. Was there ever a Ukrainian nation before the dissolution of the Soviet Union? No.

Ukraine was given a geographic status by the Soviet Union when the latter formed after World War One. Ukrainians, however, spoke a different language than their Russian neighbours and practiced different religious and cultural traditions.

Ukraine became a nation when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Its boundaries conformed to the geography established by the former Soviet Union. Ukraine entered into economic associations with the former Soviet republics that were now loosely joined in a commonwealth of nations.

Ukrainians, however, increasingly have seen themselves as part of Europe. They applied to become a member of the European Union and to join NATO, the defensive alliance formed after World War Two to counter the Soviet Union’s dominance of Eastern Europe. Russia has protested these moves.

Ukraine being both politically and culturally different from Russia, was now perceived by the latter to have betrayed its Russian historic associations. The Russian leadership has responded by sending its army into Ukraine with a plan to end the European quest and incorporate a sizable chunk of the country into Russia.

What’s Behind the Israel-Hamas Conflict?

With Israel and Hamas, the seeds of the conflict go back to the 19th century when a small community of Jews in what was then a province within the Ottoman Empire began to see other Jews arrive from Russia and Europe fleeing pogroms and persecution. The carving up of the Ottoman Empire by France and Britain after World War One also included a British promise to a nationalist Jewish movement called Zionism with its goal of establishing a homeland in Palestine. The British also promised the Arabs a degree of national autonomy in the same region. The Holocaust of World War Two brought surviving European Jews to British Palestine.

In 1947, the British decided to leave and the United Nations recognized a British plan to partition the territory. This is where Israel, Gaza and the West Bank are today. The Jews of Palestine declared their partitioned area to be the state of Israel. The neighbouring Arab states, also carved from the Ottoman Empire with no prior existence as nations themselves, refused to recognize Israel’s declaration of independence and promptly invaded. They lost the war with the boundaries of the Jewish state expanding with displacement of the local native population. The Arab states expelled their Jewish communities who found refuge in the new state of Israel.

The two remaining geographic segments of Palestine remained in Arab nation hands. The one in Gaza was incorporated into Egypt. The one in the West Bank became part of Jordan. Neither Arab state recognized Palestine and the territories they absorbed as a nation. The people of Gaza and the West Bank weren’t made citizens of these states. Palestinians became refugees. Subsequent wars between Israel and Arab neighbouring states have left the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza under the military control of Israel. Today, they are two jurisdictions with a degree of local autonomy. Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2007. The Palestinian Authority controls the West Bank.

In both wars, who is in the right, and who is in the wrong?

For young people not familiar with the history and assailed by thousands of disturbing images, it is hard to determine who has been wronged. These images bring out passionate emotions. Where they appear on the Internet and in social media they come attached to expressed opinions, the spin of disinformation, and the doctoring of facts. It’s easy to do, to ascribe an image to a current event that comes from elsewhere and a different conflict. It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theorists, and ideologues who have a different agenda in mind, one focused on hatred and bigotry.

War is ugly. Hate feeds wars and wars feed hate. Will we ever get rid of war? Will we ever end hate and bigotry? When ignorance is overcome by knowledge, and when our shared planet becomes a collective project worth nurturing and saving, maybe we will find our better nature.

In World War Two, and in other wars, humans have done unspeakable acts to other humans and to the planet. What happened then has happened again and again. The youth of the world in whatever nation they reside, whatever their creed, skin colour, or sex, need to learn from those who preceded them and have never learned how to stop the kind of wars fought in the past and present.

There is, however, one righteous war still ahead. It is the one to save the planet. This is the existential battle, to mitigate climate change, to help those hurt by it to adapt, and to ensure that those escaping its consequences are welcomed wherever they go and whenever they arrive.

It all started with World War Two which laid the foundation for the computing world we live in today. From the machine conceived of by Britain’s Alan Turing in 1936 to the invention of the Internet that connects all of us today, it was military-funded research that provided the money to drive innovation in the field. War it appears remains the mother of invention when it comes to technological advancements as it has with computing.

Modern Computing Owes its Existence to War

Before computers analog machines and people were doing the calculations that our advanced technologies do today. NASA called its mathematicians who calculated launch, orbit and reentry paths, computers. That’s right. Computers were people before they became machines.

Mechanical computing systems preceded the electronics-based systems. Alan Turing’s computer at Bletchley Park where the British broke the German Enigma code, featured valves as switches. Its successor, Colossus, used telephone selectors. Then came vacuum-tube logic circuitry in the 1950s. These preceded the transistor, invented in 1947, but not appearing in an operational commercial computing system until 1955.

Today, billions of transistors can be found on the silicon chips that are the central processing units (CPUs) of modern computers. These chips serve military purposes, found in computer-guided smart shells, missiles and drones. The guidance systems feature built-in terrain mapping software or rely on global positioning satellite networks to hone in precisely on targets.

The main countermeasures of past wars, artillery, aircraft, and anti-aircraft guns, are being replaced by software tools that target weapons and the ordinance they fire. The wars of the 21st century include computerized weapons with humans in control. The wars of the future may eliminate humans entirely.

 The Internet Owes its Existence to War

Even the ubiquitous Internet is a product of war planning with its precursor called ARPAnet, (decommissioned in 1989) a U.S. Department of Defense advanced research project. One of its key purposes was to win current and future wars. Before the Internet, I used ARPAnet in 1989 I had a Pine email account, a home computer and a modem. The first text-only web browser followed in 1990, called WWW, an acronym for World Wide Web. Later WWW became Nexus. It was followed in 1991 by Mosaic, the first browser capable of displaying text and images.

Would we have seen this rapid development in computing and the interconnectivity of the entire planet without war? In time, likely. But war brought energy and money to invention and gave us what we have today.

Does Artificial Intelligence Owe its Existence to War?

If we consider the work of Alan Turing then war could be considered the birthplace of artificial intelligence (AI). The Turing Machine is named after him. It never was a physical device, just one proposed by Turing in a paper he wrote in 1936, three years before the outbreak of World War Two in Europe. Turing described a digital device that could analyze and compute. In his paper, he described information fed into the device in mathematical terms, 0s and 1s, the binary code that has become the basic machine language used in computer programs to this day. That the paper preceded the outbreak of war, didn’t mean that Turing’s musings were relegated to a desk drawer. The decrypting technologies he devised along with others at Bletchley Park reflected some of what he envisioned.

In 1950, Turing proposed a test which he called the Imitation Game. Also known as the Turing Test, it was designed to see if a human could distinguish in a conversation between a machine and humans during a natural language conversation. The conversation took place on a computer keyboard with a screen. So the machine couldn’t be betrayed by speaking. If in the test, the human could not tell whether he or she was talking to a machine or another human, then it was said that the machine had passed the test.

Today’s OpenAI ChatGPT, Google’s BARD, and even Siri, Alexa, and Google Home Assistant are the progeny of Alan Turing’s conjectures, musings and papers. Recently, ChatGPT demonstrated that it could fool a human in a conversation. It passed the Turing Test. Other AIs are capable of doing the same and will soon follow.

Finally, AI is now incorporated into 21st-century warfare with software like that developed by Palantir and Donovan providing command and battlefield management tools that incorporate smart technology to communicate and interact with soldiers in the field and with command and control centres. This is war fought with AI assistance and despite some concerns raised about the fog of war, likely will become part of wars fought in the near future.

The question left is when will future wars have AIs fighting each other? That’s where it could soon head as humans on the battlefield get replaced by intelligent but disposable weapon systems with AI commanders moving these smart pieces around as if they are playing a game of chess.

I grew up at the dawn of nuclear warfare and The Cold War, the latter an ideological conflict between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its satellites. I also was growing up when European colonialism crumbled sometimes peacefully, but often through armed conflict.

The more recent conflicts have included wars on terrorism with the fallout from the 9/11 attacks in the United States leading to the invasions by America and its allies into Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

In the 20th century, wars killed more than 160 million. The tally for the 21st century is estimated to be another 20 million to date. But both of these numbers are a significant undercount when you consider the collateral deaths that accompany human conflicts.

The wars of the 20th century featured technological innovation and the restructuring of national economies focused on the mass production of weapons. Two of these wars were global lasting many years. The losers of these 20th-century conflicts saw the emergence of social upheaval, civil war and regime change. A list of 38 of the most notable of these conflicts follows:

1. The Boer War in South Africa, 1899–1902
2. World War One, 1914–1918
3. Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917 – 1922
4. The Irish War of Independence and Civil War, 1919-1923
5. The Turkish War of Independence, 1919 – 1923
6. The Japanese Invasion of Manchuria, 1931
7. Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935 – 1936
8. The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939
9. The Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936-1939
10. The Japanese-China War, 1937 – 1945
11. World War 2 in Europe, 1939 – 1945
12. World War 2 in the Pacific, 1941 – 1945
13. The Palestine Conflict, 1944 -1948
14. The Cold War, 1945 – 1991
15. The Chinese Civil War, 1945 – 1949
16. The Partition of India War, 1947
17. Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948 – 1949
18. The British-Malay War, 1948 – 1960
19. The Korean War – 1950 – 1953
20. The Kenyan Mau Mau Rebellion, 1952 – 1960
21. The Algerian War of Independence, 1954 – 1962
22. The Vietnam War, 1955 – 1975
23. The Suez Crisis, 1956
24. The Eritrean War of Independence, 1961 – 1991
25. The War of Malay, Brunei and Indonesian Independence, 1962 – 1966
26. The Six-Day War between Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, 1967
27. The Nigerian Civil War, 1967 – 1970
28. The Northern Ireland Troubles, 1969 – 1998
29. The Yom Kippur War, Israel, Egypt and Syria, 1973
30. The Ogaden Ethiopian-Somali War, 1977 – 1978
31. The Argentine-Falkland Islands War, 1982
32. The Kuwait-Iraq Gulf War, 1990 – 1991
33. Sierra Leone Civil War, 1991–2002
34. The Yugoslav Wars – Slovenia, 1991, Croatia, 1991 – 1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina – 1992 – 1995, Kosovo, 1998 – 1999
35. The Somali Civil War, 1992 – ongoing
36. The Rwandan Genocide, 1994
37. The Congo Civil War, 1997 – 1999
38. The Eritrean – Ethiopian War, 1998 – 2000

The legacy of the 20th century has carried on into the 21st. That legacy includes nuclear, planet-killing weapons, ballistic missiles and more. A growing number of militaries have these capabilities in their armaments. And yet there are even more changes to come as technology alters the battlefields in the 21st century.

So what is changing? Cyberwarfare has opened up an entirely new theatre of war taking it to the Internet, making data networks, energy, and civil infrastructure vulnerable to disruptions. Wars for the minds of people, today, include mass dissemination of misinformation using social media and search engines.

Warfare may soon extend to near-Earth space. Anti-satellite weapons have been tested by Russia and China. Others will soon do the same.

Finally, human warfare is likely to be supplemented by machine-to-machine conflicts as remote-guided and autonomous weapon systems, artificial intelligence, and robotics get deployed on 21st-century future battlefields. The age of killer robots is near, something in the past confined to science fiction novels. That’s why, since 2018, the United Nations has been trying to organize an agreement among nations to draft a treaty banning the use of anti-personnel autonomous weapons in conflicts. How effective have UN bans been in deterring war? Unfortunately, not very.

A final note. Have you heard of the Mad Scientist Initiative? Formed by TRADOC, the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command in the last decade, among its many pursuits were surrounding human soldiers with better technology that included enhancing combatant protection and awareness using Iron Man armour and neural-link implants, the latter, to create human-computer interfaces. Welcome to a real 6-million-dollar man.

If this subject interests you, I recommend you read a paper entitled, “Technology, war and the state: past, present and future,” published in the journal, International Affairs.

The fact that the U.S. House of Representatives recently held a hearing about UAPs expressed concern that the unknown phenomena could pose a threat to America or even the rest of us. Hence, the hearing.

Not to be outdone, NASA, the civilian U.S. space agency, has joined in the discussion having recently filed an independent report. Of course, getting NASA involved in something we believe might be coming from outer space would make sense considering the vast panoply of observation satellites, the International Space Station, and other agency earthbound hardware that studies the skies.

In its report, NASA notes that current UAP data is hampered by poor data collection and a lack of sensors with spatial recognition capable of making hazy observed phenomena a lot clearer. After all the Agency has been equipped with an inventory that is “a potent mix of Earth-observing satellites that offer imagery at sub- to several-meter spatial resolution, which is well-matched to the typical spatial scales of known UAP.” In addition, NASA has “state-of-the-art computational and data-analysis techniques” and is “well-positioned to play a leading role.”

Considering what should and should not be a NASA priority, and budgetary challenges, one wonders why the Agency would engage in the UAP exercise. The rationale is that NASA will give legitimacy to the search and reduce the stigma associated with UAP reporting.

The NASA report states, “The threat to U.S. airspace safety posed by UAP is self-evident.” But is it? Has any reported UAP sighting led to an airplane crash or interference with rocket and satellite launches? One would think that if we were dealing with a real out-of-this-world safety threat, sightings would be happening at locations where our space infrastructure exists. But that is not the case. Instead, we have eye-witness reports and images like the one seen at the beginning of this posting. What Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist, calls “fuzzy TicTacs.”

NASA’s UAP study team for its latest report includes 16 experts with backgrounds in science, technology, data, artificial intelligence, space exploration, aerospace safety, media, and commercial innovation. Its initial assessment clearly states that legacy UAP sightings and data have little value. Instead, NASA’s involvement should focus on future sightings with UAP-specific monitoring technology.

At the same time, NASA is encouraging public engagement to report UAPs with the calling for a crowdsourcing system and campaign with open-source smartphone apps to gather images and other citizen-based observations. It appears NASA is unaware of Enigma, an already existing smartphone app designed to record UAP sightings.

The Agency also wants to partner with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to do real-time analysis focused on UAP data gathering to create a future generation of air traffic management systems. I gather that the goal is to guide UAPs to help them on their flight paths.

Neil deGrasse Tyson questions the reliability of sightings noting that “eyewitness testimony is some of the lowest form of evidence you can bring to a scientific conference.” The congressional hearing received testimony from pilots and people deemed to be reliable eyewitnesses. None of these eyewitnesses, however, were using tools and methods of science to reinforce what they had seen, recorded, or experienced. It is this lack of technology specific to UAPs that Tyson questions stating he wants better data. 

He goes on in a recent interview stating, “We have 6 billion smartphones in the world, and at any given moment, there’s a million people airborne with a window looking out into the atmosphere. And everybody has a high-resolution camera, video and stills. And all we have is a fuzzy Tic Tac and some other fuzzy images.”

Some final observations about the pursuit of UAPs:

• If UAPs are a technology designed to spy on the U.S., then the Department of Defense (DoD) is where the effort and money should be spent.
• If UAPs are visitors from remote civilizations, the technology to get them to the vicinity of Earth would so far surpass us that I doubt we would ever figure out what and who they are.
• If UAPs are visits from humans from the future, then we need to understand physics at a level far greater than we know today.

To me, this is not where NASA money should be spent. I propose an alternative, a crowdfunding campaign to raise money in support of this pursuit.

Or as an ultimate absurdity, maybe Congress should hold hearings to verify the claims of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who has stated that Jewish space lasers are being used to melt the polar ice and wreck White Christmases for the future. And if Congress isn’t game, maybe NASA could pursue this and file a report.

The capabilities of this type of transportation could include sub-orbital and orbital point-to-point delivery. First on the agenda is material shipments. But where materials go, so can humans. One commercial operator, SpaceX, believes that the design of its Starship and its configurability has the potential to do material and human sub-orbital and orbital transportation. The company already has commercial partnership agreements with DoD but they do not cover this capability.

Soliciting Commercial Cargo Delivery From and Through Space

The latest development has the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) of DoD soliciting proposals from rocket companies for solutions for point-to-point cargo delivery from and through space. Responses are due just before midnight on July 17, 2023.

DIU seeks scaleable, cost-effective solutions and initially is asking those who respond to address the following three types of missions:

• material payloads shipped from Earth to orbit,
• shipped from orbit to Earth,
• and shipped from one orbit to another in space.

Based on the initial successful acceptance of a commercial submission, DIU will request further refinements of concepts and then select prototypes for subsequent demonstration missions as a proof-of-concept.

Other DIU considerations include operators being able to:

• Increase the volume and mass of delivered payloads,
• Provide precision accuracy on point-to-point suborbital and orbital missions,
• Flexible onboard compartmentalization for different payloads,
• Autonomous capability,
• Minimization of orbital or suborbital debris,
• Provide quick turnaround from request to launch to point of delivery and back,
• Flexibly maneuver to make changes to destinations,
• Sustain a payload’s viability for long durations if a mission requires it,
• Support or augment rescue or disaster response missions.

The DIU will accept submissions from domestic and international commercial companies, not under sanction by the U.S. government and wants to be mission ready in two years.

Background to This Solicitation Request

DoD has established USTRANSCOM for coordinating its military missions around the planet. The current operational services cover air, sea and land transportation. If DIU’s solicitation succeeds in finding one or more commercial partners, USTRANSCOM will likely be the beneficiary adding space to its repertoire.  But DIU’s remit request includes non-military uses which may lead to a civilian equivalent to USTRANSCOM arising shortly.

Last year I asked in an article this question: How close are we to rocket-delivered cargo? I went on to describe what might evolve into a global network of spaceports that would be similar to today’s airports. These spaceports would not require the same amount of land as airports. Their biggest needs would include areas to safely store fuel, maintenance hangars, and launch and landing facilities. With autonomy, there would be no need for a control tower or human operators. Only fueling and cargo loading would involve people, but even robots could do that. The rockets of this future would operate autonomously.

DIU is thinking along these lines and through USTRANSCOM has encouraged partnerships with SpaceX, RocketLab, Blue Origin, and other commercial space ventures to develop the capacity to move 80 tons of cargo anywhere on the planet in an hour. This would equal the capacity of the incumbent air transportation technology currently in use by the U.S. military, the C-17 Globemaster, of which there are 157 in service.

Cyber security as fiction has become a reality based on headlines this week that provides a rationale for why, in the United States, there is a call for a seventh military branch. The first six include the Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines, Coast Guard and Space Force. The seventh will be the Cyber Force, an acknowledgement of the growing online threat posed by adversary nations and non-state actors to Internet and space-based assets.

In the last two days, there has been an unauthorized release of classified Pentagon documents that have appeared on social media sites like Telegram, Twitter, and Facebook. The documents include photographs, intelligence briefings, tactical updates, and analyses done by the U.S. related to the Russia-Ukraine war, China, and other countries. The information leaked has American national security officials looking for those responsible. Was this a Russian cyber hack, or another inside job like the 2013 Edward Snowden Wikileaks?

It was inevitable that either an external or internal hack would happen at some point that would highlight why cybersecurity needs to be addressed by a dedicated team within the military and by a civilian government agency equivalent.

A centralized military command responsible for all cyberspace would end what has been called a “hodgepodge“ approach by the Military Cyber Professionals Association (MCPA). The MCPA is holding its second annual convention in Laurel, Maryland on May 18th. I am certain that conversations at the convention will buzz about this latest leak of classified documents that currently has the Pentagon scrambling for answers.

Before this latest leak, there have been recent cyber incidents that include:

• the shutting down of NATO member online services and websites.
• ransom attacks that have compromised U.S. law enforcement operations.
• the Viasat hack on Ukraine’s broadband communications network at the beginning of the Russian invasion in February 2022.

Cyber Force would incorporate Cyber Command which the U.S. established in 2009. The latter included 6,000 personnel in 133 teams spread throughout the various branches of the military. But the growing number of incidents, hacker attacks, ransomware demands, misinformation dissemination and classified material leaks over the Internet requires a new level of computer vigilance.

The Cyber Force when constituted would be doing more than looking at what is happening here on the ground. Cyberspace goes all the way into outer space. That’s because our communications systems are increasingly reliant on satellites. The growing Starlink constellation of satellites helped Ukraine overcome the Russian Viasat hack. But as more of our global communications, whether commercial or military become space-dependent, the easiest way in the future to disrupt a country will be to target outer space assets.

How many satellites are orbiting Earth today? As of February 2023, Starlink alone had 3,580 in low-Earth orbit with plans to deploy 12,000 in total for its global Internet communications mesh network coverage. That’s an impressive number when you consider a census of satellites in low-Earth orbit done recently by the Union of Concerned Scientists showing a total of 4,582 active out of 7,941 still circling the planet launched from the beginning of the Space Age back in 1957. If that seems like a lot today, some experts are predicting we will have more than 100,000 orbiting the planet by 2040, and that number doesn’t include new space habitations, or a planned satellite network to orbit the Moon to provide computing, communications, and other essential operations in near-Earth space.

Considering the Viasat hack, Starlink, GPS satellites, and the constellation of new commercial operators from the U.S. alone let alone China, Russia, India, Canada, and others, it is pretty clear the “space” in the word cyberspace will require global extra vigilance than what is in place today. Our cyber defences will be both on this world and out of this world.

Attacks on satellites will in the future be considered acts of war equal to 9/11, and Pearl Harbor. That’s why America’s consideration of creating a Cyber Force branch for its military makes sense as a dedicated service of this type does for all nations that currently and shortly will face state and non-state-sponsored threats.

Experiments on invisibility have been on the go since the 1960s. Back then, Harvard and the University of Utah experimented with using augmented reality to produce optical camouflage that combined highly reflective material, computers, video cameras, projectors, and specially-designed mirrors. The effect worked but as an invisibility solution, it was far from compact.

Mirage Invisibility

In 2011, a University of Texas experiment used the mirage effect to achieve invisibility. Mirages are what drivers see on hot stretches of a highway when photothermal deflection occurs because of differences in the temperature between the pavement and the air above it. This creates false images which appear as watery surfaces in the distance. In deserts, that same phenomenon happens when hot sand is in contact with the air above it which causes lightwaves to bend making a phantom oasis appear in the distance. The Texas experiment achieved a mirage effect by heating sheets of carbon nanotubes that interacted with the surrounding air to make anything behind the material invisible.

Meta Invisibility

At Duke University in 2006, metamaterials were first used to distort the flow of microwaves. Although humans cannot see microwaves, this work showed the promise of metamaterials for use in deflecting visible light. A team at the University of Maryland the next year used metamaterial to bend visible light proving it was possible.

Back in 2012, I posted an article describing the creation of a thermal invisibility cloak designed to hide electronic heat signatures. I didn’t call the material used meta. It was made from thin PVC-type polymers, silver and gold and certainly sounds like it fit the category.

Then there is an engineering experiment at Harvard University done in 2018 that employed broadband achromatic metalenses and metamaterials to make objects undetectable across the entire visible light spectrum. The results can be seen in the image below. Pretty spooky!

Behind meta invisibility, you find two commonly used terms: metalenses and metamaterials. What are they?

A metalens is a flat very thin lens made of metamaterials. Harvard used titanium dioxide for its metalens. The lenses are thinner than a human hair. Today you find them in digital cameras, microscopes, and mobile phones where space is at a premium.

Metamaterials are synthetic composites that are nanoscale in thickness and smaller than the wavelength of light. They exhibit negative electromagnetic properties which means unlike natural material which is positive and visible in light, metamaterial causes lightwaves to pass around any object covered by it.

A large enough piece of metamaterial could hide a tank on a battlefield making it invisible to an enemy.

Stealth Invisibility

Another way to create invisibility is to use stealth technology. This is technology currently deployed on aircraft like the United States Air Force F-35. Stealth doesn’t deflect light waves. But it does deflect radar. Radar transmitters send electromagnetic waves from a transmitting source which then get reflected when an object is encountered.

So what a stealth aircraft has is electromagnetic wave-absorbing composite materials applied to its surfaces. Thus the aircraft is undetectable by radio waves although it can be seen visually if a spotter is looking up. But radar operators seldom look up and watch the world through their receivers. Hence a stealth aircraft can remain invisible to them until the sound of the jet engines can be heard approaching.

Camouflage Invisibility

The military began adopting camouflage in World War One ending a tradition of uniforms with bright colours that made a soldier highly visible to an opponent holding a rifle. Naval vessels before World War One were painted white. Camouflage soon altered their look as well as that of the armies and aircraft being deployed. Today, the art of war is all about camouflage and deception.

Fractal colouration that mimics nature can be found on today’s battlefields (see the tank in the image below).

Beyond fractal colouration, today’s field camouflage uses materials made from semiconducting polymers that absorb a portion of incoming light and radio waves to make them almost invisible. Even a vehicle as large as a tank becomes almost undetectable, cutting in half the observable range of spotters looking for the enemy on a battlefield. As forces move forward they can be walking or driving right into the field of fire of nearly invisible tanks, like the one above, having never seen it.

Camouflage on today’s battlefields goes beyond deflecting visible, radar and infrared spectrums. Special materials hide the heat signatures of soldiers making thermal imagers and night vision goggles ineffective.

At the University of California-Irvine, battlefield wear is being developed to make infrared imagers inoperative using materials embedded with tiny metal flakes in thin rubber sheets. The material is almost as light as today’s uniforms.

A British military contractor, BAE, is developing appearance modulation to alter the look of a military vehicle like a tank when seen through a thermal imager. What the viewer sees is a car.

Then there is quantum stealth technology that uses colouration patterns to hide objects in plain sight.

There are even camouflage technologies that make something as large as a tank appear to be local foliage, absorbing the characteristics of the organic and inorganic materials found on a battlefield.

As cool as Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility appears to be, current and future materials science discoveries and technological advancements may have it beat.

In 2022, every branch of the U.S. military struggled to meet recruitment goals. Reasons given for this shrinking number included potential recruits who were obese, drug users, or had criminal records. Of those who applied between the ages of 17 and 24, only 23% qualified, down from an average of 29% in previous years. In addition, interest in military careers among eligible Americans has dropped to 9%, the lowest number since 2007. The result for the U.S. military is that enlistment targets in 2022 were only 40% met.

Canada’s military last year also noted a recruitment problem. In 2021, recruitment efforts filled less than half of the military’s needs. The Canadian military noted that the number of applicants was also down by half leading to a growing shortfall. Canada’s military in 2022 reported it had 100,000 unfilled positions.

In Germany, where the military was once considered an honourable career, the country cannot get Germans to join and is considering offering positions to foreigners to fill its depleted ranks. Other European Union countries are similarly challenged.

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 with 150,000 to 190,000 troops, largely members of Russia’s professional army, navy, and airforce and members of a mercenary army, the Wagner Group. After the offensive stalled and was rolled back by Ukrainian forces in some areas, Russian mounting casualties led to the government enacting a partial mobilization to fill the ranks. Even the Wagner Group began scouring prisons to fill its depleted ranks. Meanwhile, on the day of the mobilization announcement, tens of thousands of Russian men fled the country displaying what seems to be a consistent trend whether in autocracies or democracies of rejecting the military.

If you can’t recruit volunteers or draft people when needed, who or what will fight future wars? In the Medieval world, mercenaries were recruited to fight the dynastic wars of kings and queens. The Swiss were among those renowned for seeking employment in the armies of European nations. The Wagner Group isn’t alone in carrying on the gun-for-hire tradition. Consider three other groups: The French Foreign Legion, U.S. mercenary groups MPRI and Blackwater. But mercenary armies face recruitment challenges of their own as is evident with the Wagner Group having to scour Russian prisons to find those willing to fight in return for pardons.

Replacing Humans in the Military Equation

Peter Warren Singer, who served as a consultant to the U.S. military, intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation,  has written a book entitled, “Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution.” In it, he describes the steps being taken by militaries to remove humans from future wars beginning with technologies like remote-controlled drones being used today in Ukraine.

He states this is only the start of a revolution in war where technologies will face off on the battlefields of the near future. Machines armed with artificial intelligence (AI), and gamers sitting in rooms far removed from battlefronts will be the ones in the fight. The gamers already exist with Predator and other drones at their beck and call being used to eliminate human targets from Afghanistan to Syria.

And if you think anything else is science fiction, then consider 12 recent successful flights using a pilot AI at Edwards Air Force Base in California. This facility is all about training human pilots to become top guns. But this time it was the X-62A Variable Stability In-Flight Simulator Test Aircraft (VISTA) that performed the dogfighting maneuvers in mock engagements against human pilots.

From AI fighter pilots in the air to robot armies on the ground is no longer a big stretch of the imagination. Militaries are looking at autonomous battlefield vehicles such as self-driving tanks while the navies of a not-too-distant future are looking to deploy crewless ships and submarines. In the U.S., Army Futures Command (AFC) was established in 2018 to design the armed forces of the future. It is not yet ready to eliminate the human soldier from the field of operations. But as bipedal and four-legged autonomous robots such as those being built by Boston Dynamics become a reality, the human soldier in the field may take on a coordination role supported by a regiment of intelligent machines.

What’s the timeframe for this future reality? Without a doubt, it will be well within the limits of this century.

At a summit at The Hague last week, representatives from 60 countries got together to discuss the legal and ethical consequences of AI’s use in weapon and defence systems. REAIM stands for Responsible AI in the Military Domain, the name given to the meeting which lasted two days and ended with a call for action to identify what would collectively be deemed acceptable uses of AI for the military and in war.

AI is in Use in the Military Today

AI is already being used by military and defence contractors. Where it is used in operations and production and not on the battlefield, it is deemed to be within the boundaries of acceptance. In an interview with BNN Bloomberg, the Chief Technology Officer of Saab AB, the Swedish defence contractor, states, “Our current way of working is an interpretation based on the humanitarian law and some guidelines for development. We make sure that our engineers understand what areas are safe and in what areas should we be really careful.” 

The discussion at The Hague last week was heavily influenced by the Russian-Ukraine war with many attendees rationalizing the use of AI in support of the “good guys” in the fight.

AI and Autonomous Weapons and Defence Systems

In Ukraine today, a U.S. software company, Palantir, is supplying the country with Skykit which processes intelligence gathered from observation drones in the air and those made by operatives on the ground to help with strategic decision-making on the battlefield.

Another technology developed in Ukraine is called Zvook. It is an AI-powered acoustic monitoring system that by noise can evaluate a missile’s speed and direction so that interceptors can destroy it.

In 2019, the U.S. Center for Global Security Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory published a report on the use of AI on battlefields. In its introduction, the report quotes Vladimir Putin who has stated that the nation that rules AI “will be the ruler of the world.”  The report explored five questions:

1. What near-term AI military applications were possible?
2. Which of these applications would be consequential for strategic stability?
3. How could AI systems affect regional and global stability?
4. How would AI systems affect strategic deterrence?
5. What are the unintended consequences of using AI for the military and on the battlefield?

Algorithmic warfare is another name for AI. It uses machine learning tools and the application of neural networks which mimic the human brain and applies them to current and anticipated military logistics, planning, analysis, transportation, intelligence and tactics. AI is seen as having a potential influence on decision-making related to the scale and scope of wars, to strategies of deterrence, escalation and de-escalation.

AI Autonomy on the Battlefield

The autonomous vehicles and systems presently in play in Ukraine are seen as having the highest priority for the military use of AI with a focus on navigation assistance in support of land, sea and air operations. Uncrewed vehicles can use AI to navigate through hostile environments. Drone swarms like the ones presently being used by Russia can operate synchronously through the use of an AI agent. AI can respond to information received in real time by onboard sensors and those deployed in the field to alter battlefield tactics as conditions change.

AI for Wargaming

Today, AI is being used to simulate nuclear explosions. Modelling has replaced underground nuclear weapons tests. Modelling assisted by AI is influencing the design of weapon systems from fighter jets to missiles and tanks. Entire battlefield scenarios and missions are being mapped and simulated with the assistance of AI. AI is being used to create novel production methods for new military hardware. And in wargaming which simulates battlefield conditions, gamers can modify conditions, weapons, and other variables and analyze what different mixes of these do to results.

AI for Intelligence Gathering and Analysis

The U.S. manages incoming streams of intelligence from so many different sources that analysis faces the problem of information overload. Machine learning and neural networks are well-suited to sort through the mountains of incoming information to spot potential destabilizing acts by foreign governments and their militaries. The U.S. is only beginning to use these tools within the military and domestic intelligence institutions. But for global security, using AI to separate the chaff from the wheat is a powerful use of the technology.

Are AI Autonomous Battlefield Robots in the Future Mix?

Whether you are one of the good guys or one of the bad, the advent of AI autonomous systems on battlefields is in the present and future mix. But does Russia or China have plans to send robot armies and drones to fight its 21st-century battles? To some extent, Russia is already doing this with its kamikaze drone swarms that have attacked Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure.

But fully autonomous individual robots given the weapons to kill humans seems to be an ethical and moral dilemma that even the maddest generals whether friend or enemy would consider as a justifiable strategy. I say this, however, knowing that Vladimir Putin has used the threat to use nuclear weapons in speeches as Russia finds itself increasingly challenged by its failure to achieve his objectives in Ukraine. Most military and government analysts as well as current NATO members see Putin’s threats as a bluff. But would someone like Putin who is so willing to talk up nuclear war, be morally challenged by sending killer robots onto the battlefield?

If you have been keeping up with the evolution of autonomous mobile robotic systems, whether multi-wheeled or bipedal, none are yet ready for prime time on battlefields let alone to reliably and consistently navigate the sidewalks and streets of city neighbourhoods. So we still have time to put ethical and legal boundaries in place for AI’s use in the military and on the battlefield which means we need more than 60 countries meeting in The Hague to come up with the rules of engagement.