Future of World Warfare “Fifth Dimension”

“Do we need a legal framework to chain a Frankenstein we have created?”

By - Imran Hanif, CMgr, FCMI, MIPSA

Introduction:

Innovations in technology are changing the tactics of modern-day conflict. There are new tools in today's arsenal of weapons. Helped by advances in electro-magnetic and modern information and communications technology, a new form of electronic warfare has been created. It is called cyber war and is increasingly recognized by governments and the military as posing a potentially grave threat.

One can say easily that conflicts in the future will increasingly be waged in the worldwide data networks, detached from any geopolitical borders. Warfare no longer revolves exclusively around the conventional dimensions of land, sea, air and outer space. Indeed, cyberspace has been added as a new component to the combat zone. In this new logic of asymmetrical warfare, the comparatively clear-cut distinction between the military sphere and the civilian sphere has lost its validity. It is not at all rare for cyber-attacks to be launched by civilians with no actual power status, who operate covertly and strike anonymously.

And it is not just cyber war that is a growing phenomenon. The internet has empowered cyber activism, allowing people to share information and mobilize support to take direct action - both online and on the streets. The so-called Arab Spring has been described as an electronic revolution. Protesters were turned into citizen journalists - taking front line images on their mobile phones and uploading them via their computers for the world to see. The regimes may have jammed the signals of satellite news channels and banned international reporters from entering their country, but they were unable to prevent citizens from becoming reporters in their own right

Brian Orend, who is the Director of International Studies, and a Professor of Philosophy, at the University of Waterloo in Canada gave a presentation on “Clearing Up the Fog in the Fifth Dimension: Regulating Cyber-warfare”. He thinks Cyber-warfare is a truly cutting-edge topic in armed conflict. It can be defined, at least initially, as attempting to use the Internet, and related advanced computer technologies, to substantially harm the fundamental interests of a political community. And cyber-space has been referred to as “the fifth dimension of warfare,” after: land; water; air; and space. Yet, much confusion or “fog” surrounds cyber-warfare, both regarding its present realities and its future potential. Certainly there are lot of question which crops up in our mind like:  

How much damage can cyber-attacks actually do? Is it even appropriate to compare computer-based cyber-attacks to physical violence? Is “informational warfare”, as cyber-war is otherwise known, changing the very nature of political conflict in our time (indeed, for all time)?

Commonly, cyber-warfare takes the form either of espionage, disinformation, or sabotage. The countries most frequently mentioned today, with reference to cyber-war technology, include: America; Britain; China; France; India; Israel; Pakistan and Russia. In 2011, America, China, and Russia met to see if they could craft a treaty to regulate the outbreak and conduct of cyber warfare, parallel to such other established laws of armed conflict as The Hague and Geneva Conventions. Unfortunately, these talks fell apart amidst bitter mutual accusations. This is an unfortunate state of affairs that needs to be resolved: cyber-warfare, like any other form of armed conflict, ought to be brought under thoughtful regulation. States need to propose a set of principles, consistent with established law yet responsive to the new technology, which ought to guide any eventual (and inevitable) treaty designed to bring this “Wild, Wild West” under helpful, progressive, lawful control which serves the interests of all nations.

Legal Confusions and International Law

It is said that the law of war consists of the internationally applicable principles "ius ad bellum" (acceptable justifications to wage war) and "ius in bello" (limits to acceptable wartime conduct). Experts in international law around the globe are tackling with the burning question of whether these principles apply to cyber warfare and to the current basic situation with its implicit changes. The focus is on massive attacks that go far beyond the usual Internet crime being prosecuted under criminal law. This important discussion is thus clearly associated with a number of questions that are difficult to answer .i.e.

What criteria have to be met to have a cyber-attack be considered an act of war justifying a military retaliation?

Is a conventional military response a reasonable and legitimate course of action and one on which consensus can be reached?

To aggravate matters, it is complicated to identify the attackers and their motivation quickly and unequivocally and to assess possible diffuse consequences of the attacks. And not least, politics and policy play a role, not just technical aspects. How should a country defend itself against a cyber-attack verifiably brought about by another country without endangering economic relations, for example?

As the 21st century commenced, nearly every aspect of human activity had become irreversibly entangled with cyber space, from the public global Internet and its innovative military counterparts to GPS precision location, navigation, and timing to financial transactions and personal communications. That also raised the bar on ensuring the security of digital and cyber space elements and an accompanying increase in the volume, intensity and sophistication of computer and network hacking, malware and, ultimately, cyber weapons.

In last few years few western governments have been criticized for spying on their own citizen and sparked a huge debate on private life of citizens. Here in the United Kingdom there is lot of hue and cry over this issue. In this regard a secret program code named “PRISM” by US government was revealed by Mr Edward Snowden took the world by surprise. PRISM was a clandestine program launched in 2007, under which the National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications of foreign nationals from at least nine major US internet companies. PRISM was publicly revealed when classified documents about the program were leaked to journalists of The Washington Post and The Guardian by Edward Snowden – at the time he was a NSA contractor. After these revelations notion of being spied on everything we do become quite glaring. 

  According to Anne-Marie Slaughter who is a professor of politics and international affairs at University of Princeton, she also served from 2009-2011 as director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department. In her article titled “War and law in the 21st century: adapting to the changing face of conflict” she states that conflicts in the 21st century are going to look very different from those of the century before. The two wars launched in response to 9/11 – one in Afghanistan and the other unjustifiably in Iraq – are likely to be the last examples of 20th century-style warfare: large-scale multi-year conflicts involving the ground invasion of one country by another. Among the major powers, 21st century warfare is more likely to be fought on the digital frontier, or by Special Forces conducting limited operations.

She also writes that among the majority of the world’s nearly 200 states, conflicts are much more likely to take place within states than between them. As former UN official Andrew Mack found after a major study of conflicts between 1945 and 2008, wars in the post-Cold War world have mostly been fought within rather than between states, and by small armies equipped with light weapons. Those wars generally kill fewer people compared to the superpower proxy wars fought in the Cold War period, but they are “often characterised by extreme brutality toward civilians.” Consider Rwanda, Somalia, East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo, Darfur, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya and, increasingly, Syria. The current international legal regime governing military conflict is designed primarily for wars between states conducted on the ground, at sea, or in the air by organised and identifiable military forces. It will apply less and less to coming conflicts, although, the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 extend basic humanitarian protections to insurgencies fighting against colonial regimes or occupying forces. But it is not clear in the first instance that international law should even apply.

She further writes “When a government abuses one of its citizens it is a domestic constitutional rights violation. If a government official kills a citizen extra-judicially it is murder, punishable under domestic criminal law; and if a government official tortures a citizen, it is assault and battery. When a government discriminates against a group of citizens, it is a minority rights violation, again subject to redress under most constitutions. When a government charged with making and enforcing laws systematically violates those laws by a deliberate decision to torture, murder, and “disappear” or detain citizens without legal justification, domestic law gives way to international human rights law, and increasingly to international criminal law. When those citizens fight back in an organised fashion, or otherwise organise themselves against the state in a sustained military confrontation, then international human rights law gives way to the patchwork of international rules developed to apply to conflicts within states”.

As per an article titled “Cyber warfare ushers in 5th dimension of human conflict  Mr J.R. Wilson (who is Vice President, Partnerships & Alliances for AT&T Mobility)says so far as is known outside classified sources, the leading use of cyber weapons to date has included the Stuxnet virus (of suspected-but never confirmed-U.S./Israeli origin) used to take down Iran's nuclear research computers; Russian confirmed and suspected cyber-attacks on Estonia, Ukraine, Georgia, Latvia and Estonia; and Chinese incursions into U.S. military, government, and civilian infrastructure networks.

 At one stage in 2010, more than three dozen separate cyber security-related proposals were introduced in Congress. The first decade of the 21st Century saw an explosion in the creation of cyber security agencies, departments, and offices throughout the U.S. government throughout the world.

This movement also elevated information technology (IT) from the "nerd" department responsible for keeping an organization's phones and computers working to the heart of secure data and networking.

According to the 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report, 92 percent of cyber security breaches are of external origin: "Motive correlates very highly with country of origin. The majority of financially motivated incidents involved actors in either the U.S. or Eastern European countries (e.g., Romania, Bulgaria and the Russian Federation), while 96 percent of espionage cases were attributed to threat actors in China and the remaining 4 percent were unknown. This may mean that other threat groups perform their activities with greater stealth and subterfuge. But it also could mean that China is, in fact, the most active source of national and industrial espionage in the world today."

For the U.S. military, creation of the U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) in May 2010 as a sub-unified command subordinate to U.S. Strategic Command has been likened to the elevation of the Army Air Corps to a separate military service as the U.S. Air Force-the "Third Domain of War"-and within it, in 1982, creation of the Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) - the "Fourth Domain of War"-also as a component of STRATCOM. AFSPC also became the lead Major Command for Air Force cyber space operations in 2009, thus placing major components of three domains of war under the Air Force.

Cyber Advancements and Pakistan

There has been a paradigm shift in the nature of conflict and pattern of statecraft in the post-World War-II period, largely due to; initiation of nuclear weapons, revolution in military affairs, rapid advancement and spread of information technologies and effects of globalization, which have weakened the concept of international borders. In Pakistan discussions on Kinetic and Non Kinetic domains have started to emerge recently which I think is very positive sign. However, until recent past, our primary focus has been on kinetic threats, whereas, awareness about how non-kinetic challenges are affecting upon our national security is slowly being realized. Transformation into the psychological domain from physical domain with the primacy of informational, diplomatic, economic, ideological and technological means is basically known as non-kineticism. The term, however, has no established definition and its interpretation differs from actor to actor. USAF ascribes to it only the Information / Cyber domains, while the Chinese see it as an overarching concept of the indirect strategy or non-traditional warfare, squarely grouping it with Smart Power.

Since our independence, Pakistan has remained in a state of continuous conflict with its arch rival India. Until 28 May 1998, the main threats to Pakistan were primarily in the kinetic domain and so were our responses. However, after the overt nuclearization of South Asia, the threat paradigm has been further compounded to involve host of kinetic as well as non-kinetic challenges not only from India but also from other hostile or potentially hostile actors.

According to a pioneer research effort by National Defence University (NDU), Islamabad in the shape of a National Strategy Paper titled “NON-KINETIC CHALLENGES TO THE STATE OF PAKISTAN” there are three major determinants of Non-Kinetic applications. Firstly, unresolved Kashmir dispute, secondly, Nuclearization of South Asia and thirdly, Developments after 9/11, particularly regional situation and likely end game in Afghanistan. Paper has correctly brought out that our unresolved domestic issues and socio-political fault lines add to our vulnerabilities, which can be subject to exploitation by internal and external actors alike. Therefore, we need to be conscious of the fact that, owing to globalization and greater inter-dependence, the threat mosaic has changed and acquired a new form. Now, information, cyber and media are new tools of influence alongside other traditional means. Thus, a wholesome view of evolving threat paradigm is extremely imperative and great deal of work is needed in this field.

National Strategy Research Paper by NDU has prepared a Nation’s Prosperity Index which divides states into three categories i.e. Prosperous States, Borderline / Weak States and Failing States. Pakistan unfortunately ranks 107/110 on Legatum Prosperity Index 2011. Poor internal indicators are the chief causes of low prosperity level in nation states and these become exploitable fault lines, which can be turned into serious vulnerabilities through non-kinetic applications. In the same way Systemic and institutional failures, especially poor governance or institutional weaknesses exacerbate these vulnerabilities which, if aggravated, can have serious consequences for viability of a state.

Conclusions

1.     I can say with conviction that if world (governments) won’t bring out a legal set of documents covering all sets of confusions on the matter then “Fear of Unknown” will take over and confusions can only create misunderstanding or possibly lead to war. We (countries) all have to come on common ground and remember that societies exists only on fair play and justice.

2.     Since we all know that the primary expanse of non-kinetic threats in Pakistan lies within the informational/cyber domain, therefore, its response should also be generated within the same domain. In this regard Pakistan needs a comprehensive Information Policy involving cooperation and synergy amongst all stake-holders (Public and Private). Cyber, media, intelligence, IT, academia and diplomatic quarters need to be harmonized. A Cyber Security Unit needs to be created on a priority basis as a focus for exploitation of information and cyber domain.

3.     There is requirement of skillful exploitation of the weaknesses/fault lines of hostile/adversarial states to put them into a reactive mode.

4.     Pakistan and Pakistan Army will continue to confront non-kinetic challenges along with kinetic threats. Hence, there is requirement of extra effort / funding in this emerging area which directly effects National Security.

5.     There is a dire need for building consensus on notion of non-kineticism and draw the attention of all leaders / policy-makers towards the changing nature of conflict. Army being the pioneer in this field must take on pilot seat in this field. As correctly said by first director of Strategy and Security Institute, University of Exeter in United Kingdom “The aim of strategy is to unite the levers of national power in a common framework for purposeful action”.

__________________________________________________________________________ “To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” Sun Tzu

About The Author

 Imran Hanif spent almost two decades in the Pakistan Army before moving to United Kingdom. He graduated from Prestigious Pakistan Military Academy (PMA) as commissioned officer in 1991. During his military service held various staff and command appointments. He has been an infantry company commander, GSO-2 (operations) at Brigade level CAF HQ and 2nd in Command of an Infantry Regiment. He commanded two different Wings of Civil Armed Forces (CAF) in interior Baluchistan, one at Pak- Afghan border during Taliban’s era. He is a graduate of Police Management Course (train the trainer) from Centre of Excellence for Stability Police Units (COESPU) from Vicenza, Italy. He got early retirement in 2008 at his own request and pursued his Post Graduation degree of Master of Business Administration (MBA) from UK. He also completed his Post Graduate degree in Strategic Management and Leadership from largest management body “Chartered Management Institute (CMI)” in UK. He achieved the ultimate accolade in management and was granted status of Chartered Manager (CMgr) and declared Fellow of Chartered Management Institute (FCMI). He is also Member of International Professional Security Association (MIPSA) and try to keep himself abreast of latest developments in the field of Security. Presently he is a freelance trainer in the field of Conflict Management, Physical Intervention, Security guarding within Private Security Industry within UK. He has spent almost last four years researching and writing his upcoming book titled “Strom over Kabul” which will reveal all dimensions of Afghan Conflict including a way forward and a logical conclusion for peace and stability in the region. Nowadays he is pursuing his Business goals and streamlining his PhD proposal.