Liquid Equipment for Liquid Wars

Antonio Dias de Macedo Filho, CMG(EN RM1), PhD

José Ricardo Rodrigues Teixeira Alves, CMG(EN RM1), CBPP Blue Seal

Around ten years ago, Zygmund Bauman (1925-2017) introduced the concept of Liquid Modernity. He said that in today’s world, nothing is made to last. Obsolescence comes in a blink of the eye. He predicted a scattered and selfish society where people are linked through massive use of telecommunications. The instabilities are huge, since all change too fast. Technology evolves in a tremendous speed, and then quickly drains away into the limbo of uselessness. Focusing on defense issues, such scenarios are quite proper for flourishing ethnic nationalism, religious fanaticisms, violent protests, organized crime, terrorism, drug traffic, illegal immigration, human traffic, and weapon smugglers, tangled along with normal daily world’s affairs.

Other modern philosophers, Alvin and Heidi Toefler, laid down the concept that “a society fight its wars in the same way it makes business”. This means that possible future opponents will be also “liquid” in nature: Besides despising any frontier, they will change considerably before they can be defeated, they will not be permanently loyal to anyone and their danger level and intentions will not be the same during all times. This means that planning, although still crucial, will need to be much more flexible. Any military plan must now evolve alongside the conflict. Thus, a flexible liquid strategy will be determinant for anyone who intends to survive.

If in one hand, technology is evolving too fast, and huge investments are needed, on the other hand, not everyone will be able to keep the same pace. Everyone will struggle for speed and accurateness, but this will be in the grasp of only few. Moreover, as obsolescence will come almost instantaneously, life cycles shrinks, and along with them, the technology maturity phase where most manufacturers obtain their profits. Therefore, these providers will do their best to extend their product life cycle, in special to peripheral countries. These countries will face a dilemma: to pursuit the near to latest technology means extremely high investments to buy nearly obsolete systems or try to re-invent the obsolete legacy systems they already have. Although performance is, by far, the factor that most sales persons emphasize (and that high rank officers like best), the most important for the periphery is to get systems that do what they need, and that they are able to maintain, repair and use in their local environments. It is a simple matter of analyzing the quality of a product: It doesn’t matter the amount of cutting-edge technology that it is there, or how it can provide a superb performance. If the system does not provide the required results when needed and in the right place, the unsatisfied customer will not perceive quality. Thinking only in terms of performance is a dangerous gamble for those who have short budgets.

 As society enters the gates of the 4th Industrial Revolution, where possibilities of crossed innovations by blending ideas and concepts of several different areas of science increase, the concept of an information society also flows away and is surpassed by the concept of a knowledge society. Therefore, the introduction of several forms of cognitive capabilities to weapons and military systems is crucial. Any form of improved signal processing techniques that is able to provide increased flexibility is also much welcome. For electronic systems, SW defined systems are the trend.

Moreover, as technology becomes increasingly the most important issue for weapons and military systems, NERDS will become the ultimate modern warriors. However, they are not keen to die for their countries or leaders. Their loyalty is quite fluid and the epic war film heroes, strong and righteous, will drown into the tides of history. Thus, what will emerge from the swamps of the future wars will be an increasing number of unmanned platforms and robots that will do the dirty work of destroying one another. Most of them will act in swarms and will have very small sizes. They must be unperceived until the last minute. Lethality will be dispersed. Electronic Warfare will be everywhere! Along with them, there will be a set of high tech systems  that will cope with some mixed tech ones, which will be partially obsolete but retrofitted with some new technology in a way that they may be able to provide good strikes if correctly employed. Their effectiveness will depend heavily on a suitable strategy. In such sense, most strategy evaluation must be done by means of gamming theory, once the possibilities unfold in an exponential manner. A contender will have good strategy if it is able to achieve a Nash equilibrium point, that is sufficiently advantageous for itself. Negotiation skills will be fundamental. Knowledge will be the key element and not just collecting pieces of information.

In this sense, the judicious use of the available technology, the insertion of an advanced signal processing, designing SW defined flexible architectures, suitable intelligence capabilities and the elaboration of a winning strategy is what one needs to make some old systems come back to the fighting arena. For many reasons, being economics the more obvious of them, Peripheral countries will not be able to match the core countries capability. These countries will not have access to some crucial technology that will be kept under the veil of secrecy imposed by the core countries, but will have access to many other. They may be able to use creativity to improve considerable the legacy systems they know quite well. An example is the set of modern VHF radars mostly developed in Russia. They can easily detect  cutting edge stealth aircrafts and are the result of an appropriate and careful improvement of an obsolete radar technology, with extended signal processing capability and new radio frequency modules.

Therefore, the main concern of peripheral countries must be the menaces from other peripheral countries. Play with fire or against core countries is not recommended for any one of them. The chance for the peripheric ones to win their quarrels is to have a good strategy, good negotiation skills, a deep scientific knowledge, a sensible understanding of what they have in hands and to know how to apply, maintain and refurbish their systems.

Finally, the authors would like to propose a 3.5 questions quiz about the next liquid war:

1) Who will be the next war enemy?

Answer: It doesn’t matter. You will know it when it begins.

2) Where will the next war be?

Answer: It doesn’t matter. You will know when it begins.

3) What weapons and systems will be used in the next war?

Answer: It doesn’t matter. You can use everything you have already or nothing; it can have the most advanced technology or a remodeled Neanderthal one. You will only know them when the war begins.

3.5) How must we think during the next war?

Answer: Oooops!!! This is the tricky question! You can start learning how to think, and what to learn right now. That is, Liquid strategic planning! Surely, it will be a war for information warfare enthusiasts and beyond. You may need to think a bit as Alexander the Great, Patton, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Tesla, R.V Jones and some others… However, what you really need to learn is to walk over quicksand... So let’s start!

PS: The e-book “Liquid EW for Liquid warfare” is available for free. Send us an email to [email protected] with name, affiliation and your email address.

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