World War I (and the first ever global industrial conflict) began 100 years ago, when, not to be outdone, the warring nations took advantage of rapidly advancing science to develop new weapons such as poison gas, artillery shells, aerial bombs, fighter jets and tanks. With the help of these weapons, World War I claimed the lives of 37 million people.
What new weapons will be used in future wars?
What new weapons will be used in future wars?
The shape of warfare may not have changed much since 1914, but as technology is transforming at a rate probably faster than ever before since the early 20th century, weapons will become more advanced and refined.
Decades before World War I, Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel invented explosives and detonators and became famous and rich from them, but then they became so horrific in the Holocaust that he donated part of his fortune and created the Nobel Peace Prize in his name.
Now, let's take a look at some of the means that future wars might use, and keep in mind Nobel's concern about science being misused for destructive purposes, the weekly U.S. News & World Report Web site noted in a recent story.
Cyber hacking
Attacks on computer systems will be a major component of war, but the concept - including the term "cyberwar" - is overhyped. "The term cyberwarfare is widely misused to describe things that are not war, including jamming attacks, like the hijacking of Twitter accounts by the Syrian Electronic Army, which is an example of a jamming attack," said Peter Warren Singer, an American political scientist and author of several books, including "Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What We All Need to Know."
According to media reports, on April 23, 2013, the Syrian Electronic Army used the Associated Press to tweet out a message that the White House had been hit by two explosions and that President Obama had been injured. The false news once made the U.S. stock market quickly dive in the middle of the day, with the Dow falling more than 140 points in 2 minutes, before quickly recovering to regain lost ground. The Associated Press later denied the news, saying its Twitter account had been misappropriated.
On August 27, 2013, the Syrian Electronic Army attacked The New York Times and Twitter; on January 1, 2014, it hacked into the accounts of several social platforms of Skype, an Internet communications software owned by the U.S. company Microsoft, posting a satirical message about Microsoft's assistance to the U.S. government in spying on the privacy of people's communications.
Many of the above behaviors have nothing to do with war. Instead, the most commonly cited example of military hacking is the reported use of the Shocknet virus by the United States to sabotage Iranian facilities that could be used to make nuclear materials. According to media reports, the Stuxnet virus, also known as the Stuxnet virus, is a virus that has swept through industry around the world and was discovered in 2010, and as of 2011, the virus had infected more than 45,000 networks around the world, with Iran being the most severely attacked, with 60 percent of personal computers infected with the virus.In March 2013, media reports claimed that the United States had used the Stuxnet worm to attack Iranian s uranium enrichment equipment.
World War I saw the first use of long-range bombing and aerial bombardment, which put civilians at greater risk during the war. Hackers present a similar, subversive danger. Attacks on critical infrastructure, including the use of hacking techniques to break into the power grid, may be a prelude to aggression, Singh said; but the hyperbole about gifted teenagers being able to shut down networks is pure fiction and imagination, designed to promote sales of cybersecurity services.
The Final Frontier
Similar to the Internet, space will redefine the concept of the front as the battlefield expands into new venues. The high seas are international territory, and as such, Germany's use of unrestricted submarine weaponry (torpedoes) during World War I, which led to the sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania and the loss of 159 U.S. citizens, was the "final straw" that forced the U.S. to enter the war in 1917. ". Singh said that during future wars, all nations will face the same problem of setting limits on war in space.
Singer, who is also a strategy expert at the New America Foundation, said, "A great deal of military and communications control is via a network of satellites in space, and all sides will either agree to leave it alone; or deal with it by obstructing or destroying communications nodes, the latter of which is more likely. So far, the U.S. has enjoyed unfettered access to space without interference from real state-level adversaries, but that won't last."
Unmanned Vehicles
The 2014 version of the movie "RoboCop" tells the story of the U.S. relying on an army of robots to conquer Iran, but Sam Brown, a former policy analyst at the Department of Defense, said that replacing soldiers and officers with drones on the march at all times "seems a bit far-fetched" for the foreseeable future.
While airplanes had already been used in World War I, it was during the German Blitzkrieg during World War II that they became more lethal when used in conjunction with soldiers and tanks. Brown predicts that as drones continue to be cheaper to develop, nations may design unmanned warships, underwater ships and ground vehicles. Brown said, "Because it's becoming easier technically, drones may be all over the air in war."
The advantages of drones include the ability to carry out first strikes by remote control without putting human pilots at risk, and eliminating the need for search and rescue if a drone is shot down. It also makes drone strikes less politically complicated than suicide bombers, Brown said, as evidenced by the Obama administration's expansion of unmanned strikes.
Before World War II, military leaders in some countries, including Britain, refused to replace their armored forces with newly designed tanks; some U.S. military leaders also refused to expand drone weapons, Singer said. But, Singh said, "Given the current situation and the evolution of technology, we need to start an unmanned systems unit in the Defense Department to study the uses of this technology in warfare."
Drugs
Nice, future officers and soldiers may actually have to struggle with drugs. Some U.S. officers and soldiers already do. Many veterans use their federal health care benefits to buy antidepressants for post-traumatic stress disorder, and record numbers of active-duty officers and soldiers are taking drugs in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military doctors in war zones prescribe antidepressants such as Prozac, anti-anxiety drugs such as clonazepam, or sleeping pills such as Ambien for war-weary officers and soldiers. Some of these officers and soldiers have completed multiple rotations and are under extreme psychological stress because the U.S. military has stretched its battle lines so far in two simultaneous decade-long wars.
During the Vietnam War, U.S. doctors sometimes prescribed amphetamines, in addition to painkillers, for officers and soldiers when they said they had tension problems, said Paul Keckley, director of the Center for Healthcare Research and Policy Analysis at the consulting firm Farnham. During World War II, Nazis prescribed the more volatile stimulant methamphetamine, also known as "crystal meth," to make soldiers more alert during attacks.
Keckley said it was easier for troops to be supplied with drugs in Iraq and Afghanistan than to wait for counselors whose supply exceeded demand, and that prescribing drugs as the default solution was also a problem in everyday life. Keckley said, "We use a one-size-fits-all approach to dosage when prescribing medication, and even though taking a small amount of medication won't hurt a person, counseling is more important than medication."
Keckley said the growing pharmaceutical industry may design more sedatives, stimulants and performance-enhancing drugs for soldiers, but the United States wants to be cautious about that, and prescribing drugs for soldiers could lead to lawsuits or congressional opposition.
Keckley said, "We should step on that red line with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), after all, they are very cautious." Keckley predicted that as mobile technology explodes, so will medical devices, including implantable devices that can read visual signals. And Gene Roddenberry, the creator of "Star Trek," predicted that future wars would be dominated by drugged soldiers.
Mobile devices and Silicon Valley
Many of the conveniences of the digital age could be used to make weapons in wartime. For example, the most primitive cell phones were originally used by the military. Now Silicon Valley is developing a range of wearable electronics to detect the wearer's surroundings, which, with a few modifications, could be great for soldiers.
Patrick Tucker, a former spokesman for the World Future Society, said helmets similar to Google Glass allow soldiers to connect to remote sensing cameras on drones, but the challenge in a war zone is having enough wireless signals to maintain that connection. "If there is a WiFi signal at a forward operating base (in Afghanistan), it could easily leave it exposed and thus vulnerable to attack," he said.
Tracking messages on Twitter has become a large-scale intelligence-gathering tool for governments to monitor conflict zones such as Ukraine, so it's likely that spying on the content of communications will continue to be used as a military strategy as well, Tucker said. Google has already been forced to cooperate with the National Security Agency's surveillance apparatus, but a morally damaging world war would be a true test of its "do no evil" motto.
With mobile devices growing by leaps and bounds, Silicon Valley companies are investing in ideas that could be the next big thing in technology. Tucker said alternative energy technologies might be very useful to the U.S. military, which is currently the largest consumer of the world's limited oil resources. Also, several Silicon Valley companies, including Google and Apple, are increasing their investments in robotics programs. In a two-month period earlier this year, eight of the 12 companies bought by Google, the search giant, built robots, according to media reports.
Silicon Valley, with its large number of defense contracts, could turn into an arsenal -- unless engineers are as opposed to war as the German Albert Einstein. After World War II, Einstein opposed the use of nuclear weapons created from his physics research because he feared they could cause more damage in future wars. Einstein said, "I do not know what weapons will be used in World War III, but I do know that sticks and stones will be used in World War IV."