Near peers and unknown unknowns

I read something this week that left me with a momentary chill. In an advertising piece for vertical lift solutions (AKA helicopters) from the defense contractor BAE Systems, the very first sentence began, “As the U.S. Army continues the pivot from the global war on terror to the near-peer nation-state fight….” The content then goes on to tout the company’s products and how they can be utilized in a “new” battle environment, etc. Aside from that opening statement, it was just a sales pitch for helicopters, but I found myself re-reading that first line.

My first takeaway from that sentence is that we aren’t just dealing with third-world insurgencies anymore. We now find ourselves in direct conflict with enemies who have the capacity to strike back at us using conventional means equivalent to our own. That’s a threat that we have always prepared for, but we are now closer to direct conflict than in decades. Seeing as much in print, from an authoritative source, made it a bit more real for me.

The other thing that stood out about the introduction was that they used the term “war” in the context of our third-world, anti-terrorism efforts, but characterized conflict with our “near-peer” nations, China and Russia, as a “fight.” It would seem that even our military-industrial complex is hesitant to use the word “war” with regard to those near-peer powers, yet as I read the ad, the Sunday morning talking heads were discussing strategies to prevent World War Three. Others argued that World War Three had already begun.

As I process all of this, it occurs to me that I’m not entirely sure what a war is anymore, or exactly where it begins. When I was a kid, I was taught that it was incorrect to call the then-current conflict in Vietnam a “War” because it was never declared as such by Congress. We can easily get into the weeds discussing the War Powers Act and the Gulf of Tonkin incident, but like the Korean conflict before it and numerous entanglements since, the formal declaration of war hasn’t gotten in the way of our bombing and shooting at people for quite some time.

Whatever we call it, it’s not just bombing, shelling and shooting anymore. In addition to the known horrors of biological and nuclear warfare, we have alternative means that can result in similar catastrophic destruction and carnage, or if we prefer, as a limited response.

Economic Warfare, in the form of banking and trade sanctions, is very much in the news these days, but economic interdependencies between allied and enemy countries limit the full-throated implementation of those tactics. The embargo of a country’s fuel supply can not only interfere with an enemy’s ability to wage war (as was the case in World War II) but can cripple an economy and cause dissent among civilians. Folks my age can recall a time when the United States was on the business end of an OPEC embargo in 1973. It was hard on us as consumers, but even harder on distribution channels and the economy.

Cyberwarfare is one of the newer tools in the world’s arsenal. It first made headlines with the “Stuxnet” attack on centrifuges used in the Iranian nuclear weapons program in 2010, but cyber warfare strategies have been in limited use since the 1990s. The possibilities of cyber are only limited by the imagination, but disruption of communications, sabotage of weapons, economic disruption and the take-down of a power grid are all on the menu. Electrical grids, in particular, are attractive targets because we are all so completely dependent on them for our daily existence.

There is one particularly obscure means of waging war at our disposal that is a favorite among conspiracy theorists but is firmly rooted in history. Back in 1971, when Daniel Elsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, the public was aghast to learn the lengths to which the Pentagon misled the public and Congress about progress in the Vietnam conflict. That was the primary scandal, but the leaked document was a 47 volume, 7,000-page study and included a few other gems that didn’t immediately make headlines.

One of those ancillary stories was the exposure of “Operation Popeye.” I won’t pretend to know how the Pentagon arrives at such names, but the highly classified program, carried out by both our Air Force and the CIA, employed cloud seeding in an effort to extend the monsoon season along the Ho Chi Minh trail. The goal was to create enough rain, mud and landslides to disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines and, by several accounts, it was successful.

We have since signed on to the “International Modification Convention,” a multinational treaty that prohibits the use of weather modification as a weapon of war, but research has continued, for defensive, if not offensive uses and, treaties notwithstanding, remain a potential tool of war.

Those and other non-conventional means of war are available to us, but the one, largely unknown factor in my mind is this: Sputnik first orbited the earth in 1957. That was 65 years ago. In 1962, John Glen orbited the earth three times. That was 60 years ago. We landed on the moon in 1969, almost 53 years ago.

Looking back a bit further, the Wright brothers are generally credited with the first flight in December of 1903, and by 1914, those newly invented “airplanes" were being fitted with machine guns and used in the battle over Europe. It only took us eleven years to go from Wilbur and Orville to Snoopy and the Red Baron. Do you ever wonder what we have been doing up to in space for the past 65 years?

Since the public roll-out of the other-worldly stealth B-2 and F-117 in the late 1980s, and more importantly, the revelation that we had been using them for years without public knowledge, I have been hesitant to underestimate the ingenuity of our military. Down here on earth, we know that our ships, submarines and occasionally aircraft are known to play games of cat and mouse with our adversaries, probing their defenses and measuring their response. I can only assume that similar scenarios are played out in space.

We also have reason to believe that seemingly “private” hacking and propaganda efforts directed at the U.S. are, indeed, state-sponsored, so when does minor harassment become war? Our two-time Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld once said, “There are known knowns, things we know that we know; and there are known unknowns, things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns, things we do not know we don’t know.” As I look at the broad scope of possible actions ranging from conventional warfare to hacking, disinformation, and the occasional cloud seeding, I find myself right there with Don. I’m sensing a lot of unknown unknowns.