Articles about War

Conflict, like everything else these days, is now shaped by technology. The old model -- industrial-scale production, multi-decade procurement cycles, and the primacy of sheer manpower -- is fading. In its place something faster, leaner and more precise is emerging. Small teams with energy, ambition and good ideas now do in months what legacy contractors once did in years. In Ukraine, for example, drones built by startups and programmed by engineers barely out of university, are destroying tanks worth millions of dollars. The battlefield is changing. And with it, so is the balance of power.

A modern conflict, then, is not won by the biggest army. It’s won by those who can see first, move first, and strike first. This is the reality that some countries in some regions have been slow to grasp. I am a German citizen with friends in the force who have witnessed this first-hand. Their systems are bureaucratic, their procurement cycles sluggish. In a world where technology evolves in real time, they cannot keep pace. And after decades of peace, they haven’t felt motivated to do so.

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The war in Ukraine has highlighted the role that the cyber world has to play in modern conflict and a new survey from NordVPN finds that 93 percent of Americans believe that another country could launch cyberwarfare against the US.

What's more, of over 1,000 consumers surveyed only 19 percent feel 100 percent confident in the government's ability to protect them, despite the fact that 70 percent rank the US as the most secure country for cyber war attacks.

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President Zelenskyy of Ukraine is begging NATO for a no-fly zone they can’t risk providing. So I came up with another solution -- $10 laser pointers. 

Buy 100,000 laser pointers and give them to Ukrainian mothers (not kids -- too dangerous). Even the puniest lockable laser pointer (notice the keys?) can temporarily blind a pilot at a distance of more than a mile, so what will 100 non-puny laser pointers do to the same aircraft? It would not only create an effective no-fly zone, it might kill hundreds of Russian pilots before they figure it out.

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Gary Kasparov, the famous Russian chess player wrote a book in 2015 titled "Winter is Coming" which chronicled the collapse of the Soviet Union, charted the rise of Putin, and painfully captured the many missed opportunities of the West to contain Putin. The book also laid out historical reasons that Putin invaded Ukraine in a chilling fashion. Now that "Winter is Here," Putin initiated a ground war that might evolve to other geographies and realms, including information operations and cyber.

The prospect of a full-blown Cyber war -- once remote -- seems more likely if the Russian invasion of the Ukraine escalates and spills out of Eastern Europe and enters the highly-connected world in which we live. How bad can it be? No one fully knows, but cybersecurity professionals are no strangers to Russian cyber-attacks.

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought immediate condemnation from other countries, and while they won’t be sending in troops to help the Ukrainian fight-back, the barrage of sanctions coming from all angles is certainly going to hit Russia hard.

We’ve been seeing companies and organizations doing their bit to put the pressure on Putin's Russia too -- hacktivist collective Anonymous has certainly been hard at work here -- and today, Twitter has announced it will increase its fight against misinformation coming from Russian media organizations.

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