Weaponization of Everything is the logical extension of Internet of Everything
The Art of War got updated
By now, everybody knows about the Mossad’s execution (literally) of Lebanese militia using pagers killing at least 40 people injuring thousands. The main targeted operatives was the head of Hezbollah’s signals unit - which runs the group’s communications systems within the Radwan forces. It is an illustration of how innocent things can be turned into weapons. One ABC report describes the plan to be fifteen years in the making.
State versus Non-state Players
It can come from the nonstate actors as Audrey Cronin, a tech security expert from Carnegie Mellon documents extensively in her book - Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow's Terrorists.
Such powers are already in the hands of ISIS and other non-state actors. It does not take a great leap to see how *state* actors can use this with the full backing of the state. The only saving grace there is that the enemy states would not look kindly on it. In particular, if we consider three or four powers in the world a decade from now (USA, Russia, China and India), one state provoking another through such means should expect a full blooded response. Unfortunately, unlike nuclear detente that has probably led to nonuse of even tactical nuclear weapons since 1945, the equilibrium will be much more unstable since a small group of rogue actors within a state disrupt the status quo.
Imagine a situation where a group of undesirables have taken over an area either domestically or somewhere else. Can a particular country do something about it? We know that quiet developments are on the way using micro-bot technology to swarm an area. Swarms of bots of all sizes will emerge from above (dropped by drones), from below (moving through underground sewers) and at ground level, moving under trucks: the first wave disables all weaponry and communications, releasing nonlethal gases to knock out people in the building; seconds later, the second wave of large bots surround all members of the terror network with a mix of lethal and nonlethal weapons. There would be simultaneous interventions on social media and all networked devices explaining to civilians in the area about what is happening and what to do to stay alive.
This is not science fiction. Such plans are already afoot in the military basement of Washington and Beijing (and perhaps in Moscow and Delhi).
The PLA and Sun Tzu
In 1999, two senior People’s Liberation Army colonels wrote a book called the “Unrestricted Warfare.”
It sets out to examine the emergence of the ‘network society’. They document geopolitical events pointing to a new type of international conflict and warfare such as the Asian financial crisis of 1997 (and there is a great deal of interest in economic war throughout the book) and new terrorist movements that were exploring the possibilities for networked destruction (‘semi-warfare, quasi- warfare and sub warfare’).
When I read the book, it struck me as an updated version of Sun Tzu's The Art of War for the digital age. They note that astonishing technological development would obliterate the distinction between war and non-war along with weapon and non-weapon.
Science fiction that became real in Lebanon
But the events in Lebanon reminded me of a Bengali story by Premendra Mitra (entitled Ghodi - the Watch). His main character (Ghonada) explains a tsunami of September 17, 1937 (he was off by two weeks - the real tidal wave came on the 2nd of the month that practically destroyed Hong Kong). It was a diabolical plot by Japan who managed to miniaturize cheap copies of Swiss watches that packed tiny but deadly explosives that would detonate at a predetermined time to destroy factories - the means of production. Ghonada accidentally discovers the plot, manages to gather all the watches, drops them in an ocean that caused the tidal wave.