How significant is the ‘digital’ in the wars of the 21st century?

How significant is the ‘digital’ in the wars of the 21st century?

In the 21st century, the world has undergone a great evolution towards digitalization in various aspects. Whether in medicine, industry or warfare, all of these areas have been affected by this digital revolution. Warfare in the 21st century has greatly evolved with the digitization of the world, particularly in different aspects such as industrialization. Moreover, since the 90s, new weapon creation processes and new weapons have been created, and communication and intelligence have also evolved with the digitization of the world. this has led to new dimensions and a strategic revolution in warfare. In this essay, we'll look at the importance of the "digital" in 21st-century warfare. We'll begin by setting the historical context for the digitization of warfare, exploring the development of the impact of digital technology from its inception, and demonstrating its significant impact on contemporary warfare. We then take a critical look at the issue, with a study by Thomas Rid and John Arquilas, followed by a case study of Russia's cyber-attack on Ukraine. Finally, we'll draw a conclusion to the question.

During the Second World War, German transmissions were coded by the Enigma machine and the Lorentz machine, and this was the beginning of the digital domain. At that time, it was used for information purposes. Today, in the 21st century, warfare has undergone a far more significant evolution with the development of digital technology throughout the world. New digital technologies and numerous transformations have given rise to new challenges and stakes in today's warfare.what once had no impact on warfare now form an important part of it.from traditional warfare to new digital operations, the nature of warfare has greatly changed.digital technologies and other evolutions have changed the way nations interact on the battlefield.New fields of application for the principles of warfare are emerging, and the implementation of these new technologies requires us to revise our approach to security, training and command. After outlining the evolution of digital warfare in its various aspects, we'll focus on a study by John Arquilla in the 1990s to set out some definitions. According to them, the latter applies primarily to ideological and societal conflicts, mobilizing activists and asymmetrical civilian actors, and taking advantage of the capabilities offered by new communication modes to organize struggle and resistance. Today, "netwar" would encompass the operations of hacker-activists such as Anonymous, and cyberactivists acting in times of peace or conflict. Cyberwar, on the other hand, is first and foremost military, and refers to the preparation and conduct of military operations in the information domain, and thus consists in the disruption or destruction of information and communication systems. Here, communication refers to technological systems themselves. Definitions of cyberwarfare formulated in recent years rarely explicitly introduce the notion of communication, focusing instead on other objects or adopting other perspectives. Cyberwar is thus defined as a conflict, but we will take a critical look at this information. Digital developments have, however, introduced a new category of warfare: as an extension of conventional warfare (whose rules and aims it adopts); as a declination of information warfare. For example, in 2020, Turkish and Israeli drones played a decisive role in Azerbaijan's victory over Armenia in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Or two years before the outbreak of war, Ukraine created a "Ministry of Digital Transformation". A few days after the invasion, Kiev had already transferred all its critical data to the Cloud. Even if Russian missiles had destroyed all its places of power, Ukraine would still have been able to "function". Thanks to their inventiveness, the Ukrainians were able to transform drones, sold cheaply on the open market, into formidable weapons of destruction and observation. In this way, Kiev compensated for its numerical inferiority with a qualitative superiority based on human and technological creativity. But is this impact visible in contemporary warfare?

In this second part we begin to answer the question of the trial with the help of studies by Thomas Rid and John Arquilas on the impact of digital technology on warfare in the 21st century. First, cyberspace is an interconnected digital environment. It is a type of virtual world made popular by the rise of the Internet, and there are several possible modes of action in cyberspace. We now speak of cyberweapons. Some countries, such as the United States, are developing a veritable arsenal in partnership with manufacturers such as General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin. The aim of this collaboration is to build cyberweapons to defend the Department of Defense's networks and attack other networks around the world I There is currently no internationally recognized definition of a cyberweapon. However, the following definition by Thomas Rid and Peter McBurney is worth noting: "a cyberweapon is seen as a subset of weapons and more generally: computer code that is used, or designed to be used, with the aim of threatening or causing physical, functional or psychological damage to living structures, systems or organisms. In October 2011, Thomas Rid published "Cyber War Will Not Take Place?", a widely commented article whose central thesis is that no cyber war has occurred to date and that it is highly unlikely to do so in the future. For him, cyber action can only be the continuation of traditional modes of action using modern means. It is true that no cyber war has yet resulted in casualties - in the sense of the traditional definition of war - but this does not mean that we can ignore its impact. There is, however, a form of cyber warfare in the form of cyber actions and computer attacks. All recent conflicts have seen the use of cyber weapons (Afghanistan, Georgia, Libya, etc.). The term cyber war therefore refers to a concrete reality, which it seems natural to approach from a military angle. In his article published on the website of the British magazine New Scientist Rid explains that a computer attack requires three parameters to qualify as an act of war: it must be violent, instrumental, and political. However, no cyber-attack has ever met these three criteria, and very few even manage to meet a single one: "If we are talking about war, real war and not a metaphor such as 'the war on drugs', then cyber war has never taken place, is not under way, and seems unlikely in the future". Rid explains that cyber attacks can be divided into three distinct categories. Sabotage, which mainly targets industrial control systems in sensitive areas, is much more difficult to carry out than is often assumed; espionage, which recent events have shown can take on unprecedented proportions thanks to the Internet; and finally subversion, which consists of "using social networks and other Internet services to undermine an established authority". And finally subversion, which consists of "using social networks and other Internet services to undermine an established authority".That said, these types of attack, although different from traditional warfare, do have a major impact, particularly in the case of espionage.In wartime, espionage is a major asset in the conduct of a war.In our arguments, we will also emphasise the limits of this impact. And while the concept of 'cyber war' is not borne out by the facts, Rid goes further and explains that it is misleading, confuses the debate, is disrespectful of those who risk their lives on the front line and can even be used to justify tighter control of the Internet. In their seminal article of 193, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt describe the decisive advantage that informational mastery arising from the digital revolution would provide in future conflicts. In "Cyber war is Already Upon Us", John Arquilla argues that "cyber war has arrived" and that we need to focus on what can be done to control it. Arquilla argues that "cyber war is already upon us" and that we need to focus on what can be done to control it (Arquilla 4). Arquilla gives examples of cyberattacks that he considers to be cases of cyberwar to argue his point. To be considered an act of war, an attack must be potentially violent, intentional and political (Lecture 20, slide 5). Many of the attacks Arquilla refers to were intentional and political, making them comparable to specific battles within a war. However, they should not be classified as wars in their own right because, traditionally, war is defined as a period of continuous conflict and not as a specific attack.

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