After Covid-19, what is the future of conflict? Part 1

We fought two world wars in the 20^th Century in defence of liberal values in this country. Then, after 9/11, we fought a series of engagements that attempted to impose those same values in other people’s countries. Now, the handle is turning again and even that recent aberration appears a long time ago. A new strategic epoch seems to indicate that we no longer need to go looking for a fight. Conflict will come to us.

The front line is no longer a nameless hillside in Afghanistan but the firewalls inside the computer systems of the power grid or what masquerades as news on social media. The digital revolution and globalisation have, in combination, dramatically increased the vulnerability of Western societies to severe disruption. We no longer have to speculate what a rupture of the distribution systems of the major supermarkets would look like. The creation of a black market in loo rolls at the start of the pandemic was a darkly comic moment but showed just how quickly the normal conventions of an apparently ordered society can unravel. And that wasn’t even the result of a break in supply, but simply human frailty; what if the same systems were subject to a sophisticated and concerted cyber-attack?

Ever mindful that it might have to pick up the pieces, Lloyd’s Insurance conducted a recent study into the implications of a successful cyber-attack on 50 suppliers of the power grid covering the north east of America. It concluded that 93 million people would be without power immediately and for up to two weeks. During that time, and in the biting cold of a New York winter or the suffocating heat of a Washington summer, the immediate consequences of a blackout would be compounded by the secondary effects of opportunist crime and civil unrest, both of which would test the competence of government.

This is not an abstract, hypothetical threat — the massive attack against Estonia in 2007 and the 2017 NotPetya malware attack against a variety of Western companies reveal cyber operations as a weapon of choice in contemporary conflict. And it’s not just the bad guys who are at it. The Stuxnet attack on the Iranian nuclear programme set the standard for cyber intervention and seemed to leave a trail back to America and Israel.

At the same time, Russian attempts to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election by disinformation and fake news and even the faintly risible Iranian attempt to encourage Scottish separatism using the same methods during the 2014 referendum are a matter of public record. Cyber and information operations are being directed against this country on a daily basis in a form of conflict that is pervasive, insidious, ambivalent and rarely attributable. The attack on the Skripal family in Salisbury — breathtaking in both its audacity and incompetence — showed that chemical attack could also be part of contemporary conflict. What if, on the back of Covid-19, biological weapons became part of this sinister equation too?

Hittite texts written beyond 1000 BC speak of infiltrating people infected with deadly, communicable disease into rival communities in what is probably the first historical reference to biological warfare. The grotesque idea of using disease as an instrument in conflict has come and gone over the subsequent millennia and it was only in 1990 that Gruinard Island, off the west coast of Scotland, was declared safe after it had been used for experiments with weaponised anthrax in 1942. Today, an objective observer might see a Covid-19 death toll that will eventually run into millions, global economic dislocation and debt levels of individual nations that equate to multiples of GDP. These are conditions only normally associated with large scale conflict and is it entirely irrational for nation states, terrorist groups or even criminal organisations to ponder cause and effect?

In 2011, Dutch virologists working at the Erasmus Centre in Rotterdam caused a mutation of the H5N1 (bird flu) virus. Around the same time, research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was working on grafting the H5N1 spike gene on to H1N1 swine flu virus. The mortality rate of bird flu is higher than 50 per cent and an animated academic debate ensued about whether both pieces of research should be published or whether the risk of rogue scientists replicating the work was too great. In the event, the research was published in Science and Nature respectively and is now available in the public domain.

So, bad stuff is out there, but the problem has always been in weaponising it in a way that creates mass dissemination, as the failed attempts of the Aum Shinriyko millenialist cult to use anthrax in Tokyo in the 1990s illustrated. Unfortunately, advances in genetic engineering and delivery techniques mean this challenge becomes ever more soluble and a determined programme could probably overcome the technical hurdles. If it did, a biological weapon would have a number of advantages over other forms of anonymised attack: even miniscule quantities can be lethal; symptoms can have delayed onset; and, subsequent waves of infection can manifest beyond the original attack site. The effect would be pervasive, insidious, ambivalent and perhaps unattributable — exactly the fingerprints of contemporary conflict.

Let’s go one step further and explore the very boundaries of rational action. Is it inconceivable that a state actor — let’s call it China for the sake of argument — might contemplate a form of biological self-immolation? If it was confident in the ability of its large and compliant population to absorb an epidemic, its ubiquitous security and surveillance apparatus to impose control and with the advantage of foreknowledge, might it seek strategic advantage in creating a pandemic in the certain knowledge that strategic competitors would suffer far more?

It probably is inconceivable — but not in the conspiracy-obsessed social media echo chambers that pass for news reportage among the more fevered parts of the American alt-right community. And so this article turns full circle: a piece of thin analysis and opinion feeds a conspiracy debate and adds to the dead weight of fake news that bends our sense of reality. Or, alternatively stated, this is what future conflict might look like.

The implications are profound and beg questions such as: what is now the point of nuclear weapons; how do we deter these forms of attack; and is a defence doctrine built around expeditionary operations and platforms like the Queen Elizabeth class of aircraft carriers remotely relevant to the future?