Modern Warfare

Remembrance Day got me thinking. This day always seems especially poignant for me because it marks the end of the war where, apart from the tragic loss of life, everything related to warfare changed. For the first time war involved large scale mechanisation. There had been the beginnings of this back in the smaller wars of the later part of the nineteenth century but the Great War (as it was known at the time but which we now know as World War One) was when machine guns had been refined to be even greater mass killing weapons, tanks were first used, enormous ships brought soldiers in huge numbers in from all over the world to the battle fields of Europe and the Middle East, trains were used extensively for transport with temporary lines being laid and taken up and aerial warfare began. As well there was the first large scale chemical warfare with the use of gases such as chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas as weapons. It was a long way from poisoning water sources or tossing contaminated items at the enemy to infect them with disease. While it's now forbidden under the bizarrely named Rules of War quite recently the president of Syria used gas against his own people in the on-going civil war in that country and I'd be very surprised that this would be the last time.

This war was when modern warfare really changed. Although war had always been horrific in the numbers of dead and injured and disrupted lives caused by actual fighting as well as all the other problems which civilian populations endure - looting, destruction of crops and homes leading to mass starvation and murder and rape by rampaging troops full of blood lust to name only a few - the distancing that mechanisation provides makes it even easier to lose sight of the actual people involved. I'm not saying there aren't times when we have to fight to defend ourselves - obviously that can and does happen - but there's been a great change in the way we fight wars. It's no longer men armed with a spear or a sword face to face or even canon fire and arrows where there are limits to how far they can reach. Mechanisation has changed that and now we have drone strikes and autonomous weapons that put war at an even greater distance from those waging it. Even worse are the rockets which can travel half way around the globe carrying hugely destructive weapons that can wipe out entire cities. 

I grew up during the Cold War where even in as isolated part of the world as Western Australia we lived in fear of nuclear war. That these weapons and the technology to make them still exist is scary because while they do they may fall into the hands of despotic leaders or other extremists. When they're combined with weapons that are autonomous it's a frightening prospect for the future. Artificial intelligence is only as good as its programming and I for one am not convinced that we are as good at doing that as we like to think we are.