What could the future of wars look like? Sarah talks with peacekeeping consultant Janie DesJardin and researcher Leo Michel about the laws of war and the concept of hybrid warfare.
What could the future of wars look like? Sarah talks with peacekeeping consultant Janie DesJardin and researcher Leo Michel about the laws of war and the concept of hybrid warfare.
Sources Consulted:
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Sarah Jones Breaks It Down: A Kids News Podcast
S1 EP05, War Part 4: Hybrid Warfare
[INTRODUCTION]
Sarah: This is Sarah Jones Breaks It Down. I’m Sarah, and I’m here to help us better understand what’s happening in the world.
Why?
Because, as a journalist, that’s my job.
And this world isn’t just filled with adults…
Kid: Nope!
Sarah: It’s our world.
So, every week we’ll talk about the stories that you may overhear some adults talking about and we’ll…
Group of Kids: Break it down.
Sarah: Break. It. Down.
[TOPLINE]
Sarah: Alright, hybrid warfare, Let’s get into it.
It’s a term used frequently when discussing military strategy and it encompasses all aspects of how wars are fought presently.
They’re not just fought with guns, bombs, and drones.
There’s disinformation or what I call “propaganda in the digital age”. There are cyber attacks.
There are all these different points of access or entry for adversaries to use. And as technology advances. So does the way the world fights wars.
[BREAKDOWN]
Sarah: That might have just sounded like a bunch of random jargany words. So here to break down what wars look like now, and what they might look like in our life time is Leo Michel.
Leo: During Vietnam, I worked as a staff member for a member of Congress. I worked as a journalist, mainly for French media. I worked at the CIA in the early 1980s. And then, um, basically from the early nineties, mid 1980s to 2015, I worked for the Pentagon
Sarah: So we talked about what wars are in our first episode.
You know about civil wars, which are fought within a country.
And you know, wars are not just fought between countries. They can be between groups of people with arms.
Leo: Technology, also now, can enable relatively small groups who don't have a country, or don't even have territory can use technology, to damage in very important ways in sometimes very large countries.
So in 2007, Russia did what was until then unprecedented. They began to attack the cyber network of Estonia…that interrupted banking services. It interrupted some transportation and that potentially could have gotten even worse. That was 15 years ago.
We are all very dependent on cyber now. And American officials have testified not long ago, in the past year or so, they told members of Congress that Russia and perhaps other countries can manipulate the internet and how they get into it to do some really bad things. For example, try to shut down a plant that produces electricity, to interrupt financial services.
Sarah: You’ve likely heard the word Disinformation or heard people talk about how not everything you see on social media is true.
This has always been a tactic in war. It’s called propaganda.
But propaganda in the digital age can reach a ton of people around the world in a short amount of time.
Just think of how fast information goes viral. Disinformation campaigns are part of hybrid warfare.
And Janie says she saw it happening while she was working with aid agencies in Ukraine.
Janie: There are rules to be followed by all parties.
And the International Committee of the Red Cross? They are the guardians.
They are the one who are tasked by the UNHQ to go to meet both parties and say, “Okay, listen. When you fight, you cannot commit a war crime. And war crime? They give them the definition. And they tell them, “If you take prisoners of war, you need to provide with a specific treatment to a prisoner of war. You need to provide them water.
You need to provide them food. You need to provide them medical treatment. You need to provide them the same support that you provide to the military.”
So at the beginning of the conflict, ICRC did their task to meet the Russian and to explain them that.
But people were taking the picture of the International Committee of the Red Cross shaking hands with the Russian and they say, “Look! Watch! They are supporting the Russians.”
Yeah. So they used the image to discredit the International Committee of the Red Cross. And then after that, when they get into Ukraine, people were saying, “Don't come here. We don’t want you because you support the Russians.
Sarah: Um, so it's most likely the Russians that kind of put out that narrative so that the Ukrainian people would be less receptive to?
Janie: We don't always know. We don't always… if it's derision, that can be any group who won the conflict to continents.
Sarah: Janie said something interesting a moment ago. Did you hear when she referred to the international rules?
There are rules in war of what’s legal or illegal. But international lawyer Benjamin Duerr says that doesn’t always stop people from breaking the rules.
Benjamin: Yeah, exactly.
The laws are sometimes violated. It doesn't mean that they're not important. You can’t compare it to two laws in, in, in our countries where there also have been... I mean, cases of murder or theft or robbery. These kind of things happen in, in, around the world and the same applies to the laws of war.
Sarah: So we currently have laws about what weapons can be used in war, how prisoners should be treated, and many other aspects of war, but these were decided upon before technology evolved to what it is today.
So do we have laws about when a cyberattack is an act of war? Or if there was supply chain manipulation that caused major economic problems? Or disinformation campaigns that caused massive riots?
Do we have rules in America or even internationally about when these are acts of war?
Leo: Not yet, not yet.
Some countries have tried and they're discussing this from time to time at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
They're trying to think of how they can come up with, and it may not be an international law, but something, some kind of convention, which a convention simply means that people agree to do things, but there may not be any way of enforcing it. Or perhaps some kind of a treaty that would be strong enough that if a country violates that treaty, there would be some kind of a sanction. A sanction as a punishment.
But, and I’m not an expert on it, but there are a couple of big issues that people haven't found the solution to.
So, if I wanted to do something bad to your country using cyber, using the internet, there are lots of ways that I could disguise myself so that it would be very hard for you to find that it's me, Leo, sitting at this computer who is attacking your, say your electrical system, uh, or, um, your water system so that you can't purify water or something like that.
Because if I was really an expert here, I could manipulate my computer to control somebody else's computer that might be, for example, in Canada or in Mexico.
And here we're just talking about countries.
The problem is that, as I said, technology now can be accessible to small groups of people.
They send you a message and say, “You can't use your computer unless you pay me $5,000, or for a big company, maybe $5 million. And, by the way, you better not say anything. Because if you go out and publicize the fact that you’ve been attacked and you gave away that I've asked you for $5 million, I will take all of your data and you'll never get your data. So if you’re a big bank, you can’t operate.
Sarah: Whether it’s disinformation, cyber attacks, guns or explosives, how do these groups get funding or access to weapons?
Sometimes they get weapons from countries that support them and want the group they’ve armed to rule.
Sometimes the countries or people providing the weapons want to make the country where the fighting is taking place weaker, or an ally of that country weaker. The latter is called a “proxy war”.
Proxy wars are all about strategy. And it’s usually a super power country that is using smaller countries or armed groups within a country to indirectly engage in a conflict with another super power by trying to influence the outcome of that war strategically.
Remember when I said it was all about strategy?
For example, in Syria, the president of Syria was receiving support from Russia.
America and its allies didn’t want President Assad or Russia to win, so they supported the group that was countering Russia.
Russia didn't want America and its allies to win, so it was supporting President Assad.
Some other examples of proxy wars include: Libya and Afghanistan.
There’s also a well known saying you might have heard before: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But personally, when it comes to geopolitics, I think it’s important to remember: countries don’t really have friends. They have allies and these alliances are based on shared interests or common goals.
Sarah: War is definitely ugly. But it’s important to know they almost always come to a pause or an end.
And the goal, at that point, becomes peace-building.
Janie: They include all parts of the society for the men, the women, and all type of population.
How they want to rebuild their society after.
So now this is how they do the peacekeeping. They include all part of the society because they discovered that if they just take the people fight, you don't have a solution that will last five or 10 years after the contact with them.
Sarah: How important are um, children to maintaining peace in the future?
Janie: Kids are crucial for regarding a country because they are the society of tomorrow.
[UNDER-REPORTED]
Sarah: So now you know a little bit more about hybrid warfare
But information is for everyone, and everyone matters…
Group of Kids: Everyone matters.
Sarah: So let’s talk about something that’s going on in the world that isn’t getting as much attention but should be.
Central Asia is a part of the world that rarely gets covered by most international news networks. And that’s not right, but it does happen.
The term journalists use for stories or parts of the world that aren’t often covered is “under reported”
Kazakhstan, it’s a central Asian country and it used to be a part of the Soviet Union.
Remember that’s what Russia used to be called when it was a lot bigger. The Soviet Union.
Well, the head of its foreign ministry Mukhtar Tleuberdi is calling for the entire world to give up nuclear weapons by 2045.
He says the war in Ukraine and I quote “and mutual threats…make us think about collective vulnerability of humanity and urgent need to ban such weapons.”
Kazakistan’s president also refused to recognize the eastern parts of Ukraine, which is where Russia has been attacking, as independent of Ukraine.
It’s not the first time the Kazakh president has done this, but this time he was in St Petersburg Russia and President Putin was in the audience. This makes Kazakhstan a place to watch and Russian and Kazakh relations one to pay attention to.
Also on a separate note you may have heard some talk about Finland and Sweden joining NATO. This is an issue Leo is extremely familiar with.
Leo: Finland has a long border, over 800 miles, with Russia, and the Soviet Union invaded Finland in 1939. They had a terrible war over the winter. Finland lost about 10 or 15% of the territory, the Eastern part of its territory to the Soviet Union. They took it over.
But unlike other countries that the Soviet Union invaded during the course of World War II, the Fins were never occupied.
So they… They weren't technically neutral, but they weren't part of any group like NATO.
They wanted to maintain friendly relations with Russia and the Soviet Union.
At the end of the Cold War, Finland and Sweden joined. If you remember, I mentioned the European union, they joined this European union and, uh, which was a big move for them.
And then they wanted to work with NATO. They wanted it to work with this defense organization, but they didn't want to become members.
Why did they want to work with them? It’s because NATO did peacekeeping missions. So the Finns and the Swedes wanted to dissipate in a peacekeeping mission.
They also have in the back of their mind that someday Russia might become a fit that they didn't want to join for many years because they thought that Russia would see this as a provocation, a reason to get angry.
All of this has changed very quickly because of what happened in Ukraine.
Before the Russians actually invaded Ukraine, they published the demands. One of the demands that they had was that NATO could no longer ever expand, meaning it could never have any new members.
But they were in fact telling Finland and Sweden, “We don't care what you want. We don’t care what you might want in the future. We, Russia are telling you that option is off the table.”
So that got the attention of the Fins and Swedes. And then they saw what happened with Ukraine, where the Russians said, “Oh, we're not going to invade. We're just having military exercises. We don't like Ukrainians, but, we're not going to invade.”
And what do they do? And they've killed thousands of soldiers and they've killed tens of thousands of civilians. And everyone sees this.
This is a lie that Putin has. You may be able to control information inside of Russia, but outside of Russia, we see what's happening. We see the pictures coming from Ukraine, and that was a wake up call for the Fins and Swedes.
[CLOSING]
Sarah: Thank you for listening and for breaking it down with me today.
If you have a question about war or central Asia, or if there’s something else going on in the world that you want us to break down, write to us or record a message and email us at listen@akidsco.com.
Sarah Jones Breaks It Down is written and reported by me, Sarah Jones. You can learn more about me and my work at sarahjonesreports.com.
Our show is edited and produced by Matthew Winner with help from Chad Michael Snavely and the team at Sound On Studios. Our executive producer is Jelani Memory. And this show was brought to you by A Kids Podcast About.
Follow the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever podcasts are found and check out other podcasts made for kids just like you by visiting akidsco.com.
Thank you for hanging out with me and stay curious!