Asia Today

“We need a new concept of security due to technological change and climate change”

May 10, 2016

Emanuel Pastreich

Technology is evolving at an unprecedented rate. Even though Moore’s Law, the rule-of-thumb that computer chips double in power every two years, is drawing to a close, computers will continue to rapidly transform our world. These transformations have a profound impact on the security of nations, even though they are not well understood.
As we look towards the future, we risk spending tremendous amounts of our precious resources preparing for wars that will never happen and miss out on the chance to prepare for life and death challenges which are almost a certainty. The technology-fueled changes in the nature of national security mean that we can take our eyes off the past and re-focus our attention on real threats. – even the ones that don’t match up with our assumptions.
There are two major issues that need to be discussed openly and cooperatively between the Republic of Korea, Japan, the People’s Republic of China and the United States.
First we must consider whether technological change will render many weapons systems inappropriate in the years to come and ask ourselves whether a more profound rethinking of military issues is required, perhaps one that moves beyond the traditional nation-state assumptions we have used so far.
Second, we must consider whether we must limit the development of weapons systems, and rather turn increasingly to rigidly enforced weapons limitation treaties for fundamental ethical reasons because of the increasingly destructive potential of the next generation of weapons. We need to ask ourselves whether we will even have the budgets to pay for conventional weapons over the next twenty years in light of the tremendous costs of adaption to, and mitigation of, climate change. Could it be that we must reach binding agreements to limit, or ban, weapons so that we can effectively devote our precious resources to the basic steps required for human survival?

How technology is changing the nature of security
Will the nature of military conflict be so transformed by emerging technologies that most of our weapons systems will cease to play a meaningful role in the near future? We can’t assume that our conflicts will end or that deterrence is unnecessary. As technologies that can kill tens of thousands become cheaper and more accessible to small groups, even to individuals, we should certainly continue to think about how we will respond.
However, it is not clear that the battles of the future will be between nation states per se, which are rapidly fragmenting. Nor is it at all clear that the weapons we employed in previous conflicts will be helpful in such conflicts.
Three of the most important transformations are: 1) the emergence of drones and robots; 2) the sophistication of cyber warfare and 3) the emergence of 3D printing and other means of transmitting objects through non-conventional means.
The conventional military is made up of tanks, fighter planes, missiles and battleships and aircraft carriers, all of which are extremely expensive and vulnerable to these new weapons.

Read more