The Future of War | Answers With Joe

exactly how violent is the world right now you know we tend to think that things are always getting worse that there's more conflicts that there's more partisan divide and whatnot we definitely feel that in the world right now so it's easy to assume that there's more conflicts than ever before but is that the case i'm talking in terms of actual warfare like like actual countries declaring war against each other like are there any of those going on right now in the world actually yeah there's there's a lot of them you might not hear much about them in the american media but there are about 40 ongoing conflicts going on in the world right now according to wikipedia which has never been wrong and has never gotten me in trouble with ukraine although the definition of wars and conflicts does get a little bit muddy for example they include the mexican drug war which while not between two different countries obviously it was the bloodiest conflict in 2020 but how does that compare to the past there's some charts from real world and data that paint an interesting picture there first of all stepping way back all the way to 1500 you can see the global conflicts among great powers is at an all-time low the years of kingdoms fighting against great nations is over and since world war ii the trend is generally down but this is in wars between countries the number of civil conflicts on the other hand conflicts between forces fighting for control of a country has risen meaning the trend is toward a lot more conflicts that are less deadly so yay actually i can't help but wonder if all these destabilizing countries might have something to do with this new communication technology that's emerged over the last 20 years just saying i mean even if the internet can't directly be blamed for these conflicts it's definitely become a battleground for these conflicts the world is changing as we all know and the nature of war is changing along with it but where's it going we used to imagine the future of warfare as giant superpowers threatening each other with nuclear weapons for total annihilation but it's starting to look like something else entirely somewhat ironically just as i began writing this video about the future of war the united states pulled out of afghanistan after 20 years of occupation there's plenty of heated opinions on this and plenty of blame to go around i won't contribute to that in this video but i think we can all agree it did not go well in fact i don't really want to talk in specifics about it because by the time this video comes out i'm sure anything that i say will be wrong what i can say is that this is not the first time this has happened in fact the united states can add its name to a very long list of empires including the soviet union great britain the sikhs the mughals timor the mongols under genghis khan the rashidun caliphate the greeks under alexander the great and the persians who invaded afghanistan and tried to hold it and failed miserably yeah it's not called the graveyard of empires for nothing there have been a ton of videos about why afghanistan is impossible to hold but it mostly comes down to geography you know it's a landlocked country that's surrounded by mountains that are easy to hide out in plus the the mountain passes are narrow and kind of create kill zones that make it almost impossible to move through still considering today's technology and satellite imagery and everything you think we'd do a better job of rooting these people out than say you know alexander the great but uh apparently not so as i look at the upcoming technologies that are going to define warfare in the coming years it's good to keep in mind that some things about war are probably never going to change also i do want to acknowledge that i just took a very complex situation and reduced it down to a very simple point we're going to be picking apart what happened over the last 20 years for a very long time to come but some things about war are changing and drastically and one of those is the newest battleground for warfare that i started talking about a minute ago the internet cyber attacks have been around for a lot longer than you think the first worm was created by bob thomas in 1971. a worm is a kind of malicious software that replicates itself and uses the computer to spread it to other computers usually with the intention to get access to data and hacking over the years has changed from individual hackers to groups and clusters of hackers that were perfectly replicated in hollywood movies to today where entire nation states are devoting billions of dollars to build hacker farms launching endless attacks to access sensitive systems of foreign adversaries and even into allies one notable example is the russian solar wind cyber attack a quick recap is that the parent company orion had malicious software inserted into their solar winds project without their knowledge and the hackers did this via the update server so every time a update was triggered it would just spread that malicious software to all the users clever and a recent cyber attack was carried out by the chinese government using security flaws in microsoft software the chinese government denied this accusation but they were quick to point out that the u.s had the prism program which was highlighted by edward snowden so one misconception about cyber warfare or at least one that i had so i assume some of you might have had it is that it's just about accessing information um which is obviously bad but that's more that's more intangible it's not as concrete as you know blowing people up with explosions except the cyber attack in iran did exactly that in april of this year an explosion at the natanz uranium enrichment site russia available doing it almost as a sort of psychological warfare according to reporter david east saying her malicious code has been found in many power stations across the u.s the code doesn't really do anything but it does send a signal according to saying our quote they've put code into our electric power grid as a reminder that at any time they wanted they could begin starting blackouts in the united states i mean just a few months back the colonial pipeline hack disrupted our fuel infrastructure and led to gas shortages all along the east coast i mean that's another way to kneecap a country with cyber warfare i mean and on top of that the absolute deluge of internet social media bots and fake pages and misinformation campaigns run from thousands of click bait and and content farms all around the world designed to sow discord in populations of other countries i mean why spend the money and the time and the resources and the effort to physically invade a country when you can just manipulate the populace to make them tear themselves apart i mean if you want to topple the world power but you don't have the resources to do so that's the smart move you'll sneak in through the back door i'm just saying that's the kind of thing that say a former kgb agent would think of or anybody who doesn't have the high ground and is smarter than this guy and we're probably just seeing the beginning of this you know we've been hearing about cyber warfare for a really long time but now for the first time we're really seeing it have real world consequences when when you can't fill up your car with gas because of a cyber attack that makes it pretty real so yeah at the risk of sounding like joe stradamus i do think we're gonna be seeing a lot more of that in the coming years so as annoying as two-factor authentication is i think that's something we're all just gonna have to get used to so let's talk about drones now military drones have been a part of warfare for quite a while now especially in afghanistan and the middle east but we're far past the point where we're just blown away by the fact that some pilot in indiana could fly a real-time mission on the other side of the world drones have come a long way in a very short time for example now you don't need a pilot at all they can just be piloted by ai the obvious advantage of drones is that you don't risk the life of a pilot or risk them being captured and if you know if it's a high-tech drone and there's very sensitive equipment on it it can always just blow itself up to prevent it from falling into the hands of the enemy but they can also maneuver in ways that no human pilot can do even the best most trained pilots can manage about nine g's with compression suits and everything a drone can handle all the g's and we're also experimenting with speeds going all the way up to mach 20 with the hypersonic technology vehicle 2 or http 2. we have drones doing stealth bombing runs flying up to mach 20 spying on other people there are even drones that refuel fighter jets don't get me wrong drones aren't cheap but between their maneuverability and their capability and not needing a pilot drones are seeing a massive spike in investment right now and that's probably going to continue into the future now those are big drones basically unmanned planes at that point but smaller drones can make a big impact as well if you have enough of them i mean just look at what happened to nagorno-karabakh you know nagorno-karabakh the disputed territory between azerbaijan and armenia you don't crack an atlas every once in a while come on there's a conflict that erupted there last year that gives us a nice preview of what drone warfare would look like in the future i don't want to go too far into this because it's a very long story it goes all the way back to the 1920s but this is a long simmering conflict that would occasionally erupt into actual violence every once in a while and in 2020 it erupted in a big way and the result was a pretty clear victory for azerbaijan and it was done using a fleet of hundreds of drones that were purchased from israel and turkey in the united states according to military analyst michael kaufman quote drones offer small countries very cheap access to tactical aviation and precision guided weapons enabling them to destroy an opponent's much costlier equipment such as tanks and air defense systems he also added an air force is a very expensive thing and they permit the utility of air power to much smaller much poorer nations cheap drones can be quickly deployed and then circle over a position for hours in what are known as loitering munitions attacks and then when the time is right they simply just drive themselves into the target and blow it up or some more advanced loading munition drones can use ai to identify enemy targets i mean in the future drone warfare could just be set it and forget it you just set them out there and they find what they need to find and do their thing it's almost like landmines that can seek you out and blow you up where you are and if you're thinking that's all well and good but for my black mirror dreams to come true i want a drone with a machine gun on it well that exists it's called the song gar and it's made by turkey and it is the first medium sized drone that has a machine gun on it oh and a grenade launcher too yeah i could spend a lot of time in this video going over all the different types of drones that are being used for the military now because they're not just in the air they're also drone armored vehicles and tanks there's underwater drones and drone patrol boats and these are just what america has all the g20 countries are working on technology like this so yeah medium-sized drones are definitely going to play a much bigger part in war in the future but then if you want to get really scared let's talk about micro drones yeah thanks to innovations and drone technology and battery tech we can now make long lasting drones that you can just carry in the palm of your hand the black hornet's such a drone weighing at 100 grams it has 20 minutes flight time and it takes hd video and can achieve a top speed of 13 miles an hour it doesn't have weapons but it's used for surveillance and a ground counterpart to this is the throwbot too and those drones are neat but what about thousands of these drones flying in a swarm being controlled by ai this is where things get eerie the us air force has already kind of teased that they're working on this kind of technology in a promotional video from 2018. and to get a less violent idea of what drone swarming technology might look like a chinese company broke the guinness world record last year for putting on a performance with drones it doesn't take a large leap of the imagination to see these drones sweeping through a city and identifying enemy combatants or even being armed with very small ordinances it's a pretty terrifying prospect and while that kind of thing doesn't exist right now it's definitely being imagined and being developed right now in fact they have a name they're called slaughter bots swarms of thousands of drones using facial recognition technology and carrying a couple grams of poison or a single shot munition can be used to take out individual targets or members of a group considered to be enemy combatants in one fell swoop this is a thing that could exist in the near future by the way what you were just seeing on screen is actually from a short film called slaughterbots i'll link it down below it was designed to kind of show the dangers of this technology but i feel the need to tell you that that is not real just got to make that clear these days but the harm system like that could cause is pretty obvious i mean imagine in the future if instead of storming the capital somebody just unleashed a swarm of these drones into the capital and it just wiped out all the members of a certain political party at the same time though imagine if some planes dropped these swarms over those concentration camps in north korea and it wiped out all the guards and administrators of the camps and and freed all the people so proponents of this technology would say that that's the argument for it that it would only take out the bad guys and eliminate collateral damage on the other hand that's the same argument that's been made for drones for a very long time and as we now know like something like 90 percent of our u.s drone strikes have some form of collateral damage associated but even before we get to swarms of hummingbird-sized murder machines the us military is already working to sort of network various elements of their ground and air tactics to coordinate and change according to the situation on the ground that might mean collaborating to take out a specific target or redirecting autonomous supply lines that have come under attack there's even a program in the works called golden horde that will take swarms of bomb drones mixed in with decoy drones to sort of confuse the enemy anti-drone technology and yet that's another thing there's also tons of anti-drone technologies that are coming up in various locations around the world so from large pilotless planes to to swarms of murderbots drones are definitely going to play a large part in the wars of the future as i said i could go on and on because there's a lot of drone stuff going on but i think for the purpose of this video it's time to move on to nuclear weapons because yeah those are those are still a problem in fact you might have heard of the doomsday clock that keeps track of how close we are to total global nuclear annihilation well the doomsday clock peaked at 100 seconds to midnight last year which is kind of amazing considering how things were in the 60s just a reminder i might have talked about this before but tonight when you tuck your kids into bed or your dog or the next time you take a bite into a nice juicy burger you might want to take a moment to thank vasily arkapov vasily arkapov was a soviet submarine captain whose ship came under attack by a u.s ship that was dropping death charges actually they weren't exactly sure if they were completely under attack or if it was just a training exercise but the other captains wanted to go ahead and launch a 10 kiloton nuclear torpedo at the ship they thought the world war iii had started but vasili held out and that prevented them from launching it because a nuclear launch required a three officer consensus and yeah that's what it came down to just one man if facility had gone along with it then world war iii absolutely would have started and the whole mutual assured destruction thing would have kicked in so yeah your kid your dog your juicy burger you probably wouldn't exist so what happens when humans exit that equation like would an ai make the same choice you know with ai controlling all these various aspects of the military that are tied into nuclear escalation you could see how some kind of trigger could could escalate into something uncontrollable really fast or going back to cyber attacks what happens when you know hackers get access to a totally digital system that encompasses all of our various space assets but also nuclear i mean could we see a runaway reaction a positive feedback loop to self-destruction that's why the doomsday clock is so high by the way we're talking about ai controlling the access to nuclear weapons just understand that all of that applies to all that cyber attack stuff that we were talking about earlier as well ais only enhance our ability to shut down infrastructure and manipulate markets and control voting patterns through social media i mean we already have bots doing exactly that you know setting up fake accounts using fake pictures and posting links to fake ai generated articles i mean seriously we've already entered a post-truth world one of the biggest battles we're gonna fight in the future is the war against misinformation much of it driven by malicious ai so the last area of future warfare we're going to talk about today for this video anyway is space and viewers of this channel follow space stuff pretty closely and it's pretty hard to miss that space has become more militarized situation just by looking at the name of cape canaveral which is now called cape canaveral space force station yes at the end of 2019 the trump administration created the space force as a sixth branch of the military and it was it was mostly met with laughter nobody took it seriously in fact it was taken so unseriously that netflix created a sitcom around it and that sitcom came out immediately like literally five months after the announcement was made they had their first episode i mean i personally was just confused because i felt like the air force already had that covered and in fact it's kind of right i mean the space force was basically spun off from the air force space command according to usa.gov the role of space force is to quote it organizes trains and equips space forces to protect u.s and allied interests in space and to provide space capabilities to the joint force that is some government copyrighting right there the whole point is the us military clearly sees space playing a greater role in conflicts going forward um but what does that look like i mean are we going to have space force bases in orbit like are they going to have their own space stations with space force astronauts we know they're going to have space force astronauts in fact they've already had an astronaut in space pretty much right after the announcement astronaut michael s hopkins uh basically changed his commission from the air force over to the space force while he was on the iss so yeah space force had a human presence in space pretty much the day it was created now there are no plans that i could find anyway for them to actually have you know space force stations in space or anything like that mostly they're all about sort of protecting and defending uh the space satellites and the ground stations that support so much of the military because just like any other supply chain space has now become an infrastructure for the military and it is vulnerable to attack on july 15th of 2020 last year a russian satellite called the cosmos 2543 launched a projectile at another russian satellite in an attempted space attack test run basically it didn't hit it which is good because we've got enough space junk up there but but u.s military command did see that as a threatening act according to space force general john raymond saying in a statement quote the test is another example that the threats to the u.s and allied space systems are real serious and increasing russia denies this as well as another incident from 2017 where the u.s claims that russian satellite was spying on a u.s satellite whatever that means space force also has access to the autonomous space plane x37b which can be in orbit for up to two years at least or at least it's been up there for two years at this point anyway um it's basically a spy satellite on demand that looks like a tiny little space shuttle now this is where the bulk of their attention is going to be focused for the foreseeable future long term things are going to get kind of murky once some space resources start to become a factor like if as i covered in the moon mining episode helium 3 becomes the the oil of the future because of nuclear fusion um yeah the the mining and resources on the moon is going to become a particularly messy situation if history is any guide so it's hard to say if we'll ever have like an expanse situation with like space armies fighting it against each other but needless to say space assets are a thing that's going to be getting a lot of attention in the near future and by the way none of this is new uh when you think about it space has always been militarized you know the the air force space command has been covering this theater since 1982 and i mean our first astronauts that went up in the 60s were all military guys being launched on icbms but back down here on earth war has almost always been about resources having access to resources trading resources and the more interconnected our world has become the more we rely on that trait of resources and as the number of humans on this planet continues to rise and climate change does what it does to the world the access and distribution of these resources are what's going to define the conflicts of the future and take water for example many people are predicting that the kind of wars that we're fighting today over oil are going to someday going to be fought over water because some countries are going to have a lot of it some countries won't you know only 2.5 percent of the water on earth is fresh water that we can drink but a lot of that is frozen up in glaciers or way deep down below the earth so it could be that the country that perfects desalination techniques will be the ones that have an edge in the future not to mention other resources like lithium or the metals that make up our computer chipboards but while we dream of a peaceful future with no war i'm skeptical that we're ever actually going to see that personally war is hell but it's also profitable like any discussion about the war in afghanistan and the fact that we were there for 20 years has to include into it the fact that there are a lot of companies that made billions of dollars off of that war so yeah i mean as long as war and defense are a big part of the economy as long as there's a global military-industrial complex run by powerful people making billions of dollars off of it i'm afraid war is just going to be a part of life here on earth and soon above it but however soldiers go to battle in the future they're going to want to do it in comfortable underwear luckily for them the future of underwear is already here thanks to today's sponsor mack weldon mack weldon because war is hell but your butt doesn't have to be you guys have heard me talk about mac weldon before you've heard me talk about how they design multiple types of fabrics they use from air knit 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joe.com store i thought this was appropriate for today sort of sticks to spears to swords to guns so yeah the whole thing uh there's all kinds of fun nerdy shirts there you can go check them out again it's andersonwithjoe.com please like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here um google thinks you'll like this video so you can go check that out or any of the others on the side over here they got my face on them and if you enjoy them i invite you to subscribe i come back videos every monday all right that's it for now you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 442,502

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: 6idj2sPStEc

Length: 23min 30sec (1410 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021