Recent history has seen plenty of violence. Wars have been a staple fixture with incrementally evolving conflicts. Hollywood, history books and television have painted an image of wars that portrays the romance of soldiers, weapons and their physical effects. With these concepts in mind and the idea of victory defined by boots on ground, the militaries have mechanically been preparing for the same.
Well, defence planners do think about how wars will manifest in future and try to stay with the curve however, constraints ensure that the gaps are seldom bridged. Leaderships are comfortable in reaping the past, managing the present, and bidding for the future. But with great vision comes great budgetary constraint coupled with the political prudence of balancing constitution with constituency. So what does become of war and how do we fight them?
Imagine a scenario of war, where the military of men & weapons has no means to engage the attack against itsnation. It is not a thing of the future; it is a case from the now. The COVID-19 is nothing short of a biological DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. There are already analysts drawing the origin and the identity of the attackers, but those semantics do not change the reality where the whole world has been reduced to collateral damage.
Could this have been imagined? The “I told you so” aside, serious predictions are limited to international boundaries and countries mostly commit national resources to protect their geographical masses. So to blame someone, for not seeing something smaller than the wavelength of light, would at best satisfy opinion, but not reason.
The logic of predicting such non-conventional threats has already dawned upon us. This may partially take away the glamour of legacy security structures, but is more of a case of mental flexibility than hardware reorientation. Conflicts may change fast, combat follows slowly. As a national resource, military structures during non-war times are also the redundancies available with a country to mitigate crisis requirements. Thus, at home, there is farsightedness in strengthening military logistical structures while balancing combat elements in the kinetic and non-kinetic genres. Benefits of military doctors, transport aircraft and sturdy support services are all there for us to see.
To strengthen ourselves, we need to practice social distancing from each other and economic distancing from China. After this situation stabilizes, having to choose again between life and livelihood will be criminal. I have written how a strong domestic manufacturing is vital to our future (http://tiny.cc/gigtmz). However, a doctrine of expanding capacities is not as straightforward as producing more. We also need self-sufficiency in critical fields like energy, health care, agriculture, supply chains, storage, distribution and most importantly the last mile connectivity. The crisis has exposed how fragile these aspects are with invisible cogs like migrant workers and the rest of the unorganized economy.
A reluctance is seen in owning up the need to protect our way of life. West has been stripping people of shoes at the airports for 20 years because of one attack in 2001. It is time we take allowance for protecting ourselves after centuries of invasions and subjugations. We need to stop thinking about warfare as only lines on a map, firepower and territory. A shock to our way of life, a disruption of normal and a question on our tomorrow is war and we are in it.
No comments:
Post a Comment