"The end of the cold war has reduced nuclear threats to security. But the forward march of technology is creating new and more subtle security threats. Discuss." The most obvious answer to this question is to map out the nature of the threat presented by chemical and biological weapons as well as ballistic missiles and show why these present a greater proportion of the threat out there than they used to. I will discuss those issues shortly. But in addition to this we need to look at the emerging vulnerabilities inherent in a wired society that depends so totally on its computers and communication systems. Finally, we will look at the security problems that come from the technological mismatch between U.S. forces designed over the last 40 years to deal with a Warsaw Pact-style threat and the challenges presented by narco-terrorists/guerrillas, extreme religious/ideological movements, peacekeeping missions, and environmental threats. Chemical and Biological weapons. Despite all its flaws, the nuclear non-proliferation regime of the NPT, IAEA, Nuclear Suppliers Group, and COCOM has apparently stopped a good number of countries (and possibly sub-national groups) from building their first nuclear weapon. This, along with the higher natural barriers to developing nuclear weapons, has caused some political actors, which are unhappy with the status quo and lack the military or economic power to do anything about it directly, to try and improve the their position with the development of other weapons of mass destruction that are easier to make and usually easier to conceal production of. Developing countries have come late to such technologies because chemical and biological weapons really don't have much military utility. Both forms are difficult to get to a distant target and make into an aerosol on impact with reliability, biological weapons extremely so. And if one can get a good cloud up, unpredictable winds can dissipate it or blow it an undesirable direction. Then there's the problem of it persisting longer than the creator would like (a serious problem with living biological weapons like bacteria) and poisoning the environment. And the owner still may not kill very many of the enemy if they're one of the more advanced armies that carry antidotes and are forewarned about the risk of such an attack. With problems like these and a pretty much universal hatred of such weapons its easy to see why most political actors interested in getting the weapons for traditional military uses wouldn't be trying very hard. But of course some states and sub-national actors like Iraq or the Supreme Truth group in Japan have softer targets in mind anyway like poor armies and civilian commuters. What's been happening though is that as organo-phosphorous pesticide and biotechnology production facilities appear in more and more places in the developed and developing world, with more and more people knowing how to run them, the number of sites that could be making chemical and biological weapons grows every year. So the natural barriers to development have gone from moderate to almost nil. This is the perfect example of the dual-use technology problem. Advanced pesticides and biotechnology products are useful and valuable goods that benefit the economies of all nations (environmentalist concerns about pesticides aside) and discovering and proving that the facilities are instead making nerve gas or biotoxins is hard work indeed. Unless the parties to the chemical and biological weapons conventions want to go beyond trying to keep an eye on where the dual-use "precursors" of such weapons are going (with the aid of some inspections) and instead decide to simply get the ingredients off the market--expense be damned--we will see growing stockpiles of such weapons around the world. In fact, the Office of Technology Assessment claims that anyone with an advanced degree in biochemistry could make and spread small batches of biological weapons at will with little or no special equipment, the only limitation being how strong his or her concern for personal safety is. We have reached the point that a few people can possess a weapon that could kill masses of people, and unlike before with the big nations' arsenals, those few people do not to have to subject themselves to any rigidly controlled national security apparatus whose leaders can be deterred in order to get that capability. Missiles The spread of missiles worry people in places like the Pentagon because they can be used for terror bombing of cities or (if accurate enough) attacks on army or navy units, and no adequate defense against them exists. (See re-evaluation of Patriot's performance after the Gulf War, and any known system's inability to deal with lots of incoming missiles at once.) This fear is aggravated by the fact that their long range makes missiles the favored means for delivering weapons of mass destruction. In cases where both sides have long range missiles that can hit major cities in each others' countries on a few minutes notice, possibly with chemical or biological weapons, tension levels can get extremely high when one country thinks the other may be getting ready to shoot first. The creation of such situations in two or three areas of the world at once is a frightening thing, even though an old US-USSR style full blown nuclear exchange is not at stake, because of a higher chance that war will break out. This is so because of the greater complexity of simultaneous situations and the cheaper, less tested, command and control systems that will be in place in poorer countries. And it turns out that most missile technology is also dual-use in the sense that rockets can be used for peaceful purposes as well. Nations developing missiles can say they would like to be able to launch their own weather, mapping, and surveillance satellites. Perfectly legitimate aspirations. This complicates putting together the political will to bear the costs of restraining such technology by foregoing sales and paying for the carrots and sticks needed to get nations that have been subverting the Missile technology Control Regime like China and North Korea to get in line. Information warfare: weak points in a wired society As both militaries and civilian societies depend ever more crucially on computers and communication networks to do their most important tasks, computing and communications infrastructure becomes an ever more inviting target for an enemy. And this is happening just as the more frequent linking of computers with the rest of the world makes computers increasingly open to attack. It is now possible to cause a great deal of social and economic disruption just by manipulating computers from remote terminals (in some cases even over public phone lines or the internet). And failing this, a small bomb at the right place can take any computer down. Imagine the effects if some of the following sorts of systems were caused to fail in ways which would be as disruptive as possible for their users, possibly through undetectable slow corruption and insertion of false instructions/data; the computers that process trade orders on the New York Stock Exchange, a major bank's electronic funds transfer system (some have already managed to steal large amounts from Citibank using EFT hacking), air traffic control systems, municipal 911 systems, IRS/state tax records, credit card company records, police records / the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database of wanted persons and stolen property, city power grid/traffic management/sewage treatment systems, and so on. Of course the military has computers too, and sometimes their security can be laxer than one would expect. At the opening of the Gulf War the Iraqis found that the computers that ran their air defense network suddenly came down with a virus, one that came off of disks shipped with some printers they had bought recently. This was not a coincidence. The U.S. army had its own computers hacked into during the Gulf War too. Some marginally sensitive personnel data was taken by someone out on the internet. These are just the beginning steps of a whole new facet of warfare. Societies that truly depend on computers will sooner or later learn to seriously protect them as well as designing them and the human systems they work with to be robust--handling interruptions of service well and catching corruption of the system quickly--even if doing so makes the system less efficient in ordinary use. Depending on how things work out, the learning process could be quite painful. When all you have is a hammer . . . : mis-matches between military means and missions Marine Maj. Robert Steele wrote that there were four kinds of threats out there today and the U.S. was really only ready for one of them, "high-tech brutes" that fight conventional mid/high-intensity wars with advanced weapons. And that threat has become a significantly lower priority lately. The other three enemy types were: "low-tech seers", religious or ideological movements that win by converting masses of people to their goals and getting their followers to take great risks. Islamic fundamentalist movements are textbook examples of these. "high-tech seers", information war specialists that steal information, down computers, corrupt databases. Very difficult to find, can't hurt enemies that don't rely on information technology though. "low-tech brutes", international criminal organizations that win by being hard to find (operating in small numbers, using random targets and routes), paying followers well, and terrorizing their enemies into compromise. Drug cartels and various mafias are examples of these. Each sort of enemy require different attacks and defenses in order to beat them. Since "high-tech seers" were dealt with in the discussion of weak points in a wired society above and the advice for dealing with them comes down to relying on information technology less and/or protecting the computers and communications you have better, we will only deal with "low-tech seers" and "low-tech brutes" here. The problem here is not so much the new technology these groups bring to the conflict, but rather the differing technology (broadly defined) required to beat them which we don't have in place yet. One of the biggest lessons of Viet Nam and some of the Latin American conflicts is that a team of area specialists with really good intelligence and the political and economic resources to reach out to the people and win their loyalty back are worth more far more than tanks, planes, or artillery when dealing with "low-tech seers". Helicopters combined with infantry trained to treat civilians well and avoid endangering them can be pretty effective too against movements that rely on natural cover rather than blending in with civilians. Scholar of war Van Creveld noted that as the countryside in a given country becomes cris-crossed with means of quick transportation for government troops to move along and readily available communications for the troops and pro-government civilians to coordinate against guerrillas, anti-government forces get driven out of the countryside and will resort to urban terrorism instead. This means that unless the public's grievances are addressed or they're persuaded to be more appreciative of what their government is already doing for them, the fighting will still continue. The government's fighting from behind the heavy hardware or preemptively killing/jailing those suspected of being the enemy to try and minimize one's own casualties, harms innocent civilians and earns the enmity of the community. Given that the U.S. has a very low tolerance for casualties, winning these kinds of struggles will require that they either be willing do whatever it takes to make the people in the warring country willing to stop fighting quickly, or they stay out and let others do the fighting with U.S. weapons and training. The U.S. has generally stuck to the latter in the last two decades. But with the arrival of "low-tech seers" in our own culturally diverse country capable of camouflaging them (see the World Trade Center bombing), letting someone else do the fighting for us is now no longer an option. We have to get the underlying community's support and drive such groups out rather than just let the conflict grind on indefinitely as was done in Latin America. Whether the U.S. is ready for such a war of hearts and minds is in doubt. That leaves the "low-tech brutes" or narco-terrorists as they're often called. The current military hardware and configuration of units can't do the job of getting intelligence on the location of drug refineries from locals and wiping out such sites without needing the prior knowledge and approval of the national government. A somewhat modified and expanded version of the special forces with more autonomy, the ability to work in civilian clothes, and more of their own local language/intelligence resources would be far more capable. Barreling through the countryside in helicopters on once-a-year missions with weak intelligence and having the enemy know where the unit is going in advance due to leaks in the host government is a recipe for defeat. And lest these changes prove to be politically unworkable, there is one technical improvement that can only help: develop new kinds of radar technology designed to pick out slow, low-flying Cessans from the terrain rather than MiGs flying at mach speeds and high altitudes would also help. Peacekeeping: Beyond Steele's arguments about threats we aren't ready for, there's the problem of our not being ready for the absence of a threat. Peacekeeping and similar kinds of situations somewhere in between war and peace are situations where behaviors appropriate to conventional war can have disastrous results. Think back to the effort to protect re-flagged oil tankers from being targeted in the Iran-Iraq war in 1988. A force of U.S. ships was sent to the area. After a while one of them, the USS Vincennes, accidentally shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, thinking it was a fighter getting ready to launch a missile. Aside from the other possible factors involved, this may have been caused in part by the training simulations undergone by the Vincennes bridge crew which (in retrospect) underemphasized risk of killing civilians relative to the need for protecting the ship from attack from fighter-launched missiles like the ones that gutted the Stark and Sheffield in the years prior and like would be a major part of the threat the Vincennes would face in a full-scale conventional war. The people who designed those training scenarios and the captain and bridge crew weren't used to the idea that civilian aircraft could be flying overhead at the same time they were being shot at by patrol boats on the ground. Such a thing just wouldn't happen in conventional war, the commercial airlines would know to keep their planes away from the fighting. One could say it wasn't in the Vincennes' official job description to worry about the threat it posed to civilians. But it should have been. Army troops on peacekeeping missions will face similar problems as they struggle against deeply ingrained instincts to shoot first and ask questions later if someone is pointing a gun at them. Expecting them to pull this off without extensive training for that purpose is asking for trouble. Environmental Threats: And what of struggles with neighbors over the increasingly fouled atmosphere? The U.S. might be able to push Mexico to upwardly harmonize its air pollution regulations as it acquires more of an industrial sector. But other countries around the world who haven't been bought off by inclusion in NAFTA might be somewhat less accommodating, having an incentive not to cooperate, hoping to use pollution reduction later on as a bargaining chip for more foreign aid. Will the U.S. and countries like it respond simply by subsidizing more environmentally acceptable technology in those other countries or will they try to stop the pollution by more direct means, by sabotage or embargo of the imports needed to complete the offending factory or power plant? There will probably be a combination of the cooperative and antagonistic approaches. Do we have the right kinds of military and political means available to make sabotage or embargo of these new and highly controversial kinds of targets go smoothly if we decide those sorts of actions are required? CONCLUSIONS: We have a clear security problem in that new technologies are spreading that make killing masses of people by a small number easier to accomplish, with no traditional balance of terror to keep the weapons from being used in the case of terrorists, and weakened versions of it for poor nations which acquire them at the same time as their rivals. Conversely, we have a problem in that the core computer and communications technologies that make developed nations so productive and keep them from losing many more of their jobs to the global south, also puts them in a position of heightened vulnerability via attacks against those technologies. Combine this with a range of demanding new missions that our trillion dollar military wasn't equipped or trained for that need to be done and done well as soon as possible, and one has a pretty good idea of why people in the national security business can be nostalgic for the good old days of the cold war.