by Roqeebah Olaoniye

June 28, 1914:  Gavrilo Princip, a Serb and Yugoslav nationalist, shot and killed the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, the Duchess of Hohenberg in the city Sarajevo. That singular act sparked off the first World War. The warring parties were clear: the French, the Russians, the Italians, the Japanese, the Americans and the British on one hand against the Central Powers: the Germans, the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary, on the other. The war did not end until November 11, 1917.

September 1, 1939: Adolf Hilter’s Germany invaded Poland and then went on to conquer a large portion of continental Europe. France and Britain declared war on Germany. An already confused state of affairs involving Germany, Italy, Japan on the one hand and the United Kingdom, France, and at different times and during different conquests, the Soviet Union and China, on the other hand, deteriorated into the second World War that lasted until September 2, 1945.

Since then, the United Nations came into being, colonisation supposedly ended, Japan went from being a super power to electronics giant; the Cold War happened for over 40 years, democracy found its playground in Africa while the rest of the world found meaning in actual development. The internet also happened.

August 23, 1991: A 35-year-old British geek made the world a better place by creating an environment called “cyberspace”. It was okay to put the words in inverted commas in 1991; the term ‘e-mail’ was still the subject of good riddles as anyone who read Page 8 of the paper above must have found.

Since 1991, we’ve come a long way. There has been the acceptance of e-mail as the most reliable of communications systems and, there’s been Yahoo Messanger, and an intersection between those two has birthed the likes of Slack. You have also had the self(ie)-serving Instagram and Twitter and Medium and Pocket and yes, Google with all its world-dominating appurtenances. You get the drift.

But did Tim unknowingly create a war field for the next World War? This is the point where we warn you that this is simply a thought experiment. We are restless and our minds are wandering and wondering. What we are sure of is that there’s a pattern: the people living through any given experience at any point in history are usually too oblivious to the patterns; to connect the dots that will help them arrive at the conclusion that latter generations will so easily see. For example, it wasn’t until after the First World War that it became generally called that. It was mostly called the “Great War” until then.

The 20th-century wars culminated in the establishment of the League of Nations which then came to stay as the United Nations; tidying up the affairs of the world as much as it can and keeping what birthed it at bay. Except that no one thought about the internet much less of a cyberwar at the time.

Also, the series of conflicts that plagued the world leading up to the second world war – the Japanese trying to invade China; Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Japanese invasion of Mongolian and Soviet borders, the invasion of Poland – were not easily connected by those directly involved and to be honest, it’s only because hindsight is 20/20 that we can now connect the dots.

Which is why we think our mental expedition today is important. Our hypothesis? That there’s a war going on in the world – one whose battlefield is different from what we know and whose combatants need no military drafting – but a war nonetheless.

Cyberwarfare presents a different kind of problem because very rarely will States ever own up to having delivered an offensive.

April 27, 2007: when the Estonians removed the Bronze Soldier Soviet war memorial in central Tallinn, the Baltic State experienced three weeks of concerted cyber attacks which disabled the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies. NATO waged in. NATO! The intergovernmental military alliance defined it as a mere operational security issue and not military grade. Of course, it helped whoever was attacking (Russia) that Estonia in 2007 was one of the pioneer countries to operate e-governance.

The world was convinced about Russia’s complicity but expert opinion was divided on whether the attackers could be reliably singled-out and some even said Russia could inflict much more serious cyber-damage if it chose to.

Recently, even during physical warfare as we know it, cyber terrorism could be employed as a good and effective delay or defence tactic. In 2008, U.S military suffered a 14-month long set back in the heat of the Iraq war. Some officer had picked up a flash drive planted in the military base washroom and carelessly plugged it into a military laptop. The result was a self-propagating malware that affected the military command’s systems. It took over a year to eradicate.

Don’t forget that Stuxnet also happened that same year with strong accusations against either the United States or Israel.

Another characteristic of this cyber warfare is the parties. There’s no doubt that at this stage in history, the hi-tech countries are winners and the next set of world super powers are those who can comfortably lay claims to the most advanced of technologies.

May 25, 2015: “A war is inevitable” between the United States and China, the Chinese Communist Party’s official daily Newspaper declared. This was in the heat of the race to arms between the two countries. The budding super power, China, had been leading the race with the highest number of warships and warplanes built in the recent history of the world before Americans merely announced a plan to “offset” the Chinese efforts with a new generation of hi-tech weapons. Next thing we knew, there was a hack on the United States’ federal records at the Office of Personnel Management and China was generally blamed for it. According to the director of the US National Intelligence, James Clapper: “You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did. If we had the opportunity to do that, I don’t think we’d hesitate for a minute.”

The Office of Personel Management screens and hires federal workers and not only has data of current and former federal employees but also the data of Americans who have applied for security clearances.

What if the Chinese then took the same opportunity to introduce foreign fighters who will now not be identifiable. Imagine that attack had been carried out against the United States Immigrations and files containing illegal immigrants were compromised and the United States could no longer identify those who belong in the country or not. But then that’s just China and the United States.

This new kind of warfare won’t just have State actors on the offense or defence. There are allies and collaborators and independent actors – from whistleblowers to underground organisations who have virtual access to all of our lives and will show up when there is need to shelter a combatant. We admit this part is was inspired by too much of the show: Quantico.

Fastfoward to 2016 and the United States is admitting that Russia intercepted its Presidential elections. The Sony hack happened and soldiers are increasingly being able to distance themselves from the very battlefields where their actions are killing millions daily. It’s hard to imagine a warfare with combatants digging trenches and fighting on two fronts.

A Doubting Thomas will refer to all these incidences as just espionage carried out on the largest scale. But here is the thing: what is the state of war? If a country has the resources to shut down underwater cables that carry internet communication to a whole region or can intercept all communications from millions of miles away, remotely without being indentified or even from within by planting a mole who can be sheltered through asylum. Our theory is that the same actor can develop malware that will remotely cut off water supply, render communication lines useless, compromise health system such that drugs are either not delivered or intentionally mixed up. Worst still, what’s stopping the countries in possession of drones from dropping deadly viruses that can wipe out an enemy State.