Strategy&Future

Z pomocą zachodnich sojuszników siły zbrojne Ukrainy zdołały zniszczyć okręt flagowy rosyjskiej Floty Czarnomorskiej – krążownik Moskwa (lub – jak nazywała go Rosja – „giganta zimnej wojny”). Było to wydarzenie prawdziwie historyczne, zarówno w znaczeniu symbolicznym, zatopienie okrętu zraniło bowiem rosyjską dumę narodową, jak i praktycznym, ponieważ nadszarpnęło zdolności rosyjskiej marynarki wojennej na Morzu Czarnym.

“Russia doesn’t need Ukraine as an independent country. They need our resources. Now the scenario is repeated. Russian dictator Putin planned to take away Ukraine’s minerals in order to enrich themselves and gain influence around the world.” National Association of Mining Industry of Ukraine

In addition to Putin’s two declared goals in Ukraine, “denazification” and “demilitarisation,” we should think about adding a third, which is to deprive the country of access to any source of traditional energy like coal, hydro, thermal, or nuclear power stations, most of which are stationed in Eastern and Central Ukraine. A special component of Moscow’s strategy appears to be to gain control over the nuclear plants, uranium deposits, and to destroy the infrastructure enabling Ukraine to restore nuclear weapons.

Ukrainian political and historical thinking was dominated before 2014 by two main intellectual groups. The first worked under the political, social, and ideological edifice that Ukraine is a European nation. The second targeted the issues of the national history of the Ukrainians as a nation and as a nation that fought against Russian aggression throughout the centuries.

Ukraine is resisting Russian aggression. Ukraine and the Ukrainian people have lost their territories, infrastructure, military material but it still holds its soul, pride, and zealously resists. It is visible from all levels of Ukrainian society, from the President of Ukraine, the Government of Ukraine and many MPs, the governors of the Ukrainian regions that are in place and present in their positions despite the massive attacks and bombardments.

Autonomous systems are a dangerous element of future warfare. Especially taking into account the prospect of so-called Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs), controlled by machine learning and AI. And as Michael Horowitz writes, it would be a mistake to focus solely on the drone strike trees and miss the vast military robotics forest.[1] He raises quite an important question for understanding the upcoming military future. [1] Michael C. Horowitz, “The Ethics & Morality of Robotic Warfare: Assessing the Debate over Autonomous Weapons”, Daedalus 2016; 145 (4) // https://www.amacad.org/publication/ethics-morality-robotic-warfare-assessing-debate-over-autonomous-weapons

The main take-away points from the events in Belarus from the summer of 2020 (the unrest of the pro-Western factions of Belarusian civil society) until the current refugee crisis on the Belarusian border with the EU are the following:

The current crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border suggests that Eastern Europe won’t see peace and stability in this decade. The Ukrainian crisis together with the Belarussian crisis gives enough evidence that processes are occurring within the region that can affect the entire European continent, much more than was the case in 2014. A global dimension to the crisis was given by the threat of Poland to cut off its rail links to Belarus and the symmetrical threat of Belarus to cut off gas supplies to Europe through Belarussian territory.

What’s brewing in the United States is not exclusively only one concept of future warfare based around JADC2, but something more sophisticated and sometimes even more controversial for traditional politicians and militaries that are used to seeing war as something specifically human. This supplementary concept to JADC2 is called Mosaic Warfare, and it is the offspring of DARPA. Accurately speaking, Mosaic Warfare is a branch of JADC2 because within DoD are following programs that are linked to JADC2:

Murray Shanahan, an expert in Cognitive Robotics and senior scientist at DeepMind, writes that military commanders might understandably have reservations over their roles being usurped by AI.[1] The ascent of the autonomous weapons creates a great challenge for the commanders: on one hand, autonomous weapons are much more effective in the process of detection, avoiding threats more quickly and accurately than any human pilot. [1] Shanahan Murray, „The Technological Singularity”, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2015 p. 154

Jeżeli potraficie dokazać tego, by Polak nigdy nie mógł zostać Rosjaninem, ręczę wam, że Rosja nigdy nie ujarzmi Polski. Nigdy nie będziecie wolni, póki choć jeden żołnierz rosyjski pozostanie w Polsce, a zawsze grozić wam będzie utrata wolności, jak długo Rosja będzie się mieszała do spraw waszych. Ale jeśli uda się wam zmusić ją, by porozumiewała się z wami jak mocarstwo z mocarstwem, a już nie jak protektor z protegowanym, wówczas korzystajcie z wycieńczenia, w jakie popadnie wskutek wojny z Turcją, aby przeprowadzić dzieło zanim mu będzie mogła przeszkodzić.

On 5th December 1994, the three depository states of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) that entered into force on 5th March 1970 – Russia, UK, and the US – pledged to provide security assurances to Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine for their accession to the NPT and to respect their independence and sovereignty within their existing borders. Already from the very document, it is possible to draw three main components.