Source: BBC.COM
The future of warfare is no longer about bullets and bombs, or dominating land, sea and air. Instead, tomorrow’s victors will dominate the ether.
The voice of the foreign military commander is sinister and gloating.
“On the anniversary of our nation’s most glorious sea victory, let us remember our heroes that helped bring the United States to its knees,” he says, his face obscured by shadows. “We ground to dust the vaunted American navy like the impotent clay figurines that they had become.”
The speech continues, providing hints of how the devastating attack of 2025 began—carried out initially not with bombs and bullets, but invisible electromagnetic energy and cyberattacks that dropped drones from the sky, left US cities in total blackness, and disabled entire aircraft carriers at sea.
This video may sound like the opening of an apocalyptic movie, but the brief clip was created as part of a US Navy game called MMOWGLI, an acronym for the unwieldy sounding Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet. The crowdsourcing game, which was run by three elements of the US Navy – the Navy Warfare Development Command, the Office of Naval Research and the Naval Postgraduate School—invited players to help develop ideas for how the navy could prepare for this brave new world of electromagnetic warfare, where enemies use invisible, and often untraceable weapons, that can theoretically disable everything from satellites and computers to radar and aircraft.
Electromagnetic warfare covers any and all weapons that attack using electromagnetic radiation, which can jam or even permanently fry electronics. But the Navy now may be looking at such weapons as part of a broader approach to warfare. In a recent article, Admiral Jonathan Greenert, the chief of US Naval Operations, argued that cyber weapons needed to be merged with electromagnetic attacks, or what he calls the “electromagnetic cyber realm.”
Categories: Americas