All roads lead to the Taiwan Strait. Or, perhaps, before to the Indian Ocean, where China and the United States have faced each other since 2017 through their naval bases in Djibouti and Diego García. The paths that lead to the geopolitical collision between both superpowers now pass through Gaza. A few weeks ago they did it through the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave and before that through Niger. A series of geopolitical fires that raise the temperature of the planet, while the open and long-lasting conflict in Ukraine resonates intensely. This is where, without a doubt, the struggle between China and the United States through their interposed actors: Russia and Ukraine-European Union becomes more explicit and evident.
This geopolitical warming is the thermometer of the fight for world hegemony waged by the Chinese and the Americans. A conflict that does not use its armies, but does use its technological capabilities directly or indirectly. Let us remember that we are moving within a context of global hybrid war where anything goes to weaken the enemy. In this objective, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) is decisive, which is already the spearhead of the vector of technological progress that drives the Sino-North American struggle that we discussed. Here, we must highlight the development of so-called lethal autonomous weapons (SALA) and, in particular, AI systems that interrelate the information generated within a war zone. Which is what happens with integrated command platforms that automate the famous O-O-D-A decision cycle (observation, orientation, decision and action) and that make digitalized armies more lethal in the deployment of their defensive and combat capabilities.
I analyzed this military use of AI a few months ago with an article that I titled in these same pages as “AI and autonomous weapons” (July 1, 2023). In it I addressed the importance of these weapons in the full-fledged war that runs along geopolitical fronts in which culture, maps, history and religion are mixed with data, algorithms and, above all, AI. Since the North American withdrawal from Afghanistan, global geopolitical warming continues to increase under a dangerous escalation that destabilizes the small number of democracies that survive on the planet. Especially in Europe. The Old Continent has become a victim of the Sino-North American conflict as it sees how the risks that compromise its stability increase in its outer perimeters. To the point that the Mediterranean has been placed, together with Ukraine, at the epicenter of global geopolitical warming. This is influenced by the existence of a huge security gap in Libya that is not being closed. Through it, a migratory flow controlled by Russia from Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and Central Africa spreads over southern Europe and raises the populist temperature in Europe at will. A phenomenon that will increase with the situation created in the Caucasus and the Middle East after the Hamas terrorist attack.
If we analyze the blow suffered by Israel a week ago, we will see that it is not just another episode of the tragic conflict with Palestine and the Arab countries. It is related to the confrontation between China and the United States that we discussed. In particular, with the competition in the development of AI systems. Israel is one of the North American allies with the greatest military capabilities in this field and where the collaboration between both countries is closest. Let us not forget that technology has given Israel prestige in terms of cybersecurity and in the development of prototypes of lethal autonomous weapons. By the way, they were repeatedly used in Gaza, which was a laboratory where they experimented with their combat and surveillance AI designs.
The development of its AI integrated command system controlled the famous Gaza wall. This circumstance meant that in May 2021 he won, as he officially recognized, the first war based on AI. In the famous operation Guardian of the Walls, 90% of the 4,000 missiles launched by Hamas over southern Israel were destroyed in the air and the number of victims among the civilian population was reduced to only 12 deaths. In addition, 261 terrorists were killed and 2,200 more injured, while chaos was wreaked within the strip by selectively destroying critical infrastructure that caused the displacement of 72,000 Palestinian civilians. Then, in August 2022, the victory of the previous year was repeated with the offensive launched on the Gaza Strip through Operation Dawn.
Algorithms against terrorists, it was said then and the balance was just as forceful. It was even announced that thanks to AI, no Hamas commandos would be able to infiltrate or carry out terrorist operations in Israeli territory. What has happened, then, a year later? What has failed in the sensorized systems of the concrete wall that isolates the Gaza Strip, in the satellite surveillance that covers the border with a technological security perimeter and in the aerial drone coverage that makes the wall impassable and allows monitoring of the instant of mobility that occurs around? Furthermore, what has changed so that Israel, which boasted on July 17 through its Ministry of Defense that it was in a position to successfully face a total technological war, has failed so miserably? That someone is ahead and another behind in the military development of AI and that makes some of us suffer watching the thermometer of geopolitical warming rise.
