All roads lead to the Taiwan Strait. Or, perhaps, earlier in the Indian Ocean, where China and the United States have been facing each other since 2017 through the naval bases of Djibouti and Diego García. The roads leading to the geopolitical collision between the two superpowers now pass through Gaza. A few weeks ago they did it for the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and before that for Niger. A wave of geopolitical fires that raise the temperature of the planet, while the open and lasting conflict in Ukraine reverberates intensely. This is, without a doubt, where the struggle between China and the United States becomes more explicit and evident through its intervening actors: Russia and Ukraine-European Union.
This geopolitical warming is the thermometer of the struggle for global hegemony between the Chinese and the Americans. A conflict that does not use armies, but its technological capabilities directly or indirectly. Let's remember that we are moving in a context of global hybrid war where everything is used to weaken the enemy. In this objective, the application of artificial intelligence (AI), which is already the spearhead of the vector of technological progress that drives the Sino-American struggle that we discussed, is decisive. Here, the development of so-called autonomous lethal weapons (SALA) and, in particular, AI systems that interrelate the information generated within a war zone should be highlighted. What about integrated command platforms that automate the famous O-O-D-A decision cycle (observe, target, decide and act) and make digitized armies more lethal in deploying their defensive and combat capabilities.
I analyzed this military use of AI a few months ago in an article I titled in these same pages “AI and autonomous weapons” (July 1, 2023). I addressed the importance of these weapons in the full-scale war that is taking place on geopolitical fronts where culture, maps, history and religion are mixed with data, algorithms and, above all, AI. Since the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the global geopolitical warming continues to increase under a dangerous escalation that destabilizes the few democracies that survive on the planet. Especially in Europe. The Old Continent has become a victim of the Sino-American conflict by seeing how the risks that compromise its stability increase in its external perimeters. To the extent that the Mediterranean has become, together with Ukraine, the epicenter of global geopolitical warming. This is influenced by the existence of a huge security gap in Libya that is not closing. Around here, a migratory flow that Russia controls from Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and Central Africa spreads over the south of Europe and that raises the populist temperature in Europe as it wants. A phenomenon that will go further with the situation created in the Caucasus and the Near East following the terrorist attack by Hamas.
If we analyze the blow that Israel received a week ago, we will see that it is not 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 were discussing. In particular, with the competence in the development of AI systems. Israel is one of the American allies with the most military capabilities in this area and where the collaboration between the two countries is closest. Let's not forget that technology has made Israel prestigious in terms of cyber security and in the development of prototypes of autonomous lethal weapons. Incidentally, they were repeatedly employed in Gaza, which was a laboratory where he experimented with his combat and surveillance AI designs.
The development of its integrated command system using AI controlled the famous Gaza wall. This circumstance meant that in May 2021 he won, as he officially recognized, the first AI-based war. In the famous operation Guardian of the Walls, 90% of the 4,000 missiles launched by Hamas on southern Israel were destroyed in the air and the number of casualties among the civilian population was reduced to only 12 deaths. In addition, 261 terrorists were killed and 2,200 others were wounded, while sowing chaos within the Strip by selectively destroying critical infrastructure that led to the displacement of 72,000 Palestinian civilians. Then, in August 2022, the victory of the previous year was repeated again with the offensive he launched on the Gaza Strip through Operation Alba.
Algorithms against terrorists, it was said then and the balance was just as strong. It was even announced that thanks to AI, no Hamas commando would be able to infiltrate or carry out terrorist operations in Israeli territory. What happened then a year later? What has gone wrong in the sensor 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 tracking at the time of the mobility that occurs around? What is more, what has changed so that Israel, which boasted last July 17 through the Ministry of Defense, that it was in a position to successfully face a total technological war, has failed so resoundingly? That one is at the front and the other behind in the military development of AI and that this makes some of us suffer as we watch the geopolitical warming thermometer rise.
