The Internet during world war(oecd-forum.org) |
The Internet during world war(oecd-forum.org) |
I've never been in a conflict zone but I'd assume securing food and water is #1. Reliable electricity access might be a distant nice to have and cell phone or wifi signal? I'm guessing that's a no.
Decentralize, increase redundancy, eliminate single points of failure, sure all good.
But if we're really talking about internet like communication during wars then I would assume what we need to talk about is off-grid power generation, packet radio infrastructure build outs, hardened underground storage containers for computing resources, etc. Without those you aren't going to have a phone that turns on or connects to a tower.
Maybe this is a marketing play to sell things we should be doing (like community networks) to people who otherwise wouldn't listen. If that's the approach than best of luck
During World War II, to coordinate the UK and United States war efforts, at the peak several thousands of teletype channels, were in continuous operation across the Atlantic (something like ~10 kilobytes of text per second) and priority mail shipments by plane (often shrunk to microfiche to reduce weight) were measured in the tonnes per week. The Allies even spent around a billion dollars (inflation-adjusted) to create an implausibly-complicated system [1] to allow encrypted voice communication between high officials over shortwave. Allowing FDR and Churchill to speak real-time, even just for a few minutes a week, was considered just that important. And back then, they were used to doing things with much less coordination from afar.
And now I can whip something similar in one afternoon, and run it on my phone. Nuts.
You are right about communications infrastructure, which is a favored target in any militarized conflict. Mesh networking offers a workaround to communications breakdown, albeit at the cost of bandwidth and deployment effort. LoraWAN devices are quite cheap at the margin (under $10 in bulk) but hardening, powering, and installing them is labor-intensive, to put it mildly.
They don’t even bother to use multi-port chargers, let alone DC to DC converters, or cars rigged for power generation. Not to mention open-source encrypted software-defined self healing mesh network microwave radio protocols.
Maybe wartime is not the best to introduce alternative infrastructure that are inherently new; maybe only what’s there peacetime works.
And if that is the case, what we would need might be such items as, sideloadable resilient mesh apps for teenagers, appliance-fied server for game sessions in University dorms, and parallel chargers for camping.
My acquaintances in Ukraine report using various batteries, and converting UPS devices to run on larger batteries, car batteries, etc. Electric power is now intermittent there, even in the capital, because Russian strikes are especially targeted to destroy the electric infrastructure.
Democracy is utterly dependant on a well informed population.
If the fair and balanced media fails (or access to it fails), then democracy is in peril.
If there was no electricity where I am at, the apartment would soon start to cool down. It is right now something like -6°C outside. I think it would take some days to cool down to that level.
Electricity keeps my food refrigerated and frozen, both at home and in the shop. Well, I should put the frozen food out on the balcony (and cover them up so that they don't melt if the sun shines during the day).
Kitchen oven and stove, and water kettle run on electricity. There would be very little cooking going on! Not to mention that electricity is needed to pump water from the ground level up to the apartment. So I should to fill all available containers with snow and take them inside to melt (before the apartment temperature drops below freezing).
Seems like loss of electricity would mean loss of heat, water and food in rapid order. It's difficult to imagine this loss to be very localized, so my neighbours would likely be suffering the same, perhaps the whole suburb. Without apartment or street lights less reliable members of the community might try to take advantage of the situation. Perhaps not, it's not a particularly restless environment. More resourceful members might come up with solutions to problems, but I can imagine the situation to be quite chaotic.
Without communication channels I can't ask if a friend or family member can support me, or if they need support. Or indeed if it is safe to move, and if so, how and where. Lack of street and even apartment lights might be a challenge to many and make traffic overall quite a bit more dangerous.
I don't know how reliable electricity would need to be. But some reasonable level of access to electricity is definitely more important than nice to have.
I mean, I lived this during finals week in college. During the day solar heating helps some. At night, with good insulation in the home it'll take some time to match outdoor temps, and a winter rated sleeping bag helps at night. One of my idiot roommates was using a sleeping bag as a comforter and complained at how cold it was on night 1. After I pointed out what the zipper was for, he reported it was toasty warm on night 2. You can do the same thing without a zipper, its just slightly less effective.
Also helps: the water heater runs on gas. So you can take a warm shower. In the dark, since most bathrooms have no windows, just exhaust fans. But the furnace, while it needs gas to heat, required electricity to move air. I'm not sure why, but water mains don't usually freeze despite the usually cold winters (though indoor plumbing requires certain precautions in the cold).
Cellphone towers usually have some batteries and backup plans in these situations, which was less useful back then before data plans existed, but meant you could still reach friends in case their power was on.
Finally: emergency generators are a thing. So as long as it isn't so cold that diesel freezes, emergency services will be available to the community in a school or something. In cold climates there are enough of these that in the lead up to the ice storm that caused the mess there were PSA campaigns to get them tested and vetted ahead of time -- if you just energize the lines without installing a cutoff switch, it can kill line workers trying to repair.
One of the points the article is making is that stuff like "off-grid power generation, packet radio infrastructure build outs, hardened underground storage containers for computing resources, etc" will be important in areas with active fighing / bombardment, many other areas may face entirely different types of challenges.
Do we have a process for quickly revoking CA certs owned by enemy countries? Do we have locally hosted mirrors for important content / services / tools that are hosted across undersea cables? The internet has been more and more integrated into our work lives and it does bear some thought to make those systems more resilient so the economy can maintain some level of functionality in a world war.
This is very wrong, everything NATO/ISAF related excepting the absolutely smallest temporary COP and FOB in Afghanistan had at minimum one basic VSAT terminal with IP link to the outside world.
You can't have modern C4I systems without data links. Note that a lot of what was implemented was not actually "The internet" as we know it, though there was lots of commercial DIA, there's plenty of ways to use two-way satellite capacity for entirely private networks.
The above was a firm rule and ground truth even 15-17 years ago, in the latter stages of the conflict (before the US lost political will to continue in 2021, Thanks, Trump and Pompeo and Biden...) data links for anything military related were even more crucial.
Portable battery packs and generators, or power on sometimes, but not all the time would be normal.
Same with internet/ISP connections.
Cellphone towers and WiFi would usually work, unless there is a big offensive going on at the time, etc.
That means a lot of the less severe stuff is worth talking about too.
+ Shared physical infra Trans-oceanic cables being the most fragile. However, the risk here would not immediately be of the power-food-shelter variety. Satellite-based comms will potentially add resiliency. Intra-region (depending on the region), there is less fragility (more independent fibers), and emergency tactics such as P2P mesh networks aided by swarms of drones, balloons, satellites becomes interesting.
+ Shared software infra Because my network talks to your network, and/or leverages common (or at least sometimes cascading) structures like DNS, NTP, shared BGP routing tables, what risks do I have? How could I mitigate them proactively? What would I do in an emergency which wouldn't have worse consequences (trade-offs are fine)? This category of risks can be difficult in that the events might not be obvious at first (unlike most physical infra events), but that could make it worse...
It's NOT that the Internet specifically was designed or intended for this, it was a research network. The pre-existing AT&T Long Lines network which carried telephone traffic around the US48 states also carried the DoD's AUTOVON network data links for their own phone system, and data links between things like SAGE direction centers.
Many of the cold war era hardened AT&T Long Lines bunkers, underground sites, special buried mountaintop sites and such all pre-date the earliest days of the ARPANET.
There's mountain top long lines sites out there now that couldn't be duplicated for less than $50 million. Money was thrown at this in quite a profligate manner - same as money was spent on various early generations of ICBMs, strategic air command 24x7x365 standby and patrols, the DEW line, and such.
In the era before inter-city singlemode fiber optic cables were a real operational reality these places were absolutely crucial.
The data links between sites in many cases rode on top of these networks in the earliest days of IP.
But this article kinda opens the possibility of world war taking place entirely in the data/communications realm.
1. There can be nuclear combatants but the fighting is primarily on the soil of non-nuclear countries.
2. Because of #1, the war more like World War 1 than in World War 2: some sort of peace treaty that doesn't stipulate unconditional surrender. There is no regime change nor post-war occupation of nuclear powers.
3. There is an unprecedently high level of communication between the nuclear combatants as both sides try to reassure the other that they aren't going to unilaterally launch nukes (there may be nuclear brinksmanship in public though as propaganda tool. Backchannels will be all about nuclear deescalation)
I suppose a regime change can come from within, as a consequence of a lost war and economic hardships. I suppose Russia has a fair chance to experience just that, once it loses.
I know military science is its own field with many long running scholarly journals, precisely 0 of which I've read. I fully acknowledge I speak from a point of ignorance, I'm just surprised and would like to know more