The science of modern warfare

0:16Hello, welcome to the Naked Scientist podcast. This is the programme where we bring you the biggest breakthroughs and talk to the major movers and shakers in the worlds of science, technology and medicine. I'm Chris Smith. And this week, how science is shaping the future of warfare. From Cambridge University's Institute of Continuing Education, this is The Naked Scientists.

0:47From Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan to Myanmar, war is not something that happens elsewhere. It's present and it shapes economies, borders, families and futures. But modern warfare doesn't just happen with boots on the ground. It's deeply entangled with science and technology, from surveillance satellites and missile guidance weapons and battlefield algorithms. And in this episode, we're exploring how science is transforming the nature of war and what that means for the people who are living through it. We begin with Ukraine, where a war that started with tanks and artillery has become a testing ground for modern military science.

1:27Here, drone footage is analysed by AI, soldiers carry smartphones, as often as weapons and behind each trench line is a network of digital systems shaping what is coming next. Alona Hlyfko is a Ukrainian political analyst and defence strategist. For her, war isn't just a story in the news though. It involves her direct family and her brother in particular. Yeah, he's been on the front line for exactly three years already. He volunteered in March 2022, not probably anticipating that it will last this long but he's a part of a reconnaissance unit and that's just about as much that I can share meaning he's always on the front line or sometimes even too close to action which always keeps us worried and on our toes shall I say.

2:16Given your knowledge of how this is all playing out and what you do professionally what does this actually mean to you? How have you experienced what's happening to your your old country and given the family connection with all this? Well it's been a very interesting experience because on one hand acknowledging that there's a full-scale war in your country that definitely puts you in a state of shock for at least six months and having spoken to some Ukrainian friends they've gone through a similar process but also So at the same time, I was living in peaceful UK, in London specifically. So I needed to still stay sane, stay on top of my day-to-day job, my bills.

3:00So it was very much a dual existence for me, almost like a parallel reality where you need to coexist between work and war back home. This presumably, though, and I don't mean this in a rude way, but it must have been good for business because this is your business. That was the upside, yes. And I do fully agree with the statement that every challenge provides an opportunity. And it, of course, takes resilience and soberness, I guess, and a will to take whatever you have to face and turn it into something productive. So it 100 % accelerated my career unwillingly, because at the time of the invasion, I was just working in a think tank.

3:42And then I went on to run it to become a managing director here in Westminster and eventually even launched my own consultancy, focusing on exactly all of the things that the war in Ukraine is producing at the moment in the world, if that's the right way to say, because it is creating a new stage of modern warfare as we speak. What is dominating that? We hear about drones. They're probably the biggest thing that has really risen to prominence. But what is different about this conflict in Ukraine that has moved warfare on to a new level? I think the drones and autonomous systems are definitely grabbing the headlines the most because it's a novelty.

4:21But what's being talked less about is the multidimensional approach to war these days. So modern warfare now exists in multiple domains. We see the trench warfare with the engagement of infantry and artillery and heavy weapons being used as much, if not even more, than the First World War, Second World War level. At the same time, we're seeing a new digital dimension of this war, the development of modern technology, operating drones through artificial intelligence and deployment of that. electronic warfare is spiraling and booming. And I think that's going to be the biggest challenge for the Western nations to tackle when it comes to facing adversaries, but also other domains like economic warfare, like geostrategic struggle of trying to form new alliances and building new partnerships at the time of geopolitical fragmentation.

5:20Cyberspace is a really big one, and the one where Russia, for example, and China with their surveillance capabilities are getting more and more effective every day. So all of those domains exist simultaneously. And when you're fighting this war, you need to sustain all of those fronts at the same time. We've spoken to a number of military and defence specialists on a range of topics in recent years here on the programme, including about the war in Ukraine. And the one thing that they're saying is that while Western countries are arming Ukraine, they're also quite keen to do so because they're seeing how a lot of these modern generations of weapons and tactics actually play out in a real world circumstance where they wouldn't normally be able to test them like that until it was the real thing for them.

6:13So I suppose in that respect, they're quite keen to collaborate with Ukraine up to a point because they actually get to test things. Yes, Ukraine has definitely become a very effective testing ground for modern weapons. And it goes to everything from long-range missiles to tanks and armored vehicles to potentially very soon fighter jets as more F-16s are coming into Ukraine and being used in Ukrainian skies. But it's also about the drone technology that you've mentioned at the beginning of this conversation and all the modern developments. developments, whichever Western countries or even companies have access to Ukraine's battlefield, they can create something, deploy it on the battlefield and get live feedback of what to improve or how it could be improved.

6:59But it's also about learning from Ukrainian producers. The key to Ukraine's ingenuity is the lack of resources and the willingness to survive. And that combination creates a very quick and agile innovation cycle of about two weeks. So Ukrainians can create their drones in the garage with basic elements and particles. And then they would deploy it to the frontline, they would learn the lessons, they would see how Russia is reacting to them. And adjusting that to the electronic warfare, signaling and jamming, and basically the ability to destroy the drone and its ability to perform whatever tasks it was created to perform, the companies and the countries are learning very fast the innovation that they need.

7:45Alona Hlifko, founder and CEO of St James' Foreign Policy Group. As Alona was just explaining, modern conflict is very much a game of cat and mouse where combatants try to stay hidden. Stealth warfare, as it's called, is not just a tactical advantage but it's a field of applied science. It draws on physics, signal processing, materials engineering and mathematics all designed to outpace the systems built to detect and destroy. To understand how this stealth works, I met Ramsey Farragher, who's the CEO of the Royal Institute of Navigation at Queen's College in Cambridge, and I began by asking him how submarines attempt to avoid detection.

8:23The primary thing they try and do is stay incredibly quiet. So they move very, very slowly, typically just walking pace when they're trying to be quiet underwater. and in the very beginnings of the design of the whole vessel silence has been carefully considered so padded floors to try to reduce vibration of people moving around inside the submarine no big clunky worry bangy stuff on board and the other trick they try to employ is to hide in other sources of noise so if it's raining very hard submarines can hide under the raindrops on the water and even in certain times of year and certain parts of the world they can hide behind the sound of plankton mating.

9:03My goodness what does that sound like? Lots of loud chittering in the ocean. How do they know where they are though? Because when they're underneath the water they don't have windows you can't look out and look for landmarks and things so how does a submarine actually navigate? Yeah that is an excellent and very very expensive question. They have the world's most expensive accelerometers and gyroscopes on board that are monitoring every change in speed and orientation and just accumulating those changes in acceleration and rotation. That's called inertial navigation and over time the uncertainty as to where they are increases and so they still have to get some kind of position fix.

9:42So if they're quite confident that they can poke up a peristope they'll do so with a GPS antenna on the periscope and get a quick GPS fix and then they might not need to come up again for a whole nother day. They can get by on the gyroscopes and accelerometers and subs also have favorite particular places where they'll go and take a depth reading so they'll go to certain features and ping just once and get a depth onto some undersea mountain or similar structure that they know about and use that to get periodic position fixes as well when we want to actually see where things are we often use radar i mean in world war ii it was a game changer wasn't it being able to see through mist and fog and see things that were coming before they even knew you were there.

10:25How does radar do what it does? So radar is a radio signal that gets belted out very, very loudly from a big transmitter with a very particular pattern. And the radar then listens for that pattern to reflect off things and come back to it. And as you said, radar was invented just before World War II, but it's still the predominant way we can detect aircraft at long range today. And so the vast majority of stealth technologies are all about hiding from those pings. When you want to hide something from radar though how effective is that is it really possible to hide from radar and how does that work?

11:00One of them is to coat an aircraft or a ship with radar absorbent materials and they're generally slightly advanced versions of iron filings in rubber and paint and things like that. There's various tricks that are employed to absorb the radio signal and the second trick is to carefully design the shape of the ship or the aircraft such that the radar pulses bounce away from the radar that sent them in the first place. So there's this concept of a corner reflector, which is when you've got anything making an L shape, a 90 degree angle, which on traditional aircraft is exactly what the tail looks like.

11:38With the vertical fin and the two horizontal fins, they are perfect corner reflectors. a radar pulse will bounce beautifully back in the exact direction it came from, shining like a fighter jet Christmas tree. And if you look at stealth aircraft, they don't have any of these sorts of right angles as part of their main stretcher. Retro reflectors, aren't they? Isn't that how cat's eyes work in the road to show you the light from whatever angle you're looking? You see the cat's eyes illuminating the road ahead. It's the same thing. Exactly. And the reflectors on your bicycle. So they're for the visible.

12:11and they're basically corner reflectors that reflect visible light and big bits of metal a few feet long will be great for reflecting radar and there is a third trick actually which is quite rare and quite expensive which is called active suppression and that's when the aircraft attempts to very quickly capture the radar pulse make a copy of it and return the radar pulse out of phase so that it actually tries to knock out the incoming radar pulse. Wouldn't that make a gap though? So if you've got an astute radar operator, they'd see that there was this area that's darker than it should be, corresponding to a patch of sky.

12:50And so in fact, you'd be looking for the absence of something that tells you, oh, there's something trying to hide there. In terms of the direct radar return, it'll look exactly the same as there being nothing in the way. So the signal just goes out into space, which would be what you'd expect if there's nothing there. But what you're referring to is when we use bistatic or multistatic radars, and that's when you have the pulse being emitted from a different place to where you're receiving from. And then you can start to look for things that have absorbed energy that you expect to come to you.

13:23So say you normally expect to see radar pulses bouncing off a large mountain range in some particular area. and then you see this gap in that mountain range return that could have been a stealth aircraft that absorbed the energy that normally bounces back from you from that mountain range. So all of these sorts of tricks are played both above and below the water actually. Warfare has really shifted with the current conflict for instance in Ukraine towards much smaller aircraft. It's not being dominated by huge great jets and bombers above the skies of Ukraine and Russia. This is being fought by drones.

13:55This is really the first time we've seen this in a major way isn't it? Yeah, and stealth then is quite different, and sometimes it's not needed at all. So if you can put up thousands of incredibly cheap drones, they don't need to be stealthy at all. They just will completely overpower the defences of whatever you're trying to hit. And because they're very small and often made of plastic or other composite materials, they actually are quite invisible to radar too, so you get a double whammy. So it can be very hard to see a drone on radar, and they're so cheap you could put thousands of them up anyway.

14:27the interesting thing that i've seen emerging more recently though is the fact that they're now being flown on fiber optic because of people trying to jam them so drones appear people jam the signals that were controlling the drones now they're making fiber optic remote controlled drones yeah that's exactly right it's um the constant evolution of the weapon and then the counter measure against that weapon and then the counter counter measure so the original weapon was we've got lots of drones flown by radio using gps the counter measure was fine we'll put up load of jamming signals and we'll stop any of those radio signals getting to the drone.

15:01Then the counter measure was, OK, we'll put 15 kilometres of fibre reel on every drone and we'll fly via fibre. And it's just shown how complicated and rapidly evolving that particular theatre of war is. Ramzi Farragher, CEO of the Royal Institute of Navigation and also a bi-fellow at Queen's College in Cambridge. The Naked Scientist podcast is produced in association with Spitfire, cost-effective voice, internet and IP engineering services for UK businesses. Find out how Spitfire can empower your company at spitfire.co.uk.

15:40Music in the programme is sponsored by Epidemic Sound, perfect music for audio and video productions. This is the Naked Scientist podcast with me, Chris Smith, and today we're examining the science that is driving modern warfare. There are battles that we never see at all going on. No tanks, no sirens, no smoke, just clever computer scientists and mathematicians going about their daily business. In the 21st century, conflict often plays out in cyberspace through data breaches, ransomware attacks, sabotage of infrastructure and the silent theft of state secrets. Power grids get disrupted, hospitals can be paralysed and elections manipulated, but it rarely looks like an act of war.

16:25Modern espionage has evolved alongside it. Once it was characterised by briefcases in smoke-filled bars, but now it involves malware, quantum encryption and digital surveillance that can take place from a kitchen table. Kieran Martin founded the UK's National Cyber Security Centre and he's now based at the University of Oxford. Cyber is pretty much always and everywhere a secondary or enabling effect. Now, let's say you've got a well-designed power grid that doesn't have a single off button and it can detect presences. You might have a little bit of disruption, but you couldn't take out the whole thing.

17:02There are a couple of interesting examples going back to the pre-full war period in Ukraine. So in 2015 and 2016, in December of both years during the winter, the Russians went for Ukrainian power grids. And it took them, according to some studies, for one of them it took a year and a half, for the other it took two and a half years to prepare these attacks because they're enormously technically complicated. And they achieved limited outages of about seven hours in one case and two hours or under in another case, affecting millions of people. So it was pretty inconvenient and pretty scary. But compare that to what a fighter jet can do, what a bomber plane can do, what a missile can do.

17:40In Russia, Ukraine, you're seeing a fierce intelligence contest where the Russians will spy on where are Ukrainian civilians hiding? And they find out that they're in Mariupol theater. They use cyber to work out what's going on in Mariupol. And then they send in the bombers and the bombers are much more cruelly, devastatingly effective. You see a huge information war. You see digital reconnaissance before the fighter jets go in to power grids and so forth. So you see all sorts of things. But in the words, for example, of the former head of the British Army, General Sir Patrick Sanders, you can't cyber your way up a river.

18:16You can't hold ground with cyber. You can't conquer a territory the size of Ukraine with just cyber. But it's an important and very nuanced supporting capability for intelligence, for information and to enable disruption and military effect. And you can, of course, also through propaganda, influence elections, which means you can put the right person in the right job at the right time, which might load the dice. You can. And I think when we're talking about that sort of issue, it's not just about elections. It's about the whole dynamic of democratic politics in lots of different countries. And in terms of the Russian-Ukraine war, the information and influencing and manipulation of media, of political discourse is enormous.

19:04And one of the things you're seeing, for example, at the moment in terms of issues like community relations in Western countries, a lot of whom are divided over, say, the conflict in the Middle East. You're seeing local Facebook groups being infiltrated by malicious content, misleading content, designed to provoke, designed to divide. And presumably the rise of AI is making some of these things a lot easier. Again, it's important to look at the detail. So back at the end of 2023, people were looking ahead to the next year, which was going to be the year of elections, where most of the democratic world, by coincidence, was having national plebiscites.

19:44and people were warning about the risks of deepfakes and ruining elections and so forth. And none of that happened because it's very hard, even with a really sophisticated deepfake, to deceive an entire population. People will notice that it's fake, that will be amplified and so forth. What we actually saw instead in the US, a bit in the UK, is what I was just talking about. quite clever little fakes in local areas, quite clever bits of targeted agitation, which went below the radar of national media and national discourse. So the counter example is the Russians did one of the most sophisticated, in the technical sense, deep fakes I've ever seen, where they pretended to have the Ukrainian deputy national security advisor on television saying that Ukraine was responsible for the horrible terrorist attack in Moscow in March 2024.

20:40The problem with that, even though it was technically brilliant and the voice sounded right and the speaker looked right and so forth, was that it was completely implausible. Loads of people had seen the original show it was supposed to be where it didn't happen. The TV company released the original show and it just didn't pass the smell test. There was no way a senior member of the Ukrainian government was going to go on live TV and say that they had been behind this attack when the rest of the government was vociferously denying it. So I think you have to look for those more micro-targeted points.

21:10There was an example where turnout in the 2024 Democratic primary in the state of New Hampshire was depressed because there were AI-generated robocalls to Democratic supporters telling them to stay at home. And people, when they were alone and vulnerable, were much more susceptible than when they were with peers, when they were engaging with other people who could tell them that it wasn't true. So it's a risk to watch. But again, the details of how that risk manifests really matter. Where do you think we are vulnerable in this space, then? Where do we need to put our efforts to a showing that there's a deterrent effect and be tightening up security to make sure that we don't fall victim?

21:48So we have to essentially plan for every organisation, particularly critical ones have to plan for the loss of a key network. Sure, try and defend against it, but you can't defend against everything. How are you going to cope to an acceptable level if you're hacked? So that's the one big worry. And I think it requires, to use the cliche, a whole of society defensive approach. Deterrence is much harder. People talk a lot about cyber deterrence and we should hit back hard. And the question you've got to ask is, what activity are you proposing? We can potentially, and we wouldn't obviously disclose this if we were doing it, We can hold other countries' critical infrastructure at risk.

22:26But it's unlikely that we're going to go around hacking civilian hospitals, that we're going to put innocent people in other countries at risk. So deterrence is actually quite hard in that respect, which is why one of the things you want to use the theory is sort of deterrence by denial, which is making it harder, which goes back to your point about protecting us better. Kieran Martin, founder of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre. As we've been hearing, science has always shaped war, from the invention of gunpowder, the tank and radar, through to the atomic bomb, a weapon that was born from theoretical physics.

23:02But today, new technologies are pushing these boundaries even further. Autonomous drones, artificial intelligence, gene editing and space-based systems are changing what war will look like in the future. So to conclude this episode, here is Joan Johnson-Freece, who's a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. National War College and also author of Space Warfare in the 21st Century, Arming the Heavens. Technology always outpaces policy and strategy for use. And what worries me as someone who focuses on space is there's too little thought being put into what's the end game? How do you end a space war?

23:46What's the off ramp? And although a lot of the space war games are very highly classified, we do know from summaries given the problem of distance. You don't know what's going on. You don't know if your satellite went out because it was hit by a piece of debris, it malfunctioned, or a hostile act. And so there's a tendency to assume the worst and act on a use it or lose it basis, which means that things escalate very rapidly and into the nuclear zone. Because of course, space is where all the nuclear warning assets are and everyone wants to adopt a use it or lose it approach. How do you dial this back?

24:30And once the assets are lost, you're getting into some real tricky realms. But it would be an excellent way to really be disruptive, wouldn't it? Without doing too much damage on the ground, initially at least. If you caused major havoc in space, you can blind your enemies, you can really mess up their economy. You couldn't even take cash out at the bank if we knock out the GPS system. You knock out the GPS system and bad things are going to happen, not just to the military and not just to the country that was being targeted, but on a pretty widespread basis. And again, I think people don't think enough about the secondary and down-the-line effects of taking out space technology.

25:11And we know from some past tests, even dating back to the 60s, that, you know, you break up a satellite, you create a lot of debris, and that debris doesn't know if it's hitting your satellite or somebody else's. So there are these secondary effects in terms of the space technology that are hard to predict. We learn strategy from looking at what has happened in the past. We don't have anything to look at when it comes to space. We can predict, but we don't really know. So if you get into, let's take out that satellite, let's blind that satellite. You don't have to blow up a satellite to make it dysfunctional.

25:53You can blind it, but is that an act of war? And is that an act of war that's going to bring on similar retaliation or escalation. One of the reasons that we've had wars in the past is because of concerns over biological threats. And I mean, this sounds a little bit yesterday as well compared to things like AI and cyber security and so on. But is that still on the table? Or have people learned their lesson about that thinking, no, we always end up being shot in our own foot. So we just won't go down that path. Or is that still regarded as a realistic threat, biological warfare? It must be still considered a threat.

26:32I think there are individuals and groups who, for them, biological weapons might be the easiest to access, because from the programs, the military programs in the past, do we have an accurate inventory of what was developed, What happened to it? Was it destroyed? We would all be remiss not to consider biological warfare as a threat, not just based on the past, but again, countries are going to want to continue to develop responses to biological threats, which could in themselves propagate new issues. So anytime something becomes a threat, it's very difficult to put it in a box and say that threat has now gone away.