The fantastical in Hollywood movies is a given as Marvel, DC Comics, Disney, MGM, Universal, Sony fight it out on the sci-fi battlefronts. The Terminator franchise with its Skynet neural-net future ushered in a dystopian future not far from today’s realities… full-spectrum dominance, right?
Weapon Systems Cybersecurity:
DOD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Vulnerabilities
Published: Oct 9, 2018.
At Strategic Demands, we read the Government report and we think Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Halo, Descent, Macross, Babylon 5, Gundam … movies and television, games and role playing. Today’s generation of kids blasting away in cyberspace, prepping for future warfare as game playing, role playing adversaries with Chinese, Russian, US and other nation’s forces aligned in new unpredictable alliances.
The downside isn’t visible, except to war planners.
A Future of “Dispensers”
It’s Just The Start
“These Pods Could Let Drones Carry Throngs of Small Smart Bombs”.
Similar “dispensers” could allow aircraft ((F-35) to carry hundreds, even thousands of ‘smart targeting’ weapons.
The U.S. Army is considering the Hatchet miniature munition, a tiny precision glide bomb, as a possible future armament option for its MQ-1C Gray Eagle drones together with dispenser pods that could let a single one of the unmanned aircraft carry dozens of them at a time. At the same time, the manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, is proposing larger systems that would enable MQ-9 Reapers in service with the U.S. Air Force to carry hundreds of the weapons on a single mission.
Orbital ATK first unveiled Hatchet, which weighs approximately eight pounds and has a three-pound warhead, in 2012. Northrop Grumman finished its acquisition of the Virginia-headquartered defense and space systems firm, in June 2018, subsequently renaming it as their Innovation Systems division.
Space Force
Tracking and Targeting from Space.
Air Force under Heather Wilson paints a picture of a new frontier, new insignias, a new war with satellite monitoring and hyperspace vehicles, autonomous weapons, space-based lasers (remember the “Death Star” ?), linear particle accelerators, particle-beam weapons, microwaves and plasma-based weapons, ‘old-fashioned’ kinetic bombs with ‘spotter’ satellites, low-orbit reentry hardened tactical systems.
The future of CyberSecurity or CyberWarfare is far beyond war planning and far from the front-line skirmishes signalling the age of Cyber/Information War. CyberWarfare is winning.
The upcoming Age of Cyberwar will be a boon for weapons producers and a bane for civilians paying the deep costs of a global war.
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