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Say you're a government that employs a variety group of rebels, insurgents, terrorists, or freedom fighters to advance your national goals. Like any crafty strategist, you want to inflict maximal damage on your enemies while minimizing the potential blowback to yourself – while ideally avoiding excess costs and casualties among the people on your payroll.
What a time to be alive, because new technologies are vastly expanding the ability of so-called "non-state actors" (nerd term, but that's who we are) to bloody the noses of their enemies, in particular leveling the playing field between militants and nation states. What the Kalashnikov rifle did for militants of the 20th century (hat tip to Moises Naim on this), new technologies are doing for non-state actors of the 21st.
Consider, first of all, drones, which were in the news again after Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed (now disputedly) to have used them to hit Saudi Arabia's oil facilities over the weekend. Drones are many desirable things at once: They are cheap – experts estimate some early models used in Yemen's civil war cost as little as $10,000 a pop to put together from basic parts. They're lethal. And, thanks to big improvements in range in 2018, the Houthis' drones are now capable of striking targets nearly a thousand miles away.
Drones aren't your thing? Let us show you into the cyberattacks aisle, because those also fit the mold: bad actors in cyberspace today have access to more powerful malware and a wider array of targets than ever before. The biggest cyberattacks have typically been state-sponsored – think Russia's NotPetya or the WannaCry ransomware attack launched by North Korea, which caused billions of dollars of damage around the world in 2017. But non-state actors are increasingly stepping up their game: criminal gangs have already paralyzed the computer systems of entire cities, like Atlanta and Baltimore, to try to extract ransom. Russia routinely uses proxies in its disinformation campaigns and other cyber campaigns. Meanwhile, critical infrastructure may only grow more vulnerable as 5G networks wire together everything from water plants to refrigerators to self-driving cars to pacemakers.
Into more of a SciFi look, you say? If you can hire a good rogue scientist, consider that some influential voices in the US intelligence community are already warning that new precision gene-editing techniques could become widespread enough to be weaponized, creating new pathogens or pests that wreak havoc on populations and ecosystems. Examples: modifying anthrax's genetic code to make it much more potent, or perhaps even altering a virus to make it disproportionally target carriers of a certain gene.
All of these technologies are complicating the ability of nation states to defend themselves. And unlike the Kalashnikov or other low-tech methods typically favored by non-state actors, they don't usually require putting people directly in harm's way. We've only just begun to understand how that's going to change the global balance of power between individuals, groups, and nation states.
So, what was it that you wanted to buy again?