Tag: Lessons | Page 3

Possible Lessons for the IDF

March 26, 2023/in Internet Security

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 2,189, March 26, 2023

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The war in Ukraine is an example of modern high-intensity warfare. As such, it offers a number of lessons that can be learned about the capabilities, limitations, and requirements of armies conducting such warfare. New technology and methods have added capabilities, but have not rendered more traditional methods of warfare and technology obsolete. The IDF should learn to merge the new with the old by acquiring competence in new technology and tactics while maintaining technical and tactical competence in the veteran ”basics”.

This article will point out a few of the more important lessons the IDF can learn from the Russo-Ukraine War. Before discussing those lessons, however, a caveat must be stated. The political and military situations of Israel, Russia, and Ukraine are different, so not every lesson being taught by the warfare in Ukraine is relevant to Israel. Also, some lessons might be relevant “as is” while others might require adaptation.

A Shift in Expectations

There has been discussion for decades in Western armies and academia, as well as in Israel, on the changing characteristics of warfare. It has been proposed that these changes represent not merely an evolution but a revolution, in that changes are occurring not only in the characteristics of warfare but perhaps even in the nature of war itself. Some of this discussion is purely theoretical, while some is based on analysis of wars conducted in the 1990s and early 2000s. The year-long war in Ukraine has added much fuel to this debate.

Over the late 1990s and early 2000s, the IDF gradually adopted an extreme view of the transformation occurring in warfare and the adjustments it needed to make to its own composition and operational art. Future wars, its senior commanders believed, would no longer include major maneuvers of massed formations conducting high-intensity warfare (inaccurately dubbed “old”, “classic”, or “traditional” warfare), but would be purely low-intensity warfare with the enemy invariably employing methods of guerrilla warfare and terrorism. Accordingly, it was argued, the IDF should be reorganized and…

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Lessons from Africa’s innovation history

December 12, 2022/in Internet Security

It’s not as old as the Egyptian hieroglyphs, but the continent’s journey to digital innovation holds lessons for today. The bad news is that we’ve mostly not cared.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of recent memory and lose the context and lessons from where we started. Africa’s digital ecosystem is often discussed as something recent and from the past five years. And any conversation that goes 10 or 12 years into the past equals ancient history

Some of this is understandable. A lot has changed, and a lot more is changing every passing hour as the continent’s digital reality becomes a separate and fully dynamic force of its own.

At the same time, nothing much has changed. A lot of the conditions that predated the digital revolution, as it is called, still exist or have become worse in some cases. In other cases, the problems have transformed into subtle and not-so-subtle bottlenecks on the road to digital prosperity. In a digital ecosystem defined by high-growth mobile app startups and Silicon-Valleynomics, the missing context of how we got here is already exacting a huge price.

If there is anything Africa’s current crop of founders, operators, and entrepreneurs need today, it is conversation, stories and lessons from how the continent’s digital economy got the ball rolling.

Why

Nothing is new under the sun, the good book says, or to quote extensively from Russell Southwood’s new book, Africa 2.0: Inside a continent’s digital revolution:

The first cohort of sub-Saharan African start-ups appeared in the 1990s: in 1995 South African Mark Shuttleworth founded Thawte Consulting, which specialised in digital certificates and internet security: four years later, in 1999, he sold the company to Verisign for US$575 million. In 1998 the US-based Africa Online, which is arguably the ‘Africa start-up zero’ outside of South Africa, relocated to Kenya. The arrival of Mark Davies’s Busy Internet in Ghana in 2001 (see Chapter 2) spurred the creation of a whole community of first-wave start-ups.15 In the same year the G8 Dot Force Initiative set up Enablis to help entrepreneurs in Kenya and South Africa. As already outlined in…

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Bringing lessons from cybersecurity to the fight against disinformation | MIT News

August 21, 2022/in Computer Security

Mary Ellen Zurko remembers the feeling of disappointment. Not long after earning her bachelor’s degree from MIT, she was working her first job of evaluating secure computer systems for the U.S. government. The goal was to determine whether systems were compliant with the “Orange Book,” the government’s authoritative manual on cybersecurity at the time. Were the systems technically secure? Yes. In practice? Not so much.

“There was no concern whatsoever for whether the security demands on end users were at all realistic,” says Zurko. “The notion of a secure system was about the technology, and it assumed perfect, obedient humans.”

That discomfort started her on a track that would define Zurko’s career. In 1996, after a return to MIT for a master’s in computer science, she published an influential paper introducing the term “user-centered security.” It grew into a field of its own, concerned with making sure that cybersecurity is balanced with usability, or else humans might circumvent security protocols and give attackers a foot in the door. Lessons from usable security now surround us, influencing the design of phishing warnings when we visit an insecure site or the invention of the “strength” bar when we type a desired password.

Now a cybersecurity researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Zurko is still enmeshed in humans’ relationship with computers. Her focus has shifted toward technology to counter influence operations, or attempts by foreign adversaries to deliberately spread false information (disinformation) on social media, with the intent of disrupting U.S. ideals.

In a recent editorial published in IEEE Security & Privacy, Zurko argues that many of the “human problems” within the usable security field have similarities to the problems of tackling disinformation. To some extent, she is facing a similar undertaking as that in her early career: convincing peers that such human issues are cybersecurity issues, too.

“In cybersecurity, attackers use humans as one means to subvert a technical system. Disinformation campaigns are meant to impact human decision-making; they’re sort of the ultimate use of cyber…

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The lessons military planners are learning from the Ukraine invasion and what it means if the UK went to war with Russia | World News

June 26, 2022/in Internet Security

Throughout the Cold War, Britain’s military planners thought long and hard about what was needed to beat the Soviets if World War Three ever broke out.

Assuming both sides weren’t annihilated by nuclear weapons, they assumed a Soviet invasion would lead to a war in western Europe, and trained and equipped UK forces would need to counter that threat.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was believed that the threat was no longer there, and came from other places.

But the invasion of Ukraine has changed all of that. While analysts say a direct conflict between NATO and Russia is unlikely, it is possible – particularly in the Baltic states, or Finland.

The Ukraine war is providing a golden opportunity for British and NATO military planners to observe Russia fighting on the battlefield and to plan accordingly. Here, according to former Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) head Professor Michael Clarke and retired Air Vice Marshal Sean Bell, are a few of the lessons the MoD will be taking on board.

1. The days of purely expeditionary conflicts are over

For years, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the belief was that Western armed forces would only ever have to take part in what was known as ‘expeditionary’ wars. These are conflicts involving a strong military force going into a situation in which it has superiority, so it can win easily – for example the Gulf and Iraq wars and conflicts in Sierra Leone and Kosovo.

Now, the threat of an encounter with Russia – regarded as a military peer – is very present and it is arguable the British and other allied forces are not yet equipped for that.

Prof Clarke, former director of the RUSI and a fellow of Kings College London, told Sky News: “With British military planners … the idea of having to go all-out to fight a proper big war was ‘we’ll only do it with the US and certainly won’t be doing it for, let’s say, the next 10 years’.

“24 February showed that… Russia is now a manifest threat and will be for as long as Putin is in power and probably his successor as well. It is THE problem of European stability and security.”

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