Modern Warfare 2.0

Gone are the days when battles were fought in battlefields with the country having the most powerful weapons coming out as the winner. These days traditional arms are being outgunned by electronic warfare technologies or autonomous and remote drones. In the future, individual soldiers will still make a difference, not only thanks to innovations in their weaponry and armory but also via their AI driven, integrated personal intelligence platforms. They will have access to gadgets that come straight from a video game. From enhanced soldiers to Killer Robots and Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, this episode will reveal the new age of digitized battlefields.

Originally conceived from aerial reconnaissance, drones have now evolved to be armed with a range of missiles and bombs. The successor of the Predator drone is called Reaper and was specifically designed as a "hunter-killer". As technology becomes ever more sophisticated and linked to artificial intelligence. Air Force pilots are now being trained as drone operators and suicide bombers are being replaced with kamikaze drones. This episode takes us through the challenging concept of unmanned warfare and looks at their first introduction in Afghanistan and how the recent conflict in Ukraine has seen drones deployed on the battlefields of Europe today.

For years, the United States has been concerned about a news weapon class that has the ability to change warfare as we know it - part of a category of weapons that were once only seen in science fiction films, today they are more than a reality. A directed energy weapon uses highly focused energy such as lasers, microwaves and particle beams to damage its targets. Electra-magnetic pulses can be used to take out electric circuits of entire cities within a flash and Laser-based weapons have been developed to intercept and destroy missiles since the days of the Star Wars program in the 80s. These are the weapons that would open a new realm of warfare - outer space.

Weapons so dangerous that they are banned from warfare, and despite the ban, they are still being used, with many heads of state having used them against their own citizens. This episode highlights how certain regimes have implemented the use of different chemical weapons which can be deployed across borders, like sophisticated poisons that have been increasingly weaponized for eliminating political opponents and enemies of the state. Worst of all - these weapons have been used by terrorist groups like in sarin attacks in Japan and Al-Qaeda's Chlorine attacks in Iraq. What will a future world look like with biological weapons still readily available.

Throughout history, weapons of mass destruction have been the final frontier, a place we never want to go. While in the first years after WW2 people associated them with nuclear warfare, the term has now evolved to include chemical attacks, hypersonic missiles, neutron bombs, the list goes on. Today's atomic weapons are 10,000 times mroe powerful than the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their goal is not only to cause the most damage and lethality possible but above all to deprive the enemy of its capacity or willingness to fight back. yet, a new invisible, but widespread platform has been more and more used - cyber, turning cyberspace into a new warfare realm. Although these mostly cause technical or financial damage, they have the potential to impair a whole nation to fight back against an enemy attack with the same efficacy as a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD). Will the future weapon of mass destruction not only destroy us but the society we rely on to survive.