by Joseph Mazur

To understand war is to identify its roots in conflict. A war starts with one side or another rolling on odds of winning according to plan. Like chess, beginning with 20 possible distinct moves and getting exponentially more as it goes, the finales of war are unforeseeable. Yet statistical determinism tilts the odds of winning to the side of the most motivated force that builds, possesses, promotes, and sells the most and best weapons.

It should be talked about and written about, so as to bring to light the interests and the profits that move the puppet strings of war.

– Pope Francis, Urbi et Orbi message 2023.¹

The it in the epigraph refers to arms dealing. And so, as arms production, sales, and trade rise to sustain many of the forty-two ongoing wars, I find myself writing about the people and companies that benefit from wars, the arms dealers, manufacturers, politicians, and public investors. There is a hidden truth about that, but you never hear about it: that wars happen partly because of the existence of a profitable weapons industry supported by powerful influence.

Though the number of global wars and war-related deaths has declined since the last world war, our wars are getting bloodier. Yet still, there are spikes from year to year, and to be clear, most current wars are internal civil wars or terrorist insurgencies, while inter-state wars between developed nations are rare.

More people have died from wars in the last century, including the two World Wars, than in all the wars of the past going back beyond the Peloponnesian Wars of the fifth century BC (431-404). Yes, I know the number of inhabitants, continents, borders, and weapons is much higher now than in history. Now, though, for some wars, according to a recent UN report on the war in Ukraine, “civilians account for nearly 90 percent of war-time casualties.”² There is good reason for that. The new weapons, even those that are as precise as can be, are becoming more automated and astonishingly robotic. Future wars will increase the civilian/combatant ratio because those wars will involve fewer human fighters. More about that later.

Will there ever be a time of less wars?

Past and future wars tell us who we are as animals. We build and sell weapons to destroy enemies who could otherwise be our fellow friends and strangers enjoying a magnificent planet containing all the resources needed to build healthful, joyful lives for everyone. Just imagine what we could do with world friendship. Why do we have enemies, we ask? Some would say that having enemies is an animal hangover from primordial days when suspicion of outsiders was heightened by safety instincts. Others would say levels of greed come with who we are as individuals. When a country is determining whether to go to war, pacifications are hindered by the money that could be made from weapons sales. Nobody, other than revolutionaries, terrorists, a few totalitarian dictators with dreams of imperial conquest, and arms dealers, wants wars but the economics of winning or losing is not trivially ignored.

Eliminating unnecessary wars or even shortening them is against the interests of arms dealers, and elected government officials looking for expansions of resources to keep the military-industrial complex roaring and soaring the economy to yield high profits. Those same players are banking on how future wars will play out. At issue is the profit margin and the risk of public sentiment. Wars can and do go badly. Battlefield performance is a sales convention where weapons are on display.

If we hope to answer the daunting question of a time without or with fewer wars, we must first admit that some humans tend to need rivals and that some countries do too. Perhaps that’s why we relish in playing and watching those athletic sports that have us choose sides to satisfy our social temperaments. But craving nemeses calls for an over-challenging question about emotions that would be foolish for me to answer. Psychologists have been digging for answers for the last two centuries when the field began studying human mental processes and behavior. Before that, for millennia, those mind and behavior questions were naively answered by philosophers. And before, still, there is the foundational story of Cain and Abel. Of course, killing seems to be a primordial reaction to anger. By a common interpretation, Cain killed Abel out of jealousy and hence anger that his brother’s offering seemed more worthy.

There are wars between siblings, within families, and between political divides and related societies. Those wars are no different from those between states whose governments were formed to protect their populations from harm and to ensure survival through the security of available food, water, and clean air. But every war that has ever been fought—even those between far-off geographies—harms the populations of both the invaders and defenders. Noncombatant war casualties had been documented as far back as the 3^rd century Punic Wars (264-146) between Rome and Carthage that lasted more than a hundred years. Same with the Crusades, and on and on, they continued to mount losses through more than two thousand years of warfare until now. 

Wars start for many reasons: fear of the other, competition for resources, and, too often, geopolitical one-upmanship maneuverings—all from thinking-animal failures. For modern wars, count the field-testing of military tools for future weapons marketability. A defence buildup in one country frightens neighboring countries into an arms race. Defences might start under the foolhardy wisdom of benign protection; however, once a country has a military capability more advanced than its neighbors, the bully instinct of capable dominance becomes politically enticing, especially when the other’s intentions are not trusted. 

Pragmatically, we must first understand why private arms sales are legal for federally licensed dealers. You can buy whatever you want, from tanks to rockets to planes and all the hardware needed for maintenance, delivered by corrupt officials in control of former Soviet Union weapons considered obsolete by advanced countries. How about an RPG Soviet anti-tank grenade launcher for about $2,000 from European suppliers in Bulgaria, Romania, or the Czech Republic? One of those could destroy a million-dollar tank. However, the world does have standards for trading conventional arms, thanks to a legally binding Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) negotiated through the United Nations. Yet, even with that international code of conduct for the transferring of armaments, we have 56 countries exporting arms from fighter jets to missiles.³  With almost 30 percent of the world’s countries trading arms, constant wars are inevitable, and we will see them growing in number for the foreseeable future.⁴

“Just as private military companies have a vested interest in the profit opportunities which armed conflict creates for them, so insurgents and guerrillas are able to feed off the aid and supplies provided to the indigenous victims of war.”⁵ 

And who are those unknown suppliers ranking number 29 in Table 2? They keep low profiles for personal security. One anonymous dealer told Anna Myroniuk, Head of Investigations for the Ukrainian newspaper, Kyiv Independent, “Some of the brokers told journalists that their colleagues had been threatened by the Russians. In Belgium and Norway, arms dealers claim to have been followed on their way home.”⁶ Some dealers are registered, Others are not. Who are those dealers supplying guerrilla organizations, revolutionary armed forces, or private armies for hire? Where there are wars, there are arms providers. When there are arms providers, there will be wars. And with more wars, there will be more dealers earning excessive profits eager to heat arms markets to inflate prices and keep those wars going. That is the obscure brilliance of arms dealing. To pick one example, from the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine till now, weapon suppliers to that war have quadrupled their prices.⁷ 

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) uses trend-indicator value (TIV) as a system to measure the volume of international transfers of conventional weapons based on size, weight, range payload, and age, not on cost. Small arms and light weapons, trucks, and artillery under 100-mm caliber ammunition transfers are not included in the database. Aircraft, air defence systems, anti-submarine warfare weapons, armored vehicles, artillery with a caliber over 100 mm, engines, missiles, unmanned air, and sea vehicles (drones), reconnaissance satellites, and ships are all part of the transfer database (see: Table 2).

Success with military equipment in warfare is a show for potential buyers. Wars are testing grounds for equipment, a roadshow sales convention where weapons are on display, so a poor showing leads to fewer purchases. Russia’s arms sales are now ranked in 3^rd place after the United States and France.⁸ It will soon be in 10^th, given its poor performance in its war with Ukraine.⁹ Russia’s revenues have dropped roughly 26 percent from last year to this, a consequence of badly losing at the start of its invasion.

With weapons, war will come. Nine of the top 10 weapon-producing countries have been at war for most of their independent existence. It appears there is a correlation between a country’s weapons revenue and war engagements. In one way, it seems that countries heavily manufacturing weapons will enter wars to show off their weapons. On the other hand, war itself encourages weapons manufacturing. Ranking 4th in TIVs and 7th in arms revenue, China is the only heavy arms-producing country in the top 10 that has not acted in any international wars for the last forty-four years. That is just one country in the story, so it doesn’t confirm either view.

Unregistered dealers buy weapons from one rebellious militia to sell to another or use corrupt officials to gain weapons and sell them to private armies. Those suppliers are part of the problem. Then there are the companies with yearly revenues in the tens of billions of dollars along with their lobbying powers of political manipulation. For example, Lockheed Martin’s annual revenue in 2023 was $67.6 billion. With that much money at stake, the pressure is heavily on, not just for producing weapons stockpiled for anticipation of use, but also for the momentum of continued wars. Used weapons need to be replaced. Five of the combined top US weapons manufacturers earned $189 billion in 2022, close to 3.8 percent of the $4.9 trillion of US federal revenues and 0.7 percent of the US GDP. Consider what those companies will do with their influence powers over public officials on the issue of weapon manufacturing and development.¹⁰

Will those few corporations accept conditions leading to fewer wars in the world with diminished arms sales? Will they so easily mothball their weapons plants to focus development on home appliances and commercial aircraft at just 31 percent of current revenue? Shareholders would protest when they see their shares steeply dropping in value. And what about the rest of the world? Besides the revenues from the five top US companies, the other 94 companies around the world reap annual arms revenue of over $408 billion. Sure, a few could go back to building more Airbuses and dishwashers, but their earnings would drop to almost 7 percent of their weapons profit. 

The leaky pipeline of small arms traffic

“We cannot keep mopping up the damage while the pipeline keeps leaking.”¹² On October 20, 2022, the UN General Assembly First Committee agreed that corruption is almost impossible to stop but that there are means of arms-control measures that can be made to prevent the trafficking of weapons.

Drug cartels in Colombia, Mexico, and Guatemala get their weapons either by stealing from manufacturing facilities or by illegally buying from underground supply chains of the black market. But those consortia are looking for small arms, transportable military weapons from automatic assault rifles to surface-to-air missiles. In Africa, armed groups and government forces in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, South Sudan, and Sudan are eagerly courting suppliers. Of those states, only Nigeria can manufacture arms through ProForce Limited, a state-based company that provides defence equipment for West Africa. Other countries’ weapons are not produced on the continent. So, who is selling to them?

Before the war in Ukraine, Russia was the region’s largest arms exporter. With Western sanctions on Russia limiting parts supplies, the world is seeing its poor showing of outdated arms. African countries are looking elsewhere for arms supplies. It is impossible to know the channels that governments will tap for more war weapons; there are always underground markets involving corrupt officials who steal not-so-small arms. But revolutionary and mutineer groups, ready to overthrow their respective governments, also will be looking for corrupt officials who can divert weapons from other sources. Weapons used in African conflicts are mostly produced outside the continent and a large fraction of them are dispersed and acquired by illegitimate armed groups. That puts so much of Africa is the center of illicit small arms trade.

Corruption is almost impossible to stop but there are means of arms-control measures that can be made to prevent diversion of weapons. What can export states do to curb illegal trafficking? Nothing, if it is impossible to keep an electronic trail. So, our wars go on to make more. But we live in an age where electronic footprints are ubiquitous, and so why not track the paths of trafficking?

Gunrunning small arms

Small arms, generally referring to guns from handguns to automatic machineguns and any incendiary devices or explosive munitions, are manufactured by either an arms-dealing company, defence department suppliers, illicit homegrown groups, or ex-combatant civilians who refurbish the arms they kept. Few gunrunners deal with heavy arms trading because the UN has adopted and ratified the Arms Trade Treaty  to trace and prosecute anyone suspected of illegal trade, but the biggest non-governmental trades that keep small wars going are the small arms legal and illegal industries.¹³ Almost every country in the world,—small, large, peaceful, weak, and powerful—trades in small arms. All have a slim chance of being liable for firearm misuse that causes physical damage or the loss of human life. Manufacturers or dealers are not liable for their instruments of war when things go wrong. Gun manufacturers in the U.S. have the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) on their side. That Act shields them from misuse of their firearms after sales. For the U.S. there are extremely rare exceptions in favor of plaintiffs; when a gun manufacturer violates state or federal law in marketing or sale, the PLCAA does not apply. The gun manufacturer, Smith & Wesson, was sued by survivors of the Highland Park, Illinois mass shooting that left seven dead. The Sandy Hook school shooting left twenty children and six adults dead. Their families settled a lawsuit against the gun manufacturer Remington for $73 million.

There are 663 gun and ammunition manufacturing businesses in the U.S., but in South Sudan, there is just one, the Military Industry Corporation, a state-run defence corporation that produces firearms, munitions, and artillery. South Sudan, a country with no large-scale weapons industry, has been at civil war against multiple internal and external forces for more than a decade. That begs the question: How do those two warring sides get their weapons? One source is the state-owned Chinese defence corporation Norinco, which sold 95,000 assault rifles and 20 million rounds of ammunition to the South Sudan government. Another was through Erik Prince, Chairman of the private security firm Frontier Services Group based in Houston, Texas. His company provided three Mi-24 Soviet-era-made large gunship attack helicopters with two Soviet-made L-39 Albatross light ground-attack jets for $43 million. Those sales were legal, as they came from UN-licensed arms traders.¹⁴ But how did the government acquire 30 T-55 Soviet-made battle tanks and 10 BM-21 Soviet self-propelled rocket launchers? They came from a company owned by a Serbian businessman, Slobodan Tesic, implicated in having connections to transnational organized crime.¹⁵ Most illicit conventional arms come from “government disposals of ‘surplus’ arms or thefts from insecure government stockpiles” paid for with either cash or “blood diamonds” with no paper trails.¹⁶

Just to be clear, many wars are.

Africa is just one continent with a trafficking problem, but not the only one. According to the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, illicit arms dealing is “a worldwide scourge” of firearms markets in Europe and Africa presenting a serious threat to world security. With unknown high-tech rogue sellers and buyers, shippers, states, and some organized crime groups. including, of course, governments and private licensed manufacturers, any private group with enough cash or blood diamonds can supply a rebellion or militia with enough weapons to become a significant force.

In the U.S., arms trafficking is meticulously controlled, except when not. Many countries accept trafficking as just regular business. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the arms from Soviet-controlled countries were practically gifts to traders, so the businesses exploded in the late years of the twentieth century.

Running weapons from one country to another goes through an intelligence channel, but sometimes, in transferring, they are diverted by corrupt middlemen to unintended groups. When the legitimate arms trader Sarkis Soghanalian was interviewed by Frontline/World co-producer William Kistner in 2001, he talked about shipments getting into the wrong hands; he told a story about a delivery of 10,000 AK-47s that was to go to the Peruvian government but ended up in the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or was it “the Ecuadorians or drug dealers, we don’t know.”¹⁷

All countries need arms, and those that manufacture weapons are willing to sell. So, most countries look the other way, avoid prosecution of illegal brokers and traffickers, and even welcome some of the most notorious dealers profiting from illegal arms deals. One is Viktor Anatoliyevich Bout, believed to be the world’s biggest arms dealer, a Russian who admits having sold weapons to the Taliban in the late 1990s when his profits were close to $50 million. Another was Dale Stoffel, who contracted to sell 34 Russian missiles to Boeing to test American ship defence systems, though that sale was never completed. It’s hard to find current dealers because they live protected in a semi-mob incognito underworld. And there was Jean-Bernard Lasnaud, a French-born American citizen, who said he earned on-average, between $1M to $2.5M a year. You could have bought tanks, rocket launchers, Scud missiles, helicopters, small arms, fighter jets, field hospitals, and anti-aircraft missile launchers from Lasnaud before he became an Interpol wanted man who had disappeared.¹⁸ 

A vast majority of deaths attributed to wars are done with low-tech small arms and explosives. But many illegal weapons dealers can and will sell anything, including heavy arms to the highest bidder, be it a country, a revolutionary group, or a terrorist organisation.

By Witnessing Stories of Drone Advancement, Artificial Intelligence’s Future Weapons seems Unhindered by International Law.

In the last century, conventional weapons came from relatively few heavy-industry corporations tightly connected to the military wings of governments. There were always small arms manufacturers and some homemade gun assembly and ammunition creations made in garages and sold through black markets. In this century, arms innovations and supplies are coming from the tech sector and a much larger group of garage manufacturers who build smart lethal devices from information available on the Internet.

For another partial answer to whether there will ever be fewer wars, we explore AI tools of future warfare. Lethal drones are superseding conventional air and sea weapons. Millions are being manufactured, some are homemade and relatively cheap. A smart one might cost a few thousand dollars and, with remote human help, can attack an enemy target worth many millions. But the day will come, perhaps very soon, when they become equipped with enough sophisticated artificial intelligence to spot, identify, and attack enemy combatants autonomously. In 2017, Vladimir Putin, a leader of few scruples who shows little regard for international law, said, “The one who becomes the leader in this sphere [AI] will be the ruler of the world.”¹⁹  Elon Musk surprisingly rejoined Putin’s remark at that time, “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” Russia, though, with its Lancet kamikaze drones showing little success on the battlefield through many misses and failed strikes, does not yet possess autonomous killer drones.²⁰ 

Almost seven years have passed since Putin’s AI-ruler-of-the-world assertion, and so far, drones perform best with human piloting from distant control. But now, defence contractors everywhere, including military, academic, and private sector labs, are developing AI technologies to build autonomous armies and air forces as fighting machines.

Do we truly believe that military drones, those lightweight lethal helicopters, or jet ski drones are the digital future of weaponry? The U.S. Air Force has accelerated sights on AI-based mission control systems to be placed in F-16s so that heavy combat fighter jets could be in autonomous mode. Testing is currently underway, but evidence shows that the Air Force is not far from having a total autopilot dogfighting craft by 2030.²¹ Still, the future of warfare is impossible to predict, as many current four-star military officers, historians, and futurists will admit.²² 

The one big question, “Why are there so many wars?” becomes three:

1. How would future wars be fought?
2. Who would supply weapons in future wars?
3. Can international laws be strengthened to regulate future weapons?

As new generations of autonomous weapons systems become available, more combatants can fight from home. In February 2024, a Ukrainian special operations unit piloted from a laptop on the waterfront of the Black Sea six Magura V5 sea drones on jet skis, moving at 42 knots to sink the Russian guided-missile warship Ivanovets that was transporting ammunition. A month later, Ukraine Special Operations Group 13, using the same brand of sea drones, sunk Sergey Kotov, the newest Russian warship built for $65 million.²³ The Magura V5 is relatively small, fast, and hard to see. Warships cannot easily target or out-maneuver such a nimble attack weapon.

While war data analytics and computational capabilities are powered now by advances of artificial intelligence that can mark prize targets, cybertechniques of economic, political, and informational warfare are progressively playing their parts in direct and indirect warfare. The weapons industry and its dealers are no longer just players in manufacturing and distributing hardware weapons, they have expanded into hybrid warfare activity. What was once a profit productiveness has become an even more powerful force.²⁴   

The fog of future warfare unknowability

We know future wars will be fought differently, eventually with inconceivable weapons. While futurists work on what now seems to be beyond the most fantastic visions, the world evolves by unnoticeable small and sometimes large changes distinguished by advances or regressions noticed only in thirty-year intervals. We have many examples, starting with the smartphone, the battery, or the drone. Weapons of war don’t usually become obsolete in thirty-year intervals; they improve in design, killing power, mobility, and automobility. But though the future of warfare is, has always been, and always will be unknowable, there could be a time when lethal arms will not be the weapons of choice in military conflicts. Even nuclear bombs can become obsolete. The whole idea of lethal arms in warfare could change in a paradigm shift through clever cyberarts that achieve the same results as present warfare without having to kill large numbers of innocent people.

From my partiality and naïve yet curious interest, I envision a time when non-lethal weapons will be more formidable than nuclear bombs. How is that possible? You ask. Suppose the new weapons are cyber in nature. Exploring that possibility directs the imagination toward military activities aimed at enemy computer infrastructure. Cyber power can bring a country to an economic slump of frightening levels. Cyber weapons can isolate countries from commerce. When the world goes more aggressively cyber, the effects could bring a few continents down to far more than just a combined temporary economic slump. Eventually, cyber power will be the most formidable weapon to supplant the nuclear ones. When that eventual time happens, there will be millions of cyber abusers willing to sell hacking services and methods to the highest bidders, and there will be no law-enforcement agencies able to stop them. An evolution of warfare techniques and weapon machinery is happening with lightning speed. If solar winds can mess with satellites, why can’t hackers in Vladivostok do the same to cause power outages, disrupt communications, knock out navigation systems, and even destroy satellites? Arms dealing becomes then hacker recruiting, an almost non-detectable job done from anywhere with reception. If that happens, the chances of having fewer wars diminish.

Such wars will be limited and handled as cyber retaliation, not necessarily by bombs. In 2010, Stuxnet, a computer worm that targets data systems, was smuggled into Iran to silently sabotage Natanz nuclear facility centrifuges by manipulating valves to increase pressure and damage enrichment processes. That worm uses an automated process that hijacks computers to control machinery and industrial processes and destroys equipment.²⁵ It did what it was supposed to do in Iran, but it spread to Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and back to the U.S., where it most likely originated. In 2017, the Danish shipping giant Maersk, which holds a fifth of the world’s shipping industry, experienced a cyberattack that brought 800 of its ships to anchor.²⁶ That economic destruction was part of a Russian military intelligence pattern using the NotPetya ransomware that enables remote access to change a target program’s internal code. The Russians used NotPetya, a highly advanced command, control, communications, and computer systems, against Estonia in 2007 and Ukraine a decade later.²⁷ Those worms can do significant damage, but they are primitive compared to what future swarms of worms will do in moving conventional warfare to cyberspace battlefields.²⁸ 

I am not advocating a release of worms to the cyber field to save lives on the conventional battlefield. Cyberwars are not directly brutal, but indirectly, a significant number of lives could be lost or damaged from wriggling twists of economic, health, and emotional fallout from forever-increasing hacking intelligence. However, comparing cyber warfare to the threats of nuclear annihilation that seem to be overtaking deterrent theory, the cyber idea may be our only hope for the planet because there is a sufficient expectation that it will eventually be controlled by international laws that are yet to be enacted. In these times, cyberwar dealers are ubiquitous, global, and covert. As blogged in “Humanitarian Law and Policy” by Dr. Tilman Rodenhäuser and Mauro Vignati, advisers to the International Committee of the Red Cross, “Sitting at some distance from physical hostilities, including outside the countries at war, civilians – including hacktivists, to cyber security professionals, ’white hat’, ’black hat’ and ’patriotic’ hackers – are conducting a range of cyber operations against their ’enemy’. Some have described civilians as ’first choice cyberwarriors’ because the ’vast majority of expertise in cyber (defence) lies with the private (or civilian) sector’”²⁹

Cyber vigilantes

At issue, today, is smuggling, corruption, and dealing linked to weapon research and development for future wars when autonomous weaponry, cyberwars, and disinformation supplant conventional arms. You or I can buy a pocket-sized light weight silent drone and retrofit it with surveillance video apparatus, just like the US Army Black Hornet used to survey troop movements. It is too light to use it for offense in battle, but if you can find a corrupt dealer to bribe and are willing to pay a few million dollars, there is the U.S. Air Force Predator that can fly for twenty-four hours at a height 26,000 feet and be piloted from 7,500 miles. Don’t count on getting it armed with 500-pound precision bombs; that can be done only by the branches of the U.S. military. Predators were operated in the Afghanistan war by pilots living on army bases in the U.S.; As Gary Fabricius, a Predator squadron commander said, “You see Americans killed in front of your eyes and then have to go to a PTA meeting. You are going to war for 12 hours, shooting weapons at targets, directing kills on enemy combatants, and then you get in the car, drive home, and within 20 minutes you are sitting at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework.”³⁰  What will happen when civilians working from their home countries get involved in armed conflicts with other countries using digital technology? They may be concerned individuals, loyal refugees, patriotic hackers, or professional cyberwar dealers who can sabotage economies, vital hospital and power station equipment, government services and spread false information to confuse voters ready to cast their ballots in elections.  “With many groups active in this field,” Rodenhäuser and Vignati tell us, “some of them having thousands of hackers in their coordination channels and providing automated tools to their members, the civilian involvement in digital operations during armed conflict has reached unprecedented proportions.”^32,33 

With thousands of hackers playing war sitting home miles from any conflict, are they considered civilians? Oddly, international humanitarian law says little about hacking or civilians conducting cyberwar against combatants in armed conflict. It does, however, hold many strict rules for the protection of civilians, with the most inhumane offenses being prosecutable as war crimes. Cybernetic space has the same international laws as the space we live in. Civilians and combatants are bound equitably by the laws of the country they operate in. Cyberspace is not a lawless space. Hackers might start as civilians, but with the first hack, they are considered illegal virtual arms dealers.

Future wars will follow a marked change in direction, from war plans designed to kill combatants with autonomously launched incendiary weapons to cyberart strategies that strike at the political bases and economic substructures of enemy states. Cyberwars rely on accelerating technical advances that will transform weaponry supporting military conflicts while being more accessible to hackers who profit from extremist attacks, criminal activity, and information dealing. If cyberwars between enemy states diminish the number of casualties, there still will be dealers itching for profits. Though the number of global war-related deaths has indeed been declining since the last world war ended, that number is far too high for a civilized world.³⁴ There is a highly disturbing likelihood that future warfare tactics could involve takeovers of nuclear plants, power structures, or hospitals, raising the odds of there being more deaths; however, if a new world of cyberarts brings war evolution mechanics to new cyberbattle fields where lethal weapons are obsolete and where countermeasures are in place, then perhaps we will not continue to kill in such large numbers.

Or we can hope that future cyberarts of wars will model the brilliance of the Pig War, a military conflict between the U.S. and Britain (1859) “over a squabble of a pig” in which there were no human casualties on either side.³⁵  

About the Author

Joseph Mazur is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Emerson College’s Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Bogliasco, and Rockefeller Foundations, and the author of eight acclaimed popular nonfiction books. His latest book is The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time (Yale).

Follow his The World Financial Review column at https://worldfinancialreview.com/category/columns/joseph-mazur/ More information about him is at http://www.josephmazur.com/

References
1. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/urbi/documents/20231225-urbi-et-orbi-natale.html
2. https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N22/321/73/PDF/N2232173.pdf?OpenElement
3. https://armstrade.sipri.org/armstrade/page/toplist.php
4. https://hal.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/hal-03609741/document
5. Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (Eds), The Changing Character of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) 4.
6. https://kyivindependent.com/how-western-companies-make-fortune-on-brokering-arms-deals-for-ukraine/
7. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/inside-europes-drive-get-ammunition-ukraine-russia-advances-2024-03-06/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=Daily-Briefing&utm_term=030624&user_email=bb759ff36f2ff61999abd346c905873915c01036c5a2b4978fb83f6b22e77fde
8. http://www.sipri.org/databases/armstransfers/sources-and-methods/
9. https://armstrade.sipri.org/armstrade/html/export_toplist.php
10. Besides the revenues from the five top US companies, the world has an annual arms revenue of over $408 billion..
11. https://www.sipri.org/visualizations/2023/sipri-top-100-arms-producing-and-military-services-companies-world-2022
12. https://press.un.org/en/2022/gadis3694.doc.htm
13. https://disarmament.unoda.org/ATT/
14. Martell, Peter, First Raise a Flag: How South Sudan Won the Longest War but Lost the Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) 235.
15. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy16061
16. Greene, O. Examining international responses to illicit arms trafficking. Crime, Law and Social Change 33, 151–190 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008398420612
17. https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/sierraleone/soghanalian.html
18.https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/sierraleone/lasnaud.html#:~:text=Then%2C%20in%20the%20spring%20of,a%20gated%20South%20Florida%20community.
19. https://hir.harvard.edu/artificial-intelligence-china-and-the-international-stage/
20. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2022/12/01/russian-loitering-munition-racks-up-kills-but-shows-limitations/?sh=481ea20e5d58
21. https://www.eglin.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3320435/eglin-steps-up-as-proving-ground-for-digital-modernization-effort/
22. David Patraeus and Andrew Roberts, Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine (New York: HarperCollins, 2023) 405.
23. The sinking of Sergey Kotov has not been independently confirmed at the time of this writing,.
24. Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers, The Changing Character of War (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011) 336.
25. https://www.zdnet.com/article/stuxnet-attackers-used-4-windows-zero-day-exploits/
26. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-maersk-cyberattack-20170817-story.html
27. Ibid, Patraeus and Roberts, 434
28. Mark Galeotti, The Weaponization of Everything: A Field Guide to The New Way of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022) 113.
29. https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2023/10/04/8-rules-civilian-hackers-war-4-obligations-states-restrain-them/#:~:text=Sitting%20at%20some%20distance%20from,operations%20against%20their%20’enemy’.
30. Peter Warreb Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, (New York: Penguin, 2009) 347.
31. https://harvardnsj.org/volumes/vol1/schmitt/
32. https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2023/10/04/8-rules-civilian-hackers-war-4-obligations-states-restrain-them/#:~:text=Sitting%20at%20some%20distance%20from,operations%20against%20their%20’enemy’.
33. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/civilianization-digital-operations-risky-trend
34. https://www.un.org/en/un75/new-era-conflict-and-violence
35. https://web.archive.org/web/20080709060607/http://www.wahmee.com/pigwar.html