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Asymmetric Grey Zone War Is On Our Footsteps Australia’s connection points to the global internet are vulnerable in this era of concern about increased hi-tech warfare. Undersea cables essentially carry all of the data to and from the country – without them, we go dark losing internet, phone, or other means to connect. W h i l e s a t e l l i t e s o ff e r s o m e redundancy, it is only a tiny amount of data capability and will not be useful to us beyond a few strategic military and Government users. This makes submarine cables the kind of target hostile nations like China are looking at as they up the ante on grey zone warfare. Cables are tough, but their locations are well known and unchangeable. Cutting cables by an undersea robotic vehicle is doable and it would be an act of war if committed by a Government agency or its proxies. But it can hardly be responded to conventionally, in the way a missile attack would be addressed. Earlier this year, China deployed its latest grey zone warfare weapon
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against Taiwan – the sand dredger. These mammoth ships scoop vast amounts of sand from the Matsu Islands ocean bed for Chinese construction projects, sparking concern for Australia. For Taiwan, this has forced around-the-clock patrols, intimidated Matsu residents, destroyed marine life, and, critically, damaged undersea cables. This is not science fiction; it is modern reality – and it is not the only example of grey zone weapons and warfare. In November 2018, Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipila said the GPS signal in his country‘s northern airspace was disrupted during NATO ‘war games’ in Scandinavia. He believed the signal had been deliberately jammed by Russia. China reportedly deploys anywhere between 50,000 to 100,000 ‘hacker army’ cyber warfare personnel within its People Liberation Army, including within the ranks of the infamous PLA Unit 61398, Ministry of State Security,
Ministry of Public Security and other agencies. Such cyber capability is used to bring down networks, hack into systems, deploy ransomware, sabotage elections via ‘fake news’, and other espionage. NATO has recognised cyber and information warfare as the ‘fifth domain’ of warfare alongside land, sea, air, and space. In Australia, ASIO recently warned the threat of nation-state espionage will overtake terrorism as the greatest threat to our security by 2025. Drone attacks are another increasingly popular tool in this new world of grey zone warfare, including in the Ukraine conflict by Russian separatists scouting positions, and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict where Azerbaijan has made incredibly successful use of drones in their attacks. Drones (aerial, land, water, and underwater) make great asymmetric warfare tools due to their low cost and exponentially increasing capabilities,
