eWar - Reality of future wars

Abstract

The rapid development of information and communication technologies, especially the invention of digital computers and the Internet, pushed almost a whole world into information age, where information became so powerful that it can be directly used as a weapon of destruction. We can expect that beside conventional warfare, information warfare and cyber warfare are becoming more and more a possible option in future conflicts. Few cyber conflicts have shown that digital weapons can be successfully used to achieve attacker goals. Specially, the Stuxnet worm has proven, that digital weapons can also have kinetic effects and that the wars in the future will not be held only in a cyberspace, but rather the cyberspace will be exploited to achieve some advantages over the enemy. This paper contains a short analysis of the possible applications of modern information and communication technologies in the future conflicts.