prof. univ. dr. Ionuț PURICA^

It seems these days that the words of an old song are getting new meaning. When an economic crisis associated with a geopolitical crisis is unfolding war may be a solution to push forward and report development measured with peace time economic indicators. Manufacturing more arms and ammunition in a so-called war time economy is creating jobs and produces ‘goods’ value added. The question is what value? It is a value for destruction of existing economic infrastructure and labor capability (commonly named: people).

Moreover the war time economy is contagious and if one country announces it then various other countries, feeling threaten, are also adopting it.

A new type of war is under development in a world where not only territory is important. The fluxes of products given by the maritime and land transports as well as the fluxes of energy, be they electrical or natural gas, are also under threat of being disrupted. Another relatively new item is the information aggregates concentrated in data centers memory that is now vulnerability for specific economies; loosing that accumulated information may be irreplaceable and throw the whole world back in time.

So even if war may be useful for economic indicators as long as it is only a remote threat, it becomes a complete destructive element for civilization if action is replacing words. And the danger exists since after making weapons there is the objective to use them to justify making them.

In order to have a vision on the main infrastructures threatened by a potential war we are giving below some maps of the natural gas, electrical networks, critical points in the maritime transportation routes and land transport as well as the places of the important data centers.

Destroying these networks can be done efficiently by identifying and hitting the critical points not necessarily the whole network. One good example is the maritime transport with Suez and Panama canals. Once blocked the whole world will suffer a significant impact. Another deep vulnerability is the destruction of the data centers that are the critical points of the information networks. Once eliminated, the knowledge base of the whole World will be completely disrupted in ways we are just starting to imagine.

Incompetence is a powerful weapon for the adversaries if they manage to control the selection of decision people in the targeted economy. That can be done by influencing the selection of people and also by influencing the election process of a democratic system. An old saying in an autocratic system was that ‘there is the law but there is also the telephone’ meaning that some people in decision places are waiting for the telephone of their controllers to take decisions.

War may change all that and create enough chaos to generate new systems but war has the bad habit of destroying. This makes a civilization go back in time or even disappear and we cannot accept that risk especially in this period of great achievements of our present civilization. As Einstein used to say we do not know how the third world war will be fought but the fourth world war will be fought with stones and bats.

  We end here our comment and hope that human competence and survival spirit will prevail.