When Hamas militants shocked the world last weekend by launching the biggest and most violent attack on Israel in decades, it was almost equally shocking how they did it. Hamas blasted through a super-high-tech, $1 billion security system on the Gaza border using little more than bulldozers, paragliders and a 2G cellular network, a remarkable upending of the two sides’ tech dynamic — as POLITICO’s Daniella Cheslow outlined in striking detail this morning. As her story reports, that’s a big deal not just for a stunned Israel but for an entire Western defense establishment that has developed huge confidence in Israel as a technically savvy arms and security supplier. As Audrey Kurth Cronin, director of the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Security and Technology, told Daniella: “It’s become increasingly easy to create fairly advanced technological means to go up against high-tech nations” — a lesson attested to by the skyrocketing death tolls in both the Gaza Strip and Israel. Where do the repercussions end? To find out, I followed up with Cronin today to ask her what lessons this conflict has for the world as the dizzying pace of technological development narrows the gap between megabucks-wielding nations and their smaller counterparts, political factions — or even individuals. Cronin, the author of a book published in 2019 titled “Power To The People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow's Terrorists,” described how she’s seen its thesis about the democratization of tech fueling a more chaotic world come true. “Technology is changing warfare, but it isn't necessarily changing it in the ways that most techno-optimists think it will,” Cronin said. “Because technologies are so accessible, you've got… groups like Hamas able to use everything from drones, to social media, to low-tech clusters of technology both high and low that can have an enormous impact.” For Hamas, that took the form of staying off smartphones and preparing its propaganda in advance, as well as overwhelming the Israeli border so rapidly that its drone surveillance system failed. Cronin characterizes three key areas where lower-tech actors can, and do, overwhelm their counterparts: The democratization of media technology; the increase of physical reach allowed by cheap drones and rocketry; and systems integration, or the ability to communicate effectively within the group. Cronin drew a comparison between the current conflicts in Israel and Ukraine, where the Ukranians have used a relatively high level of technological sophistication to resist a larger conventional army by following those three tenets of asymmetrical warfare. “You've seen Hamas learn from the Ukrainians, and they're using drones in the same way to take out Israeli Merkava [Mark] IV tanks, for example,” she said. “The parallel only goes so far, but you can see that technology is a lot more complicated than which side has the most expensive, high-tech, advanced capabilities.” Numerically-outmatched, fervent combatants have beaten their better-equipped opponents throughout history from Sparta to the Napoleonic Wars to the failed Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But Cronin argues that the current state of affairs also has unique contemporary roots, particularly the decision by the Bill Clinton administration in the 1990s to make information technologies like GPS broadly available to the public — kicking off a trend that makes it possible for even individual consumers to see across the globe with the aid of drones and geolocation. That makes for a wildly evolving threat landscape, where the famous maxim “'The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed” — apocryphally attributed to the writer William Gibson — takes on a very different meaning from the one now commonly understood. Big, rich states might inflate their defense budgets and boast of systems like Israel’s Iron Dome, but the extent to which sophisticated technology is “distributed” across a broad consumer landscape is enough for highly motivated smaller actors to do whatever violence they wish. “We’re going to have to learn to focus on the state threat… but on the other hand the second side of the story is the tremendous increase in leverage that is accessible now to what used to be traditionally weaker actors, including not just terrorist groups like Hamas, but weaker actors like individuals with the large number of mass shootings that we've been witnessing,” Cronin said.
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