Ukraine, premières leçons et perspectives
One year on from the start of the second phase of Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine, this work draws some initial conclusions from the conflict and examines its repercussions for European and international security, on the basis of a selection of contributions published in 2022 on the analysis platform LeRubicon.org. For the purposes of the book, these contributions were updated in January 2023.
“There will not be peace any time soon”, the Rubicon editors Julian Fernandez, Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer and Justin Massie stress in their introduction, going on to state that “although the war in Ukraine broke out nine years ago, the conditions for a cessation of hostilities and then a diplomatic resolution of the underlying dispute are a long way from being met. Firstly, the parties to the conflict both anticipate the prospect of making gains against their adversary and are therefore not budging from their ‘maximalist’ positions, i.e. the full recovery of the territorial integrity of Ukraine in accordance with the borders as drawn up in 1991 on the one side and, on the other, the annexation of a considerable part of the Ukrainian territory and the establishment of a pro-Russian regime in Kyiv. Secondly, the warring parties’ resources are not yet exhausted. The Ukrainians are benefiting from the normalisation of increasingly sophisticated and generous military aid – with support from the West totalling more than 100 billion dollars so far – to compensate for its inferior capability at the start of the invasion and resolutely to anchor the country’s alignment with the Euro-Atlantic camp. On the Russian side, the short-term focus is on mobilising troops and securing the support of a handful of countries to limit the effects of the Western sanctions and the long-term focus is on dividing and exhausting the West, where the general public losing interest is seen as inevitable” (our translation throughout).
“As neither side is yet running out of popular support or capability, it is hard to anticipate when the war will end. But this does not stop us from reflecting on the forms that peace might take”, the authors write, arguing that “although the Russian appetite for revenge is not dissipating, European security cannot be written with Moscow, but against it, with the establishment of a deterrent force in Ukraine that is capable of slowing down its neighbour’s neocolonial tendencies”. They add that “this will require the solidarity shown by the West since 24 February 2022 to continue for a good while longer, but this cannot be taken for granted”.
Alexis Rapin (University of Montréal) highlights that despite the 920 cyber-attacks or cyber-operations detected by the end of January 2023, plus Russian cyber-espionage operations carried out against more than 120 entities in 42 States, “the predictions of cataclysmic Russian cyber-attacks or a ‘cyber-blitzkrieg’ against Ukraine made at the outset of the conflict have largely not materialised”. The author sets out the three hypotheses that might explain this: (1) we have not had sufficient visibility to make an informed judgment as to the performance of cyber in Ukraine; (2) the very nature of cyber tools condemn it to “military impotence that is hard to overcome” due to the time needed to devise effect cyber-operations; (3) cyber is an “immature method awaiting useful innovations, of a technological nature, but first and foremost of an organisational and doctrinal nature” and the “relative insignificance of cyber in the Ukrainian conflict particularly demonstrates the difficulty of modern defence apparatus to connect with it in an ideal fashion”. All these theories provide pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that will not click into place until sufficient data are available as to the initial ambitions of the players, as “although the theory of invisibility stipulates that we do not always fully know what States are doing in cyber-space, it should be stressed that sometimes we know even less about why, and by what logic, they are doing it”, he writes, going on to ask whether “the shortcomings of cyber in the conflict in Ukraine Ukraine reflect measured Russian ambitions and assumed desire for experimentation, or a genuine failure of execution? The answer is not clear and this ambiguity is limiting many of our reflections”.
Similarly, “while all observers expected to see the Russian air forces (VKS) rapidly achieve dominance in the Ukrainian airspace, the first weeks of the war in fact showed their capability and operational limitations”, explains Colonel David Pappalardo (French air force), stressing that it is “vital to remain alive to the Diagoras problem: that which we can see does not necessarily reflect that which we cannot”. Having given this caveat, the author argues that five major lessons can be learned in terms of air power: (1) “superiority in the air can only be local and temporary in a high-intensity conflict. At least it will be more expensive to obtain”, for instance due to the access denial postures, which are no longer the preserve of major powers; (2) “the increased sophistication of threats requires us to reconsider quantity as a quality that is vital to the success of operations” and this applies to platforms just as it does to munitions, with the corollary of the appropriate scaling of production chains; (3) “the multiplication and diversification of drones and so-called loitering munitions on the ground are effectively allowing new possible modes of action to emerge, for intelligence, targeting, counter-battery, fire support or the air interdiction mission; (4) “inter-army integration – predominantly multi-domain (M2MC in French) – is particularly one of the key factors in operational superiority in a highly contested environment as it is hard to obtain on the ground”, as shown clearly by Russian failures in this area; (5) pulling off a complex aerial manoeuvre requires a high level of troop training and this training must involve “taking account of the real-time constraints in the choice of tactics used, such as the number of ‘good war’ munitions and aircraft that are actually mobilised”, the author stresses. (Olivier Jehin)
Julian Fernandez, Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer and Justin Massie (coordinators). Ukraine, un an après : premières leçons et perspectives (available in French only). Le Rubicon. Equateurs. ISBN: 978-2-3828-4461-8. 185 pages. €12,00
Les cinq murs de l’intelligence artificielle
In this article published in the review Futuribles, Bertrand Braunschweig, coordinator of the French artificial intelligence (AI) research programme, stresses that in making rapid progress, artificial intelligence is heading straight for “five walls it is likely to get smashed against if precautions are not taken”(our translation throughout): (1) confidence in AI; (2) its energy consumption; (3) the security of the systems it governs; (4) man-machine interactions, referring in particular to the problems for an AI system to anticipate the intentions of a human group of humans; (5) the inhumanity of machines, in other words their lack of common sense, their weaknesses in taking causality into account and the restrictions imposed by their sphere of competence. “Without going as far as to talk about general artificial intelligence (which inspires fear and which no specialist in the area really believes is possible in any kind of achievable timeframe), without possessing basics that makes sense, AI systems will always be liable to make monumental mistakes with potentially harmful consequences”, the author writes, going on to argue that “any single one of these five walls could put an end to its progress”.
Braunschweig points out that the AI Index of Stanford University presented the evolution of calculation requirements for AI applications at the end of 2019, in accordance with Moore’s law (doubling every 18 months) between 1960 and 2012. “Since that time, these needs are doubling every three and a half months! The demand of the largest AI system known at the time (which has therefore doubled several times since) was 1860 petaFLOPS*days (…), in other words (…) electrical consumption of nearly 3 gigawatt hours. Even worse, if the current rate continues, demand will be multiplied again by a factor of 1000 in three years, and one million in six years!”, the author stresses. (OJ)
Bertrand Braunschweig. Les cinq murs de l’intelligence artificielle (available in French only). Futuribles. Edition 453, March-April 2023. ISBN: 978-2-8438-7468-0. 128 pages. €22.00
Ernesto Rossi
“Ernesto Rossi is a living mimeograph and is improving himself towards the rotary press. His average production is two brochures of 40-60 pages per month (…) His gaze is clear, fixed and visionary, his conversation accelerated by an irrepressible worry, his gestures are hurried in his great haste to do, to continue, to finish so that he can start again. The article becomes a pamphlet, the pamphlets become series, the series become volumes and the volumes become collections; the conversation becomes a conference, the conferences become lessons and those who attend them become itinerant schools, working on the very breath of this artisan school that is Ernesto Rossi. (…) Nobody has ever managed to tell me as many things in 35 minutes and to explain so many others to me. I listened to him very carefully and took notes, but I could not help noticing the extreme febrile slenderness of this man, who is tall, but you would not think so, and is eloquent without appearing so, who is certain of his ideas and affirms them”. It is with this portrait drawn in 1944 by another Italian political refugee in Switzerland, the socialist Piero Della Giusta, that the historian Antonella Braga’s introduction to this book about the Federalist Ernesto Rossi begins (our translation throughout).
“For Rossi, the significance of European federalism does not lie in ideology or the fact that it could become a simple instrument of constitutional engineering. In his eyes, from a pragmatic point of view, federalism represents a specific solution – the only one possible from a rational point of view – the answer to the most urgent problems of modern civilisation: total war, crisis of democracy and internal contradictions of the capitalist system bringing about injustice and misery”, Braga writes, adding that the public “Gli Stati Uniti d’Europa”, published under the pseudonym of Storeno in the course of summer 1944, presents the definitive summary of the studies carried out by Rossi on the theme of the European Federation during his years of imprisonment and exile in Switzerland. According to Rossi, “at the basis of the federation, the units are individuals, not States, and, within the limits of our skills, the federation has direct jurisdiction over all citizens”. The federal government is therefore “made up not of delegates of the governments of various states”, “but of representatives selected by all those who are not only citizens of the member states, but also citizens of the federation”. As regards the competencies to be devolved to the federal government, Rossi lists foreign affairs, defence of the territory and maintaining domestic peace, but also international trade, migration movements and currency.
“Alongside these lucid insights, the text also features a few blunders and mistakes of evaluation, for instance as regards the position of Great Britain and the underestimation of the role played by the United States in creating the future international post-war landscape”, Braga notes, going on to add that “this tendency to underestimate certain elements – which is, incidentally, something Spinelli himself and other his contemporaries suffered from – prevents Rossi being able to grasp the scale of the collapse of European powers and Great Britain itself, now relegated to the second tier of international relations, in time”. “Today, after the serious economic crisis in the last decade, after Brexit, in view of the immobility of the European institutions, the pre-eminence of the inter-governmental method and the rise in sovereignist movements, it has to be noted that the mechanism of European integration seems to have ground to a halt, confirming Rossi’s view: the ‘political leap’ is not presented as a natural and obvious outlet of the process of economic and monetary unification, as it implies a clear political will, that is capable of imposing itself against the resistance of national interests and to go beyond the functionalist and inter-governmental perspective”, Braga writes, stressing that at the moment, when “European construction seems to have derailed and practically lost the North, it is helpful to listen to the echo of this critical voice, as it has the capacity to put us on our guard against these ‘braggard pro-Europeans’ claiming to convince us that you can make an omelette without breaking eggs, in other words to achieve effective European unity without impinging upon the sovereignty of the nation states”. (OJ)
Ernesto Rossi, Antonella Braga (introduction, notes and comments). L’Europe de demain et autres écrits fédéralistes (1944-1948) – La Nation dans le monde – Socialisme et fédéralisme (available in French only). Presse fédéraliste. ISBN: 978-2-4914-2910-2. 221 pages. €20,00
La réconciliation franco-allemande
In this essay, Raymond Krakovitch retraces the complexity of the debates and tensions characterising the process of Franco-German reconciliation in France, during the extremely short period of time between the end of the war in 1945 and Robert Schumann’s speech of 9 May 1950, which, in the author’s view, marks the “reconciliation of the two nations”, as the following conflicts were “essentially peculiar to France”(our translation). (OJ)
Raymond Krakovitch. La réconciliation franco-allemande 1945-1950 (available in French only. Presse fédéraliste. ISBN: 978-2-4914-2912-6. 72 pages. €10,00