Fernando Alcoforado*

This article aims to demonstrate that the great powers have acquired such military power that it has rendered useless the existence of the armed forces of the vast majority of countries in the world. In the past, the rationale for the existence of the armed forces was that their purpose was to defend the country and deter enemies from attacking it. In the contemporary era, the military power to defend and deter enemies from attacking the country is only effective in the case of the great powers because they possess an immense arsenal of nuclear weapons, possess a space force focused on space warfare and have the ability to unleash modern cyber warfare and, in the case of the middle powers, because they possess nuclear weapons and have the capacity to unleash modern cyber warfare. The traditional view that each country must have its armed forces to defend its territories and to deter external threats has become irrelevant in the contemporary era because the vast majority of countries in the world have armed forces based on obsolete and incapable structures from the past to face the great and medium military powers of the planet. This fact makes the military expenditures of almost all countries in the world to become unproductive, making it unnecessary to have their armed forces whose expenses should be used in economic sectors more relevant to the economic and social development of many countries.

In the contemporary era, the military power of the great powers (United States, Russia and China) is constituted by the set of organizations for the defense and combat composed of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Coast Guard, but also for the Space Force focused on space warfare and the ability to unleash cyber warfare. The military power of each country is expressed by the size of military expenditures. The United States, China and Russia are the greatest military powers on the planet because their military expenditures are far greater than those of other countries in the world representing 53% of total world spending. Defesanet article SIPRI – Gastos Militares Globais alcançaram U$ 1,9 Trilhão em 2019 (SIPRI – Global Military Spending reached U$ 1.9 Trillion in 2019, published on April 26, 2020, reports on the website <https://www.defesanet.com.br/bid/noticia/36563/SIPRI—Gastos-Militares-Globais-alcancaram-U%24-1-9-Trilhao-em-2019/> that US military spending totaled US$732 billion in 2019 which accounted for 38% of global military spending. The Maiores e Melhores website article under the title Os 23 exércitos mais poderosos do mundo em 2021 (The 23 Most Powerful Armies in the World in 2021), published on 2 March 2021 on the website <https://www.maioresemelhores.com/exercitos-mais-poderosos-do-mundo/>, informs that the United States, Russia and China are the countries with the most powerful armies in the world today. This ranking is defined by Global Firepower, an analytical portal of 139 military forces around the world based on data such as number of soldiers, reservists, air force, equipment, annual military budget, among others.

The United States is the country with the most powerful and strongest army in the world because, in addition to having the third largest army in terms of active soldiers, it is also the country that invests the most in the armed forces. The country invests US$740 billion in the army, while China, the second most investing country, has a budget of US$178 billion. The United States also has the most advanced technology for combat and defense. Russia currently has the second most powerful military force in the world. Formed in 1992, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian army has been one of the most heavily invested in recent decades. Russia is also one of the few countries that produce its own military equipment, having the largest number of tanks and rocket projectors among all the armies in the world. China has the largest army in the world in terms of active soldiers. No wonder it is the most populous country in the world. The country is also the second most financed country in the armed forces, behind only the United States. China’s great development in recent years has led experts to project that the Chinese army will become even stronger in the coming decades. The military power of a country is supported by the economic power it possesses. Of the three great powers, the United States and China, have military power sustained by the economic power of their economies, unlike Russia, which weakened with the end of the Soviet Union. By inheriting the military power of the former Soviet Union, even economically fragile Russia maintains its military power. The article titled Maiores economias do mundo: 10 potências econômicas atuais (Largest economies in the world: 10 current economic powers), published on 2 March 2021 on the website <https://www.maioresemelhores.com/maiores-economias-do-mundo/> informs that the two main current economic powers are the United States and China.

Currently, any country that aspires to play a relevant role in the military area needs to have nuclear weapons, a space force focused on space warfare, but also the capacity to develop cyber warfare. Science and technology are used by major military powers to manufacture modern weapons for use in land and sea wars, space warfare and cyber warfare. Space warfare is related to the need to protect satellites used for communication and surveillance and the use of “destructive and non-destructive” anti-satellite weapons such as high-powered lasers, defense missiles and particle weapons located in space stations in Earth orbit. Cyber warfare is of fundamental importance in the contemporary era. It relies on information technology and, in modern times, also on the advances provided by artificial intelligence.

Cyber warfare basically consists in the use of digital attacks for the purpose of espionage or sabotage against a country’s strategic or tactical structures [MANOSKE – QUORA, Andy. O que todos devem saber sobre guerra cibernética (What everyone should know about cyber warfare). Available on the website <https://gizmodo.uol.com.br/guia-guerra-cibernetica/>, December 31, 2014]. Espionage aims to steal tactical and strategic information such as data on troop movements, the strengths and weaknesses of the country’s military system, and any other valuable information about resources needed for war. In sabotage, it can range from a simple action like taking down the servers of a government website to something extremely harmful like launching a nuclear warhead. Sabotage boils down to “doing something” as opposed to espionage, which boils down to “discovering something”. In cyber warfare, state-supported hackers, whether members of a country’s military forces, or funded by that country, attack computers and networks of opposing countries that affect resources needed for the war. They do this in the same way as any other computer or system, that is, they study the system deeply, discover its flaws and use those flaws to control that system or destroy it.

Hackers can use confidential information intended for others (espionage) to gain the upper hand in the battle against their opponent. They can find the speed of a missile so that another missile can be built or an airplane that can pass it. They can find out where the enemy is moving their troops and plan an ambush like the one against Iranian General Soleimani who was assassinated by the US Army on January 3, 2020 in a bombing raid at Baghdad airport. Hackers can find out which scientists are important in creating weapons and attack them directly as happened with the 11/27/2020 assassination of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh attributed to Israel, according to information released by US CNN. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was Iran’s top nuclear scientist when he was shot by bullets on a highway near Tehran. When the country has control of these systems, it is also possible to sabotage people and structures. By finding out how troops are communicating, the country gains access to the network so it can confuse the enemy and invade their base. It could hack into your systems/accounts and defraud them by impersonating one of them. Or you could use this information to control them and blackmail people over something found on the computer or kidnap their families using private information.

Destroying the systems of enemy countries has an obvious result: it destroys what controls that system, and consequently prevents it from functioning. A common example of cyberguerrilla is the use of attacks to disable government websites and social networks. This tactic was used effectively by the Russians during the South Ossetian War in 2008, causing chaos and spreading false information to the population before and during the Russian invasion. Cyber warfare targets any sector important to the enemy’s infrastructure, such as the army, national defense and military industry. However, these targets can also be weapons factories, mines and other manufactures that assist in the operation of these factories and the electrical system, which supplies energy to all these sectors. In its most frightening version, cyber warfare can target a country’s most important strategic resource, its population. A hacker could make a terrorist attack to destabilize or demotivate a population to fight. This implies triggering a financial war with attacks on the financial sectors, which would cause economic damage or attacks on communication systems to disable the telephone network and the internet.

Cyber warfare makes no distinction between civilian and military targets. Although a missile does a lot of damage, a cyber-attack can also result in civilian casualties and deaths. If there was an attack on any country’s energy system and the system was destroyed by a cyberattack, it would not only be the weapons factories that would cease to function. Such an attack would also result in traffic accidents, interrupted surgeries, failures in life support machines when large numbers of people could die. It is very difficult to discover the perpetrator of a cyberattack or the governments that fund these attacks. One aspect that makes digital weapons worse than nuclear weapons is finding out who made the attack. It is very easy to hide the origin of such an attack by masking the identification of the perpetrator of the attacks. Even if the government finds out which computer the attack was carried out from, it is still difficult to find out who the person behind the screen was, and it is even more difficult to know whether or not he was a government agent.

Clausewitz stated that war is an act of violence to impose the will of a belligerent on his enemy (CLAUSEWITZ, Carl von. Da Guerra. Editora Martins Fontes, 1986). The Chinese Sun Tzu adds that “the greatest military feat is to win without fighting”: cunning and manipulation have more advantages than aggressiveness in imposing one’s will on others (SUN TZU. A arte da guerra.  Editora Jardim dos Livros, 2007). Cyber warfare radically transforms the three historical components of warfare: espionage, sabotage and information warfare, along the lines noted by Sun Tzu. There is no doubt about the use of cyber capability in order to gain political, economic and military advantage. According to reports, the United States, China, Russia, United Kingdom, France, Iran, North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel have increasingly sophisticated ways to obtain information from governments and companies to influence people’s lives and destroy the infrastructure and strategic objectives of your opponents.

The world entered a phase of permanent war: no battlefront and no rules of engagement. Cyber warfare is similar to insurrectionary warfare, with the difference that you can plan and execute action from a distance, away from the enemy. The use of artificial intelligence algorithms will multiply the impact of actions and create new vulnerabilities in the adversary. It will be more difficult to identify its authors, by using robots to authorize the dissemination of false information on social networks or by making available with free access algorithms allowing people to be included in any video and putting in their mouth whatever one wants them to say it. It’s possible that cyber espionage, sabotage, or influence operations are already underway, commanded completely autonomously, requiring only someone’s go-ahead. The understanding that 5G technology could be exploited for spying and sabotage of infrastructure facilities, communication networks and financial centers has become a new concern and is at the root of the ban on the purchase of Chinese Huawei products for public or 5G networks in the United States. The new cold war between the United States and China started with trade, but is expected to move quickly to technology, where China shows signs of being ahead of the United States in the advances of the application of the next generation 5G.

Nuclear power and the ability to unleash cyber warfare and space warfare by the great powers and nuclear power and the ability to unleash cyber warfare by the middle powers make the armed forces of the vast majority of countries in the world irrelevant because would be unable to face the military might of the great and medium powers (United States, Russia, China) and medium military powers (United Kingdom, France, India, North Korea, Pakistan and Israel). This situation becomes quite evident in the case of countries that do not have nuclear weapons and are not capable of launching space and cyber warfare. Only countries like the UK, France, India, North Korea, Pakistan and Israel would be able to deter any threat against their countries because they are holders of nuclear weaponsand have the ability to unleash cyber warfare. This is not the case in Brazil, which, in addition to being economically and technologically dependent on the outside world, has armed forces incapable of facing any external threat, especially from the great powers because it does not have nuclear weapons and does not have the capacity to trigger space and cyber warfare.

Facts from recent history demonstrate the inability of the armed forces of countless countries to face the military might of the great and medium powers. In 1967, the Israeli armed forces militarily defeated Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Sudan in six days, which sought to destroy the State of Israel. In 1982, in the Falklands War, Argentina’s armed forces were defeated by those of the United Kingdom in a month and a half. In 2003, in the Iraq war, the United States, the United Kingdom and a handful of allied nations, launched a heavy aerial bombing campaign against the main cities of Iraq, mainly Baghdad, and in less than a month they had overtaken the Iraqi army and managed to occupy the country. In 2013, the United States government announced its intention to bomb Syria with the aim of overthrowing Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, which only did not happen because Syria had the military support of Russia. These examples demonstrate that countries that do not have deterrent power will only be able to avoid their occupation by the great and medium powers if they are allied with one of the great powers, as was the case with Syria.

Brazil is a country whose armed forces do not have the slightest condition to defend the country based on the data presented in the article by Tiago Cordeiro, Qual é o poderio real das Forças Armadas brasileiras. Estamos equipados o bastante para enfrentar uma guerra? (What is the real power of the Brazilian Armed Forces. Are we equipped enough to fight a war?), available on the website <https://super.abril.com.br/tecnologia/um-raio-x-das-nossas-forcas-armadas/>, published on August 12, 2020. This article informs that Brazil has 16,886 kilometers of land borders with ten of the 12 countries in South America and another 7,367 kilometers of coastline. The total area to be covered is 8.5 million square kilometers of territorial extension. Brazil doesn’t even compare with the great military powers. The United States, just to give an example, has 19 times as many planes, 15 times as many tanks and 3.7 times as many warships, in addition to having space forces and an unequaled capability to unleash cyber warfare. For a gigantic coastline, it’s incredible that Brazil doesn’t have any aircraft carriers because it just got rid of the São Paulo, which caused so much maintenance problems that, in 18 years of service, it never spent more than three consecutive months in operation. And it has only five submarines with only two in usable condition. Only in the last ten years, the Armed Forces began to take an interest in monitoring drones. It has only just begun to replace the rifles it has used since 1964. The anti-aircraft artillery has armaments with more than 35 years of use. The lack of updating of equipment is as serious as the inexistence of an effective program for the purchase of ammunition in adequate quantities. In 2012, retired general Maynard Marques de Santa Rosa, former secretary of Policy, Strategy and International Affairs at the Ministry of Defense, stated that the country only had ammunition for one hour of combat. A document from the same period indicated that 92% of the means of communication used by the military were obsolete.

In addition to the numerous weaknesses, military expenditures in Brazil are almost entirely unproductive, given that 80% of the military budget is allocated to personnel expenses (salaries, retirement, among others). Just for comparison, in France the percentage of expenditure on personnel corresponded to 46% in 2016. With the Bolsonaro government, the absurdity of the 2021 Budget proposal to increase the expenditure of the Armed Forces to the detriment of spending on Education and Health occurred. Other ministries were also passed over in relation to the Armed Forces such as the Environment (down 4.7%), Agriculture (down 1.7%) and Regional Development (down 6%). The Ministry of Science and Technology, in turn, had a large reduction in its budget proposal (down 25%) [SCHREIBER, Mariana. Os gastos bilionários que Bolsonaro propõe para a Defesa e que levarão a cortes em outras áreas em 2021 (The billionaire spending that Bolsonaro proposes for Defense and that will lead to cuts in other areas in 2021]. Published on August 31, 2020 on the website <https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-53969636>). A rational attitude in the contemporary era would consist of drastically reducing military spending in Brazil to allocate these resources to other, more productive purposes such as science, technology, education, health, infrastructure, environment, basic sanitation, popular housing, combating arms trafficking and of drugs and terrorism, rescue and relief in the event of natural disasters, humanitarian assistance in combating the new Coronavirus pandemic and reconstruction in the face of calamities.

The above demonstrates the immense military power of the great powers, the great power of medium-sized powers and the inability of countries like Brazil to defend themselves and deter external threats. For Brazil to acquire the capacity to deter the great powers, it would have to be a holder of nuclear weapons and have the capacity to trigger space and cyber warfare, which is difficult to implement because the country does not have the resources to acquire this power. This is an anomaly that needs to be eliminated in Brazil, for the country to assume high military expenditures like the current ones when there are shortages in important sectors of national life such as education, health, science and technology, the environment and the national economy. It makes no sense for the country to assume extremely high expenses to maintain useless and unproductive armed forces like Brazil’s. The rational attitude would be for the Brazilian government to drastically reduce military expenditures in order to allocate these resources to the most needy sectors in Brazil and, in the future, no longer have any armed forces. In order to defend itself from external threats, Brazil’s correct position would be to fight for world peace and disarmament with the constitution of a world government representing the will of all peoples in the world, one of whose roles would be to ensure world peace. Assured world peace, the armed forces of all countries in the world would become unnecessary.

* Fernando Alcoforado, 81, condecorado com a Medalha do Mérito da Engenharia do Sistema CONFEA/CREA, membro da Academia Baiana de Educação, engenheiro e doutor em Planejamento Territorial e Desenvolvimento Regional pela Universidade de Barcelona, professor universitário e consultor nas áreas de planejamento estratégico, planejamento empresarial, planejamento regional e planejamento de sistemas energéticos, é autor dos livros Globalização (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1997), De Collor a FHC- O Brasil e a Nova (Des)ordem Mundial (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1998), Um Projeto para o Brasil (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2000), Os condicionantes do desenvolvimento do Estado da Bahia (Tese de doutorado. Universidade de Barcelona,http://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/1944, 2003), Globalização e Desenvolvimento (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2006), Bahia- Desenvolvimento do Século XVI ao Século XX e Objetivos Estratégicos na Era Contemporânea (EGBA, Salvador, 2008), The Necessary Conditions of the Economic and Social Development- The Case of the State of Bahia (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010), Aquecimento Global e Catástrofe Planetária (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2010), Amazônia Sustentável- Para o progresso do Brasil e combate ao aquecimento global (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2011), Os Fatores Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2012), Energia no Mundo e no Brasil- Energia e Mudança Climática Catastrófica no Século XXI (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2015), As Grandes Revoluções Científicas, Econômicas e Sociais que Mudaram o Mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2016), A Invenção de um novo Brasil (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2017),  Esquerda x Direita e a sua convergência (Associação Baiana de Imprensa, Salvador, 2018, em co-autoria) e Como inventar o futuro para mudar o mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2019).