Technology is deepening civilian involvement in war
brigade, and Serhiy Ogerenko, his chief of staff, speaking to Ukrainska Pravda, a newspaper, say civilians helped correct artillery fire, even using their own commercial drones. Colonel Shevchuk says that, if his men knew that Russians were near a particular village but were unsure precisely where, they would open Google Maps, find a local shop and cold-call it. “Good evening, we are from Ukraine! Do you have any kaptsaps [Russians] about? Yes.
Where? Where? Behind Grandma Hanna’s house. Which house is that? Well, everyone knows her! So you talk to people a little bit and work out where everything is." On one occasion, he says, a petrol-station owner offered the password to its surveillance camera, giving the army a live view of a Chechen column heading for Kyiv. Digitally enabled popular resistance on this scale would have been largely impossible 15 years ago.
Jack McDonald of King’s College London points out that, when America invaded Afghanistan in 2001, less than 1% of the local population had access to the internet. In Syria in 2011, when a civil war was already under way and mobile-phone footage of combat became widespread, the rate was still only 22%. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 it had reached 46%.
When it did it again last year the figure had shot up to almost 80%. “What you’re seeing in Ukraine," he says, “is what’s going to be standard." This connectivity and the proliferation of smartphones that rely on it has accelerated and transformed an older form of civilian-military collaboration, familiar from the resistance networks of occupied France in the second world war. For some time, says General Sir Jim Hockenhull, Britain’s chief of defence intelligence at the outset of the invasion, armies tried to
. Read more on livemint.com
