Lebanon pager explosion: The perils of the ‘weaponisation of everything’

The attacks on pagers and walkie talkies (and possibly even solar panels) in Lebanon is one of those events that many have speculated was on the horizon: the weaponisation of everyday objects in 21st-century conflicts. But there were probably those who thought this “weaponisation of everything”– as security analyst Mark Galeotti puts it – was the stuff of Hollywood movies or cyberpunk crime thrillers.

Transforming pagers or phones into explosive devices, in their view, was probably not possible both in technological or logistical terms. It was the type of scenario that only the most paranoid would think could actually become a reality.

Yet it has now happened. And it has claimed the lives of 37 people, injured thousands more, and has created the possibility of catastrophic organisational disruption.

The ability to communicate across your army or terrorist network has always been fundamental to warfare. And the ability to communicate – and to communicate quickly – is even more important as the geographical scale of war expands.

An organisation needs to be able to trust that its tools of communication are reliable. And it needs to trust that the people they are talking to are real and not fake (or the products of AI – an increasing fear in times of “deep fakes”).

Members of an organisation also need to find ways to ensure that they are not being listened to – a constant fear in times when the tools of communication are constantly evolving in their power and complexity.

So, any organisation in the 21st century has to be paranoid about the threats of digital disruption and the different ways information and communication can be stolen, monitored and corrupted or manipulated. But turning the everyday tools of communication and information into actual weapons creates a new type of paranoia and fear.

How concerned should we be

There are lots of people who will argue that what we seeing in Lebanon will inevitably be coming to a neighbourhood near you. Director of the Institute for Strategy & Technology at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, Audrey Kurth Cronin, has argued that one of the biggest security challenges on the horizon is the possibility of lethal enhancement by non-state actors in a time of “open technological innovation”.

In other words, we are living in times when the use of disruptive technologies is open to a growing number of organisations and individuals. It is no longer the great powers that have all the technological might.

At the same time, in an era of increasing geopolitical tensions, there might be world leaders who feel that they can test the possibilities of the tactics that their hackers and technological experts have been planning and experimenting with.

In 1999, two colonels in the Chinese military wrote a book on the changing character of war and international politics in an age of digital technologies. I discussed their ideas in my 2023 book Theorising Future Conflict: War Out to 2049.

One of the most troubling comments in their book is on the potential weaponisation of everything in future global conflicts: “[These] new concept weapons will cause ordinary people and military men alike to be greatly astonished at the fact that commonplace things can also become weapons with which to engage in war.”

So, the events in Lebanon might give us a sense of what these military futurists from China saw on the horizon. Of course, it remains to be seen whether states will be able to keep up with a constantly changing security landscape. We are in a time of rapid change in a variety of emerging technologies.

States that have more pressing concerns and lack the resources might have more to worry about. And groups such as Hezbollah may be entering a new period of vulnerability as this new age of conflict moves from futurist speculation to brutal reality.

Geopolitical impact

The events in Lebanon are not over and we don’t know whether more attacks are to come. We also don’t know what the broader geopolitical impact the attacks will have on the region.

But, for the time being, it looks like there is a digital and geopolitical divide between those who will suffer these new tactics in this weaponisation of everything, and those that will be able to orchestrate increasingly creative types of attacks at a distance on individuals and organisations.

For countries like the UK, it seems unlikely that global conflict would reach a point where hostile states such as Russia would exploit any vulnerabilities they have uncovered in the devices people use in everyday life. The various strategies of deterrence – nuclear arsenals, for example, which involve mutually assured destruction – do, at least for now, keep much of our conflict below the threshold of open war.

And if geopolitical tensions do reach a point where Vladimir Putin’s Russia explores these new military possibilities, then we would probably have far more to worry about than exploding iPhones.

But it is non-state actors that may not be deterred from using this type of attack. So we need to hope they lack the serious organisational skill required to transform everyday items into explosive devices – and we need to hope that security services throughout the world are keeping their eye on emerging threats.

In times of dramatic and rapid change in AI, drones, robots and cyberattacks, the only certainty is uncertainty in this complex, and often terrifying, world we are living in.

Mark Lacy is Senior lecturer, Politics, Philosophy, and Religion, Lancaster University.

This article was first published on The Conversation.