Maybe the End of the Beginning...

Since last Thursday, the images from Ukraine have been mesmerizing, inspiring, terrifying, sad, but also, in a way, hopeful. We should never forget the amazing resolve of the Ukrainian people to fight for their homes, their families, their County.  As Americans, we would do well to learn from them and their display of genuine leadership in the face of this crisis which is a much needed reminder of what that word really means and what it looks like in action.  

But looking ahead beyond the hopeful coming end of this terrible war, I want to share another potential lesson about the future of these types of conflicts, gleaned from what we have watched in Ukraine in real time on Twitter, Facebook, and cable news. 

With smart phones, social media, satellite communication, and all the other technologies we now have at our disposal, maybe, just maybe this is one of the very last times we are going to see this type of conflict.

The old style "sneak attack" is pretty much impossible when every citizen has a smart phone and can share the exact whereabouts of enemy positions for targeting by smart weapons. When commercially available satellite imagery can track whereabouts of soldiers and materials, and when dating apps can provide the location of individual soldiers, the information age is also bringing forward an awareness age that makes major, long duration, military campaigns nearly impossible to undertake without the opposing forces knowing exactly what you are up to. 

Beyond that, the globally interconnected nature of our economies today, may bring forth (finally) the dreams of the post WW2 community. The visionaries and dreamers who saw the United Nations and a common set of human rights as well as an interconnected community of nations, as  key elements of preventing wars.  To date, in so many places, that collective approach has failed to prevent war.  It did not prevent the war here either, but the world has now seen the power of a shared response and perhaps this will change forever what we are willing to tolerate and empower our shared responsibility and resolve to act BEFORE the bombs fall.  

Now, this is not a perfect scenario by any means and these days are not here yet. The people of Grozny and Aleppo and Darfur and Burundi and so many other places still bear the scars of our global inaction and inattentiveness. This better future is also dependent on the technology available to local citizenry and their governments,  meaning that there are countries in the world still very vulnerable to armed conflict and populations that will still face the horrors of war. 

But here in the last week, maybe just maybe we have our roadmap to a more peaceful planet. Where the combination of resolve and technology, information and analysis, and a global community committed to action in the face of conflict can bring us to a more peaceful age.  Time, as with all things, will tell.  And we are by no means at the dawn of a fully peaceful era, but progress is sometimes slow and almost always too slow when it comes to ending the scourge of military conflict, but maybe that sight is on the far horizon.  And that is something we can all be inspired by.