7 wars that defined the decade and changed how we fight around the world

US Department of Defense

• The past decade has tested military alliances and brought on threats few could have imagined.
• ISIS's use of social media to recruit fighters and disseminate propaganda was unprecedented, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte's government has relied on Facebook disinformation to bolster support for his drug war and disparage his enemies. 
• Russia has used both Syria and Ukraine as testing fields for hardware and propaganda campaigns.
• Visit Business Insider's home page for more stories. 

The past decade has tested military alliances and brought 0n threats few could have imagined.

In many ways, the principles of conflict never change — there is always an enemy to be vanquished, and the consequences are always tragic. But in the past decade, technology re-defined how we fight most of our conflicts. 

Whether it's artificial intelligence, disinformation, or hypersonic missiles, this decade's conflicts have been defined by rapid technological advances — and the manipulation of technologies built for civilian use. 

From North Korea's nuclear threats to Syria's chaotic battlefield, here are the conflicts that have defined our decade. 

Ukraine has become a laboratory for Russia's advanced warfare.

George Kent, the State Department official who testified during an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump's allegedly pressuring Ukraine for political dirt, told Military Times in July that Russia tests much of its battlefield equipment and tactics right next door in Ukraine. 

"Ukraine is a laboratory of techniques and procedures," Kent said.

Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, described a sniper "school" on the frontlines of the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

"They just do on the front lines with Ukraine. Much of the equipment that they are developing that shows up elsewhere, including in Syria, they try out first in Ukraine."

Dispatches from Vice chronicled Russia's incursion into Ukraine starting in 2014. At the time, a popular revolution had toppled the pro-Russia leadership in Kyiv, which alarmed Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, and supports separatist militias in the Donbass region, on the border between Ukraine and Russia. It even has some of its own fighters mixed in with the troops, The Washington Post reports. 

Russia has deployed Wagner Group mercenaries to fight in Ukraine, a tactic that it's strategically utilizing and spreading to enhance its influence in Africa and the Middle East. The Wagner Group is now reportedly operating in Syria, Libya, Sudan, and the Central African Republic. 

Russia also used hybrid warfare tactics like social media disinformation to foment distrust in the government and to generate support for Russian control of contested areas, which foretold the interference campaign Russia would run in the 2016 US presidential elecion, The Washington Post reported last year. 

Syria's longstanding quagmire of a civil war has gone through several battlefield iterations.

The Syrian conflict has stretched on for eight years, pulling in players as disparate as Russia, Iran, Turkey, Israel, and the US, as well as creating the ideal conditions for the rise of ISIS. 

It's also become another testing ground for tactics and technology.

As Russia, backing the Assad regime, asserts more power in Syria, it's also become a proving ground for new Russian technologies.

"Syria is not a shooting range for Russian weapons, but we are still using them there, our new weapons," Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a public address last year. 

"When we started to use these modern weapons, including missiles, whole teams from our defense industry companies went to Syria, and worked there on-site — it is extremely important for us — to finalize them and figure out what we can count on when using them in combat conditions."

Russian state media outlet TASS reported in 2018 that Russia had tested 210 weapons in Syria. In December of that year. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov told Russian media that the Russian military had begun using the Tupolev Tu-160 supersonic stretegic bombers, the Iskander-M ballistic missile system, and the Pantsir S1 anti-aircraft missile in Syria.

But innovation has gone the other way, too — the Russian military has started developing small drones equipped with ordnance after seeing ISIS deploy them in Syria. 

And in the conflict that's morphed from a popular uprising against a dictatorial dynasty, swelling in the intoxicating first flush of the Arab Spring, to become synonymous with desperation, despair, displacement, and brutality. Bashar al-Assad, whose regime is consistently plumbing the depths of inhumanity, is still in power; and astoundingly, due to the latest failure in American policy, stands to regain control of much of what his regime lost, first to rebels, then to ISIS, then to Kurdish-led forces backed by US troops.  

ISIS changed the game with its social media recruiting strategy.

Although ISIS is determined to force its followers back into the Middle Ages, it has employed a strikingly 21st-century approach to recruitment, depending heavily on social media to reach followers, especially those from the west.

Larger social media companies like Twitter have cracked down on the group's accounts since it first rose to prominence in 2014. But the group moved on to encrypted social networks like Telegram, the encrypted chat platform. CBS reported in 2019 that the 2015 Paris terror attacks were planned using the messaging app.

It's popular because it claims to be secure, and "Telegram is less likely to crack down" on ISIS groups or members than other social companies, according to Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Middle East Policy and the author of "Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the Armies of Jihad."

There has been a coordinated effort to remove ISIS channels from Telegram, which has had limited success, according to a new piece in Wired. Researchers Charlie Winter and Amarnath Amarsingham describe the shell ISIS networks that have popped up after the European Union's Internet Referral Unit (IRU) blitzed the main ISIS propaganda and foll0wer accounts over the weekend, and at least some ISIS accounts have shown up on the network TamTam. 

Speaking to Wired in 2016, New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi described how she tracks stories about ISIS and its members online, saying that the group pushed out information on multiple channels simultaneously to reach potential jihadis, or to push out their gruesome propaganda videos. "They've become so good at it, it's unbelievable."

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