By LCDR Robert “Jake” Bebber, USN

This article is part one of a two-part piece, drawn from a recently completed report by the author that was published by The Journal of Political Risk, and is available in its entirety here. 

Introduction

Recently, American policymakers and national security thinkers have begun to recognize that revisionist powers in the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) and Russia have no interest in preserving the current liberal order, and instead have embarked on a course to challenge and supplant the U.S. as the world’s superpower. However, the United States is not postured to mobilize for long-term strategic competition or war with great powers. 

American policymakers’ assumptions regarding war preparation, prosecution, and sustainment are not aligned to the emerging 21st Century landscape dominated by three major trends: advances in understanding of neuroscience, dual-use technologies, and new financial business models. These articles take a holistic approach toward identifying how war mobilization in the 21st Century will look different from the industrial models of the mid-to-late 20th Century. Looking beyond the Defense Department, they explore economic, policy, social, technological, and informational aspects of planning and preparation. Part Two will identify why the intelligence and national security communities are not postured to detect or anticipate emerging disruptions and strategic latency. It will put forward strategies and recommendations on how to grow American power and create new sources of comparative advantage that can be rapidly converted into both kinetic and non-kinetic effects in all domains, not just military.

21st Century Trends That Will Shape the Coming War 

Three main forces will shape the 21st Century: advances in neuroscience, emerging dual-use technologies, and new financial business models. The convergence of these forces creates disruptions on a mass scale. Chinese and Russian operations, policies, and investment decisions, along with market forces and changing consumer preferences each play a part in the changing geopolitical landscape, threatening the efficacy of American assumptions in strategic competition, war preparation, prosecution, and sustainment. This requires rethinking how the U.S. considers strategic warning and intelligence during peacetime, the transition from competition to conflict, the resiliency and capacity of current forces to “weather the storm” of initial combat, and whether the country is postured to transition to other means of using force during a global war with a great power. Perhaps most important will be the means by which the U.S. sustains its economic power and the political will to fight. Right now, adversaries are conducting systematic attacks on U.S. and allied sources of economic power, reducing and eliminating what was once considered the principle advantage of industrialized democracies, while at the same time using non-kinetic means to deliver mass cognitive attacks, destabilizing political societies.

The Brain as the Battlefield

Over the past forty years, scientists have made significant advancements in the study of the human brain. James Giordano and others point to immense potential for neuroscience and neurotechnology to “study, predict and influence” human ecologies, potentially affecting human activities on individual, group, and population levels, and human relations on a local, regional, and global scale. These understandings will permit the U.S. and its competitors to develop capabilities to assess, access, and affect the human brain. It will come to influence, and perhaps dominate, the posture and conduct of national security and the defense agenda.

The growth in understanding of the human brain, from evaluating its components and functions, to accessing and influencing it, will be a central focus of strategic competition, not unlike the space program of the Cold War, but with perhaps even more profound implications — the weaponization of brain sciences. Neuroscience can be leveraged as a soft weapon to create economic advantages, intelligence capabilities, and advanced psychological influence operations such as narrative networks. More concerning is how neuroscience can help develop hard weapons that use chemicals, biologicals, toxins, and devices to have physical effects.

Neuroscientific advancement also has significant neuro-enablement application potential to enhance the performance military operators and intelligence officers. More broadly, these understandings can also be used to understand and shape public behavior.

Strategic competitors have invested considerable resources in the research, development, and fielding of neuroscience and biotechnology. China has announced initiatives to position itself as the leading power in brain science and is openly exploring the application of brain sciences to hard and soft power. Military writers and researchers in China argue that future battlefield success will depend on “biological dominance,” “mental/cognitive dominance,” and “intelligence dominance,” and are applying insights from neuroscience to exploit vulnerabilities in human cognition, to include the development of “brain control weaponry.”

Dual-Use, Radical Leveling, and Emerging Technologies

A key driver of strategic competition is the explosive growth in globally powerful “dual-use” or “dual purpose” technologies. These include mobile internet, cloud computing, the exploitation of “big data,” the “internet of things,” ubiquitous sensors, nano-materials, additive manufacturing, self-navigating vehicles, autonomous industrial and civilian robots, artificial intelligence and machine learning, advanced energy storage, renewable energy, and “do it yourself” genomics. Since the end of the Cold War, advances in these technologies have had a significant impact on military technology and operational concepts¹ in areas as diverse as space and cyberspace operations, biological weapons development, precision guided munitions (PGM), the realization of transoceanic-range precision strikes, autonomous unmanned combat systems and platforms (to include swarms), directed energy combat systems, and enhanced and protected infantry.²

More profound perhaps is how existing and emerging developments in science and technology enhance power in non-kinetic engagements, creating mass disruptive “weapons” that “incur rippling effects in and across targeted individuals, societies and nations.” These actions “can adversely impact, if not defeat, an opponent …” without meeting the current legally accepted criteria of an explicit act of war. These engagements may cause immediate-to-long-term damage to popular stability, but because the perpetrator of these engagements might remain ambiguous, it is politically problematic for the victim to respond. These types of operations are exceptionally difficult to identify in advance as threats, or can evoke effects which “may not be easily recognizable or attributable to the technology or the actor(s).”³

Adversaries pursue these dual-use technologies as means to deliver effects on a population’s brains, or even its genetic code, through the use of the electromagnetic spectrum via radio frequency or directed energy.⁴ The increased proliferation of Chinese telecommunications hardware, platforms, and infrastructure may provide a way for the PRC to conduct surveillance, collect intelligence, and execute influence operations. It is also a means to use the frequency spectrum to deliver effects at the neurological and even genetic level.⁵ This would likely be done using mundane and ubiquitous technology, such as 5G networks, cell phone applications, or even music or video streams.⁶

Economic War Matters More

Investment decisions may telegraph human behavior and intent,⁷ and identify future asymmetric disruptions in ways superior to traditional strategic intelligence tradecraft. Investments can have multiplier effects that can move entire commercial sectors globally, with profound implications in a strategic competition where understanding future business models is more important than understanding future technology. 

For example, Chinese telecommunication firms can now exert considerable influence because they enjoy approximately 78% of the leverage in the $3.5 trillion global communications industry.⁸ These firms should not be confused with traditionally understood commercial firms in the democracies, however. The Chinese Communist Party has put in place a legal and political regime that effectively controls corporate operations. This influence began when a Chinese state-owned enterprise made the initial investment in Huawei, telegraphing the Party’s intent to influence the global telecommunications industry.⁹ The Party has translated its investment into geo-economic effects that create debt obligations among developing countries (“debt-trap diplomacy”) as well as provide entry to Chinese “techno-authoritarian” influence and control of communities and states outside of China.

American national security planners must consider how to build sources of economic power, and sustain that power in a time of strategic competition and conflict, when America’s competitors exercise significant leverage over American, allied, and global industries. The capture and control of key industries such as telecommunications or space systems will circumscribe U.S. power and force policymakers into more difficult trade-offs to sustain a conflict. Information is a strategic resource and should be treated as such.¹⁰

Conclusion

The strategic competition between the United States and Allies, China, and Russia, and how states attempt to create and wield power on a global scale will drive the future security environment. There are two broad competing visions of international order: the Chinese and Russian techno-authoritarian model of control, and the liberal model of broadly supported international rules. The chance of this strategic competition erupting into outright conflict is very real.

The fact that both China and the United States – and important powers such as Russia, Great Britain, India, France, Pakistan, and others – are nuclear powers shape the competition in ways similar to the Cold War. Each side will seek to achieve strategic effects while attempting to limit the likelihood of a nuclear exchange. However, as the balance between conventional and non-kinetic powers of each side fluctuate, the risk grows that competitors will see their options reduced to “go nuclear or surrender,” as President Kennedy famously suggested.

This competition, like the one with the Soviets, will require a national effort toward sustained power creation and planning toward the sustained conversion of power into wartime, crisis, and peacetime capabilities. The United States is in the early stages of evaluating its level of preparedness. There are also important distinctions between the current Information Age and how future technologies will reshape human behavior and our understanding of it, and what that means for power creation, sustainment, and rapid conversion. Theoretical frameworks drawn from the Cold War provide some broad insights, but new approaches will be required.

Ultimately, strategic competition, mobilization, and preparedness are still acts of political will, and no effort will be sustainable that does not have the broad buy-in from the American people. It will require not only engagement from senior leaders and elected officials, but also their bipartisan leadership in explaining, gaining, and keeping political support.

Part two of this article will outline what steps the U.S. and Allies should take. When the brain is a battlefield, American paradigms of conflict preparation and executions must change to meet the challenges of an increasingly connected world.

LCDR Bebber is a Cryptologic Warfare officer assigned to Information Warfare Training Command Corry Station in Pensacola, Florida. The views expressed here do not represent those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy or the U.S. government. He welcomes your comments at jbebber@gmail.com. 

Endnotes

¹ Snow, Jen “Radical Leveling Technologies: What They Are, Why They Matter, and the Challenges to Come” Seminar Middlebury Institute of International Studies, Monterey, April 25, 2016.

² Peter A. Wilson. “Concepts of National Mobilization circa 2036: Implications of Emerging Dual-Purpose and Military Technologies” prepared in support of the “Mobilization in 2030+” tabletop exercise played by the Long-Term Strategy program, (NDU Eisenhower School) March 30, 2016.

³ James Giordano, Joseph DeFranco & L.R. Bremseth “Radical Leveling and Emerging Technologies as Tools of Non-Kinetic Mass Disruption” Invited Perspective Series: Strategic Multilayer Assessment Future of Global Competition & Conflict Effort, February 3, 2019.

⁴ Markov, Marko S. ““Biological windows”: a tribute to W. Ross Adey.” Environmentalist 25.2-4 (2005): 67-74.

⁵ Ranzato, M.A., Boureau, Y.L., Chopra, S. and LeCun, Y., March. A unified energy-based framework for unsupervised learning. In Artificial Intelligence and Statistics. 2007. (pp. 371-379).

⁶ Adey, W.R., Brain interactions with RF/microwave fields generated by mobile phones. International Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. Third Edition. New York: Elsevier. 2003.

⁷ Rhemann, Maureen. Exploring Asymmetry to Detect Disruption 2018. Journal of Futures Studies 23(2), pp.85-99.

⁸ Rhemann, Maureen. “Disrupted. Space 2030”; Reperi Analysis Center (RAC). December, 2019.

⁹ USCC Research Staff, “The National Security Implications of Investments and Products from the People’s Republic of China in the Telecommunications Sector” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. – China Economic and Security Review Commission, January 2011).

¹⁰ Robert J. Bebber, “Treating Information as a Strategic Resource to Win the ‘Information War,’” Orbis Summer (2017): 394–403.

Featured Image: A naval honor guard at the in 2012 onboard the Chinese carrier Liaoning. (Xinhua News Agency Photo)

By Julie Angus and Michael D. Brasseur 

Oceans support the livelihoods of over three billion people, provide the primary source of protein for a third of the planet, and are the transportation corridor for over 90 percent of internationally traded goods. The global blue economy is expected to grow to $3 trillion by 2030. This explosive growth is fueled by exciting bluetech startups creating new technologies to increase our understanding and ultimately unleash the full potential of the oceans. In recognition of the important but yet untapped potential of the oceans, the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development will launch next year.

A digital ocean would advance our blue economy and ability to safeguard oceans in remarkable ways, providing unparalleled insights and access to some of the most remote and inhospitable places on our planet. This “Internet of Things” for the ocean would create a network from seafloor to ocean surface across millions of square miles. Leveraging advances in artificial intelligence, communications and robotics, a system of underwater, surface, and aerial drones could continuously patrol the maritime environment while powered primarily by the sun, wind, or waves. Data from advanced sensors, cameras, and acoustics transmitted in real-time would provide early warning for risks like oil spills, safeguard against illegal fishing, and detect subversive ships and submarines.

To achieve these innovative breakthroughs, we need bluetech companies, yet even those with great promise are extremely vulnerable in their early stages due to the challenges of fundraising, attracting talent, and product-market fit. But uniting global innovation ecosystems has the potential to foster and unify disruptive technologies to protect and make the most of shared resources like our oceans.

Accelerators nurture fledgling companies and shepherd them to a stage of greater resilience by providing business guidance, access to capital, connection to community, shared resources, and the support of a mentor network to grow early-stage tech companies. The number of accelerators increased tenfold in the U.S. between 2008 and 2014, and now there are more than 7,000 accelerators and incubators globally. According to a report by the Brookings Institute, the average value of U.S.-backed accelerator companies is $7.1 million, and for those that go on to secure venture funding, their valuation skyrockets to $90 million.

The innovation and capital creation that is unlocked through accelerators is impressive, but could it be better? What if we were to create a global accelerator network to turbocharge the bluetech sector and focus companies on the creation of the digital ocean?

To do this, we would need a driving force that can connect nations, bring them together, and focus them on a common goal. NATO, with its 30 allies and over $1 trillion dollars in annual defense expenditures, is well-positioned to lead this new global accelerator network toward a common goal, like the creation of the digital ocean. The seas are critical to NATO member states, with 24 being maritime nations, and the remainder within close proximity to the water. These nations have a shared need to protect their waters to ensure safety, economic prosperity, and food supply for their citizens.

In fact, the newly launched NATO Maritime Unmanned Systems Initiative (MUSI), which brings together 14 NATO Allies to accelerate the development and integration of unmanned systems into Allied navies, could lead the effort to create the digital ocean. Given just how vast our oceans are and how expensive ships, submarines, and aircraft have become, it is clear that drones above, on, and below the water will be critical in making the digital ocean a reality. Maritime drones, many of which are created by bluetech startups and powered by wind, solar, and wave energy, are relatively inexpensive to build and operate. And these drones, when networked over secure digital networks, could not only increase our understanding of the maritime domain, but also help secure it by providing a powerful deterrent to potential adversary submarines, seaborne migration, and illegal fishing.

NATO, led by the MUSI team, could use this shared focus and pooled resources to create a network of accelerators in member states, all working toward the same goal. Each country’s accelerator would harness the nation’s academic resources, business elites, technology giants, and venture capital to drive toward the digital ocean. This convergence of research, business, and venture creates an ecosystem that nations need to drive a culture of innovation and give rise to the startups needed to finally harness the ocean’s full potential. The accelerator’s impact would be leveraged beyond its borders by linking it to the network of NATO accelerators, all focused on exciting new bluetech to make the digital ocean a reality. These accelerators across nations would share assets, knowledge, and expertise creating a pool of resources that is unlike anything else we have seen in the accelerator space to drive the development of new technologies.

Uniting the fast-paced innovation ecosystem that flourishes within accelerators with the support and guidance of NATO, with its seven decades of experience and unparalleled resources, can be the driving force that unlocks the disruptive technologies we need to tackle the seemingly unsolvable problems in our oceans. A global accelerator network under the shared vision of NATO would leverage comparative advantage, creativity, and capital to win the race to create new technologies and implement them. It has the potential to be uniquely capable of focusing on challenges and opportunities that transcend borders, like our oceans, paving the way to create a digital ocean that would meet both our security and commercial needs, grow the ocean economy, advance sustainability and protect our waters.

Julie Angus is the CEO and co-founder of Open Ocean Robotics, a marine drone company that is transforming how we understand and protect our oceans. She is a leading adventurer, bestselling author, scientist and entrepreneur, who was awarded National Geographic’s Adventurer of the Year award when she became the first woman to row across the Atlantic Ocean from mainland to mainland.

Michael D. Brasseur co-founded and served as the first Director of the NATO Maritime Unmanned Systems Innovation & Coordination Cell (MUSIC^2), which is the key integrator and accelerator for the NATO MUS Initiative which aims combine the synergistic network effects offered by the most powerful global military alliance with the agility, ingenuity, and mindset of a start‐up to enhance the Alliance’s capabilities through manned/unmanned teaming. Michael has commanded two U.S. Navy warships, served on four others, and sailed the world’s oceans with friends and allies. His views are presented in a personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect those of any government or agency.

Julie and Michael both serve on the NATO Maritime Unmanned Systems Innovation Advisory Board (IAB), providing advice on how best to improve, accelerate and scale the NATO MUS Initiative. 

Featured Image: The port of Cape Town, South Africa. (Wikimedia Commons)

By Christian Heller

The defense community is captivated with artificial intelligence (AI) and its possible impacts on warfare. There has been much debate on AI’s impact on offensive and defensive operations, nuclear command and control, and information warfare. AI experts worry about the dangers of ultrafast AI decision-making, the U.S.-China AI arms race, the level of autonomy granted to robots, and the overall threat to humans with increased AI independence.

The Department of the Navy (DoN) has responded with building organizations to help integrate AI into the military services. Most prolific of these groups are the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (also known as Project Maven) and the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). Project Maven’s efforts focus on using AI to support the processing, exploitation, and dissemination (PED) of video and imagery intelligence. These efforts also include using AI to exploit captured enemy material (CEM), acoustic intelligence (ACINT), and publicly available information (PAI, also known as Open-Source Intelligence, or OSINT). The JAIC’s first two initiatives were predictive maintenance and humanitarian assistance/disaster relief. Later last year, they expanded to include cyberspace and robotic process automation.

While these lines of effort are important, they pursue difficult, hard-to-achieve tactical goals while ignoring the easy, low-hanging-fruits of AI implementation within the bureaucracy. Self-targeting drones, deep fakes, and global integrated predictive analytics platforms are worthwhile, but the Navy can achieve better and faster returns on its investments by pursuing unglamorous AI efforts in the fields of manpower and administration. With a renewed willingness to rebuild the services to face the threats of the future, now is the ideal team to embrace AI.

Manpower

Existing uses of AI in the private sector can be implemented by the DoN to support recruiting, training, retention, promotions, and billet assignments. Numerous companies are using AI to help their hiring managers identify and recruit employees. Recruiting commands could adopt these services to reduce their personnel burden and increase their effectiveness. Montage combines AI, process automation, and analytics to personalize the recruitment process toward specific candidates. Textio helps recruiters choose the right words and language to attract the right people. Firms like Koru use predictive AI to better match candidates to available positions and could change the way the services assign personnel to specialties and units.

Many companies have already implemented cost-saving AI measures such as these. Google worked with American Eagle to customize their marketing to individual consumers, similar to how the services could customize efforts for individual recruits and better manpower management. Amazon, Starbucks, and Nike all use AI to personalize customer engagement and marketing. LinkedIn uses AI for its LinkedIn Recruiter platform to identify the best candidates for hiring managers, and Home Depot and Dyson use AI programs to identify candidates based on their internal databases, social media, and public job boards.

The lack of continuity of knowledge is endemic to the DoN where service members continuously change billets and commands. Turnover is high and leads to a severe lack of institutional knowledge. This turnover means the time-cost of retraining a replacement detracts from time spent advancing a project forward. AI training systems can help. IBM has partnered with firms to help departing employees document their knowledge for future workers. AI then indexes and sorts the information to make it more easily available, and successful efforts have already reduced the search times for previous knowledge by 75 percent.

The Navy and DARPA already proved the relevance of AI to training service members. A combined project in which a digital AI tutor led new sailors though their training saw AI-trained students “frequently outperform Navy experts with 7-10 years of experience.” AI startups like Bakpax aid teachers with their grading to identify specific personal needs for students and speed up the corrective process. A study by Johns Hopkins University found that students using Knewton, one of the original AI education startups which personalizes learning plans and materials for students, performed better compared to peers. Improvements in training may not seem like a critical requirement for the services, but training and development is viewed as the primary job benefit by millennials in choosing their employer.

AI also can help reform promotion processes with are plagued with inefficiency. Analytics firms like Palatine are helping leaders make better personnel decisions to identify strengths, weaknesses, and future potential. Well-meaning efforts within the Navy and Army are attempting to combat this issues, but AI can help eliminate recurrent human problems like bias from hiring and advancement.

Companies like Adecco are already able to prescreen candidates based on skillsets, geographic preferences, experiences, and availability to open locations. Its scale is massive: AI manages their timesheets, payroll, and work prioritization for its 700,000 workers and recruiters. A similar process could be applied to initial training and follow-on unit assignments to better meet the needs of commands and services while still satisfying the lifestyle demands of individuals and families.

Retention is a problem in both the government and the private sector, but AI solutions exist which can help. This increased level of human resources personalization towards recruiting, training, and billet assignments could drastically improve morale within the services and help retain talent for the DoN. Dissatisfaction with supervisors and a lack of appreciation are two of the main reasons employees quit, and AI and sentiment analysis can help manage those effects. AI management tools also help manage workloads and burnout, which, in a military environment, could prevent catastrophes.

Administration

The routine tasks of administration with the DoN and services can be significantly augmented by existing AI services. Document preparation, completion, and handling; payment and voucher processing; policy and guidance administration; and archival storage and retrieval are all carried out by AI at varying levels within the private sector. A Harvard Business Review study found that the majority of AI projects implemented by businesses involve automating back-office tasks. These tasks include updating personnel files from e-mails and call centers, as well as extracting and updating records between multiple systems. These examples found that process-automation is the cheapest and easiest of AI technologies to implement. Administrative programs can significantly reduce the time required for manually processing high numbers of different paperwork with inaccuracies or inconsistencies, and other government agencies like NASA have already adopted these practices in some departments.

Paperwork and process automation is well-established. For instance, the consulting and accounting firm Deloitte has automated thousands of forms and saved thousands more hours of labor for its clients in the financial sector. The accounting firm KPMG partnered with IBM and Watson to learn from 10,000 documents and help its tax advisors better serve their clients. Google’s Vision OCR detects text, character, and images in documents of various file types to extract, organize, and process the relevant information. Amazon’s Textract claims to go further by creating “smart search indexes” and automated workflows for processing documents through various departments.

Today’s tech leaders – Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft – each have their own AI-powered assistants which businesses can implement to streamline management and coordination. Routine work like task management, calendar management, and emails and communication can be augmented by these tools.  Businesses can also use these tools to manage facilities and systems. These same tools can be used to engage leaders and commands with their service members using 24/7 assistance. Major companies like General Electric have adopted these tools, and IBM’s Watson Assistant has led to 40 percent reductions in time spent on administrative tasks.

Transitioning these types of workloads to, or augmenting them with, AI services can reduce the time burden currently placed upon staff officers and administrative specialists. In addition to large companies like Google and Amazon, start-ups like x.ai, Voicea, and Sigrid all perform a variety of tasks like coordinating calendars and meeting schedules, setting up conference calls, managing receipts and travel processes, scheduling transportation, and scanning and saving relevant files. Communications platforms like Zoom already auto-transcribe meetings and then publish the results as text-files for easy searches.

One key way AI is changing administrative work is aiding companies in their legal and regulatory compliance. With overlapping, always changing, and sometimes contradictory sets of policies and guidance, the DoN and the services could benefit from AI tools to assist leaders at both the senior and junior levels with policy adherence. AI has allowed insurance firms, one of the most highly-regulated and complex industries in the world, to analyze documents and process claims 25 percent faster.

Savings and Possibilities

Despite the difficulties which government agencies often have when implementing new technologies, examples of effective AI adoption already exist in some areas: the review and validation of 50,000 PDF records for a federal healthcare agency, state governments achieving 100 percent compliance for land lease payments and management, and state health insurance marketplaces responding to over 1,500 customers per day. In the United Kingdom, both the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Transport have implemented AI tools to provide better services to their citizens.

Adopting AI services to aid in manpower and administrative functions will pay for themselves with an outsized return-on-investment, and free up manpower and time which the services can redirect to other specialized needs. Even a small reduction in cost can provide substantial returns. For example, a 1 percent savings in the recruiting and training budgets for the Army ($5.1 billion), Navy ($2.1 billion), and Air Force ($2.4 billion) would result in $96 million in savings. A 1 percent savings in the services’ combined administrative budgets would result in over $200 million saved. Manpower can also be reduced in these respective areas to free personnel numbers for different MOS’s or operations. For example, decreases in administrative, training, and departmental management manpower for the Army (195,500), Navy (103,800), Marine Corps (56,100), and Air Force (125,100) could allocate thousands of billets for other duties.

Conclusion

These savings and efficiency measures are even more important considering the DoN’s increased emphasis on re-allocating funding toward research and innovation. AI support for tactical military purposes certainly deserves its own attention and prioritization, but the services and their leadership must not be quick to reject the immediate benefits to be gained by AI-services in the routine and familiar worlds of manpower and administration. These implementations can provide the highest near-term benefit and make additional funds and resources available for tactical AI research or other battlefield capabilities.

Christian Heller is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and the University of Oxford. He currently works as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, and can be followed on Twitter @hellerch.

Featured Image: Server room of BalticServers (Wikimedia Commons)