CEO Daily: A war of firsts

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March 22, 2022

Good morning. David Meyer here in Berlin, filling in for Alan.

Much has been written about how Russia’s war in Ukraine echoes its past military operations in Chechnya and Syria—as Putin levelled Grozny and Aleppo, so he is destroying Mariupol and Kharkiv. But this is also becoming a war of firsts.

There’s already been one: the use of hypersonic missiles. On the weekend, Russia claimed to have struck two targets in Ukraine—including an underground military depot near the Romanian border—with Kinzhal hypersonic missiles that fly at up to 10 times the speed of sound while also being maneuverable. Such weapons are near-impossible to defend against, for now, and have never before been used in war.

President Joe Biden confirmed Russia’s claim yesterday, as he addressed CEOs at the Business Roundtable’s quarterly meeting. “It’s the only thing that they can get through with absolute certainty,” he said. “As you all know, it’s a consequential weapon, but with the same warhead on it as any other launch missile. It doesn’t make that much difference, except it’s almost impossible to stop it.”

However, as China demonstrated last year, you can stick a nuclear warhead on a hypersonic missile. And of the scariest and most plausible potential firsts in this war, the use of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield is right up there. It’s a contentious point, but some argue that Russia’s military doctrine could lead the country to use tactical nuclear weapons on an “escalate to de-escalate” basis—in other words, to make a very small nuclear explosion to get the enemy to back down. With his military continuing to underperform, it’s not unreasonable to suspect Putin might go that far.

Biden also told the CEOs Russia might use biological weapons in Ukraine, which would also be a grotesque first.

And then there’s the “cyber” front. We’ve already seen the first attempt at using deepfake videos in a war setting—a rendition of Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy calling on his fighters to surrender that was absurdly fake-looking and implausible, though it won’t be the last example of its kind and, as we all know, tech keeps improving.

For readers of this newsletter, the number-one first to worry about would probably be large-scale cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. Both sides in this conflict have been whacking each other in the virtual realm, but serious international spillover is possible, and Biden yesterday warned businesses that “the federal government can’t defend against this threat alone.”

“Most of America’s critical infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector and critical infrastructure owners and operators must accelerate efforts to lock their digital doors,” he said. “If you have not already done so, I urge our private sector partners to harden your cyber defenses immediately… We need everyone to do their part to meet one of the defining threats of our time.”

We can’t stop this from being a war of firsts—but we can at least prepare for some of them. More news below.

David Meyer
@superglaze
david.meyer@fortune.com

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