There is now a growing debate over what constitutes war and whether it should include strikes on data centers. They represent a new front in warfare, in which facilities powering the technology behind many critical industries have become targets.

As it is, the definition of a military attack seems to be changing over time.

Conventionally, it was understood to occur when tanks or fighter planes crossed a border. Then it was expanded to include the use of missiles that were fired without crossing the border but hitting a city and causing physical destruction of “vital infrastructure and death”.

Such attacks justified a country retaliating under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which legitimizes a war under “Right to Self Defense” if an “armed attack occurs.”

Now there is a growing school of thought that “vital infrastructure” must include any disruptive attack on data centers, whether kinetic or non-kinetic, amounting to significant loss of function. It should be treated as a use of force and trigger the affected country’s right to self-defense under Article 51, the argument goes.

Apparently, vulnerabilities in modern digital infrastructure have turned data centers into primary targets in contemporary warfare. As society becomes deeply integrated with cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and automated logistics, data centers have evolved into the nervous system of modern statecraft.

Attacks on digital infrastructure are no longer limited to cyberattacks (non-kinetic) that cause banking collapses and disrupt vital systems like power grids and hospitals by cutting off Internet access; they now include kinetic strikes on data hubs that affect nations’ military capabilities and expose financial vulnerabilities.

After all, modern defense systems rely heavily on cloud-based logistics. Data centers process satellite imagery, coordinate drone operations, run predictive maintenance algorithms for fighter jets, and host classified communication networks. Thus, taking down these nodes effectively blinds an adversary’s command structure.

This has been noticed in the recent conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. For instance, on September 23, Russian Geran-5 jet drones hit the Inkom Business Center in Kyiv,  housing Datagroup’s data center. Four people died, and internet service for 100,000 households was down for hours.

On September 27, Kyivstar — Ukraine’s central mobile operator — and Vodafone Ukraine’s data centers were hit. Russia’s Defense Ministry  justified this by saying that “Data centers were being used for the benefit of the Ukrainian military.”

Two weeks later, Ukraine returned the favor. It launched highly targeted long-range drone strikes hitting major data hubs across Russia, inflicting significant disruption on the country’s digital economy.

Between October 8 and October 14, 2026, Ukrainian forces carried out a series of “symmetrical responses” to counter earlier Russian attacks on Ukrainian internet and telecommunications assets. The strikes specifically crippled infrastructure belonging to Yandex (often called “Russia’s Google”) and Sberbank, Russia’s largest banking and technology conglomerate.

Similarly, in February-March 2026, during US-Israeli strikes on Iran, the latter hit back not only at oil but at data centers — Google, Microsoft, and Oracle cloud infrastructure in the Gulf, particularly those located in Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

Apparently, when Amazon Web Services’ Bahrain facility suffered “physical damage to cooling infrastructure from debris”, it became the first known case of an AWS data center damaged in an interstate war.

Iranian missiles near Al Udeid Air Base damaged an Oracle Cloud data center in Doha. Microsoft also confirmed “connectivity issues” in the Qatar Central region.

The same happened to the Google data center in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, which hosts Aramco cloud.

G42 [UAE AI company backed by Microsoft] data center in Abu Dhabi was also affected, forcing it into blackout mode.

In other words, from Kyiv to Bahrain, a pattern is clearly apparent  — belligerents no longer distinguish between cloud and command. Data centers that host banks and brigades are treated as brigades. They have officially transitioned from commercial tech infrastructures to critical national security assets.

As Omar Sultan Al Olama, the UAE’s Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy, and Remote Work Applications, said the other day,  “Unfortunately, they’re more important than bridges. They’re more important than roads. They’re more important than tunnels because our whole lives are on these devices that we’re using”.

Incidentally, the UAE is revising plans for a 5-gigawatt AI data center project following the Iranian strikes. The original plan envisioned a 10-square-mile campus in Abu Dhabi, to be built in partnership with American tech companies like Oracle, Nvidia, and Cisco. Now the data centers will likely be spread out across the UAE. Sultan Al Olama said, “ The UAE will change its data centre rules and stop promoting where they are”.

According to Kirk Cameron, founding director of the Institute for Advanced Computing at Virginia Tech, “Data centers are now on the critical path for modern digital infrastructure. The loss of key data centers could collapse economies, disrupt public and private transportation with loss of GPS, and affect government essential services for health, emergency dispatch, and power grids.”

Many agree with him when he argues that  “Data centers are competitive advantages in warfare. Knocking out capabilities means potentially crippling combat operations for an adversary. It’s also a form of economic warfare and could lead to longer-term competitive challenges for the target.”

All this brings the question of whether bombing a data center constitutes an act of war.  Does the definition of war need to change?

The main challenge to this question lies in what is called the “Gray Zone” of conflict, particularly in non-kinetic attacks. Unlike a missile launch, which leaves clear radar signatures and identifiable points of origin, cyber operations offer plausible deniability.

Under International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, attacking a dual-use target is governed by the principles of distinction and proportionality.  Here, attacking a dual-use target is legal only if the military advantage gained outweighs the civilian collateral damage.

If an attack on a data center shuts down military communications but also disables the life-support monitoring systems of dozens of regional hospitals, the strike violates proportionality. Such an operation can be classified as a war crime, reinforcing the argument that major cyber infrastructure operations carry the same legal weight and consequences as traditional warfare.

But any clear distinction in such cases is neither easy nor free from contention. For instance, when Russia attacked data centers in Ukraine, it claimed that these were being used by Ukrainian intelligence and military. However, Ukraine denied the charge.

As  Kasia Klonowska, an authority on international law, says, “Due to a lack of a definition of the treaty- terms weapons, means or methods of warfare, it is unclear whether non-weaponized AI decision-support systems should be subjected to a legal review prescribed by Article 36 of the Additional Protocol I. It remains a challenge to determine exactly what should be subjected to review beyond weapons.

“You have very limited situations in which they would actually qualify as lawful targets when they’re used by the military, and even then, it’s very difficult for the attacker to know whether that’s happening or not. If they are purely processing military data, they could be legitimate targets. But many, if not most, are dual-use.”

To address the legal ambiguity surrounding digital warfare, Prof. Ben Hines has proposed what he calls a “Substantive Necessity” framework, reinterpreting international law under Article 51 of the UN Charter.

Under this framework, a non-kinetic cyber attack amounts to an armed attack when the victim state, based on clear and convincing evidence, apprehends a hostile act that has fundamentally compromised, or is imminently poised to compromise, the functioning or security of infrastructure crucial to the state’s ability to function.

The framework argues that traditional international legal thresholds for “force” and “gravity” do not inherently require physical destruction or kinetic weaponry. Under this test, taking down a country’s primary data center cluster that hosts banking, health, emergency dispatch, GPS — even without an explosion — is an armed attack. Because effects equal or exceed kinetic.

Viewed thus, it is not surprising that Western nations like the US, the Netherlands, and France are clearly asserting that a disruptive attack on data centers that causes significant loss of function will be treated as a use of force and may trigger the right to self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter.

In sum, as the line between the physical and digital worlds disappears, international law is adapting to treat high-consequence infrastructure attacks as equivalent to an armed attack.

Data centers are now firmly on the front lines of global conflict, where a single breach can serve as the definitive catalyst for war. The lines between civilian infrastructure and military assets are dangerously blurring.

• Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
• CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com

The post Iran Hit Amazon. Russia Struck Kyiv’s Data Centers. Ukraine Hit Yandex. Can Such Attacks Trigger Article 51? appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.

• Ukraine's drone pilots want masses of cheap, simple drones, a soldier and analyst said.
• Western manufacturers overcomplicate them and "get it so wrong," he added.
• Operators want drones they can tweak near the front and send out in large numbers.

Ukrainian drone operators need masses of relatively simple drones without a bunch of flashy features, a soldier with firsthand experience explained, cautioning the West against making them too complicated as it readies for future drone fights.

Ukraine's fight against Russia's invasion is a grinding war of attrition that is consuming weaponry so fast that combatants need affordable weapons in huge numbers, and battlefield technology becomes obsolete so quickly that soldiers need systems they can update easily to keep them relevant in battle.

Dmytro "Liber" Zhluktenko, a former drone operator who is now a lessons learned analyst in Ukraine's 413th Unmanned Systems Regiment "RAID," told Business Insider that "we need something that works great but doesn't have superfluous features."

"That is something that most of the Western defense technology manufacturers, they get it so wrong," he said. Consider first-person-view attack drones, "we need something that is really basic."

"We are yet to find Western manufacturers that are able to produce, let's say 500,000 FPV drones, simple ones that just work, that are fine-tuned without any extra autonomy or extra navigation or any features like that," he added, describing what Ukraine needs most as something pilots can easily take straight into combat.

Western-made drone tech, he said, is often "too complicated, often detached from the battlefield, and much more expensive than Ukrainian options doing the same job. Therefore, most of the drones used at Ukraine's battlefield are Ukrainian-made."

His assessment of the situations draws on both his experience as a drone operator and his role as an analyst, where he looks at battlefield trends, interviews operators, meets with foreign defense manufacturers, prepares briefs for higher command, and organizes the sharing of information between Ukrainian units.

Simple drones give soldiers more flexibility

Part of the appeal of simpler drones is that Ukrainian operators can adapt them themselves.

Near the front, soldiers routinely modify weapons to keep them useful as the battlefield changes, and some units even have their own R&D centers.

They often want drones and other combat systems that are basic, generic platforms they can rework, upgrade, or configure for different missions, much like ground robots that can be assembled with different weapons or components like Lego sets.

Ukrainian companies and foreign companies that work with units know this is happening, work with unit engineers to help keep products updated, and are often surprised by the ways soldiers modify their gear. Companies are increasingly making their products modular, both so they can upgrade the products more easily and so soldiers can make their own changes near the front.

Zhluktenko said Ukraine's operators want products they can "tune ourselves, we would change the components or whatever as we need, because that's the normal process. But something like the basic platform that it could build upon."

He said it's "bonkers" that, despite the West's "significant industrial capacities," they aren't seeing anyone produce something simple and effective at scale.

Zhluktenko said that many Western manufacturers are still "stuck in this doctrine of building tools in small quantities that maybe yes, they do have some extra features, but that's not something that is way too relevant for Ukraine's combat."

The case for cheaper drones in greater numbers

Zhluktenko's comments echo warnings from Western and Ukrainian officials that this war has shown the West the limits of relying on smaller numbers of exquisite, highly advanced weapons.

Modern, large-scale warfare, as the situation in Ukraine has demonstrated, may also require much larger numbers of cheaper, less capable gear.

Ukraine is still buying and building advanced drone technology with cutting-edge features like autonomy, which can be critical for warfighting tasks such as intercepting Russia's attack drones or executing long-range strikes that need to break through the enemy's electronic warfare.

Zhluktenko said that it's about "balance," arguing that simpler drones remain essential and are often needed in far greater numbers. Ukrainian companies like SkyFall and General Cherry are producing these kinds of drones at scale, he said.

A representative for Ukrainian drone and technology company TechEx told Business Insider that Western manufacturers often have to deal with heavier, peacetime regulations.

They may have "levels of additional software and hardware that's put on top of it instead of making it a bare, functional, ready to go system here and now," she said.

That can "overcomplicate the operation of the system," she added. It can also make the manufacturing process more complex, so it's harder to produce the large volumes that some Ukrainian manufacturers can.

She described it as the contrast between "wartime operations and the peacetime operations." She said Western companies might have different processes and priorities if they needed to work faster and on a bigger scale.

Western officials say the war shows that allies need much larger volumes of cheap weapons, with leaders like Danish defense minister Troels Lund Poulsen previously telling Business Insider that "one of the lessons" from Ukraine is that the West needs far greater quantities of inexpensive weaponry.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said last year that "speed is of the essence, not perfection."

Drones are central to Ukraine's fight, and it says they now cause as much as 95% of Russia's front-line losses. But using drones effectively can require deploying large numbers of them, knowing that many will never reach their targets. That means making systems that are cheap and workable is key.

Zhluktenko said that when it comes to drones, the mindset should be about "spending thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands."

For more than three decades, Michael Gove has been a leading figure in British Conservatism. As a journalist, government minister and now editor of the Tory bible the Spectator, he has helped shape the right even as it has moved further rightwards. In the latest episode of Radical Thinking, Gove joins Aditya Chakrabortty to discuss the future of the right, his record on Brexit and austerity, and the Spectator’s position on Islam

Watch the full episode with Michael Gove here.

Aditya’s suggested reading:

To read the fruits of Michael Gove’s dalliance with the Marxism Today gang, look up his essay in a 1998 collection called The Moderniser’s Dilemma: Radical Politics in the Age of Blair

For a slalom ride through Michael Gove’s years in power, read The Demented Dalek by the historian Richard J Evans in the London Review of Books

To learn more on what’s become of the British right, there’s a Guardian column by Aditya

Phil Burton-Cartledge analyses in depth why the most successful political party is now failing in his book The Party’s Over: The Rise and Fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak

Phil also writes a very good blog on British politics, which keeps a close eye on how each party is trying to marshall a coalition of voters. Here he is on Kemi Badenoch

Geoffrey Wheatcroft does an entertaining short narrative in Bloody Panico!:

or, Whatever Happened to The Tory Party

For more on the economics of the Cameron years, this paper is acute on how the Tories failed to move the UK away from being a country of renters towards a country of makers. Two of its authors will join us for a podcast later in the series.

And if you want to read how Brexit may have cost the UK 8% of GDP, there’s this paper based on data from the Bank of England

Finally, on the Spectator, read Nesrine Malik’s recent Guardian column

Why has Britain’s oldest political magazine become such a rabid cheerleader for Islamophobia?

For more than three decades, Michael Gove has been a leading figure in British Conservatism. As a journalist, government minister and now editor of the Tory bible the Spectator, he has helped shape the right even as it has moved further rightwards. In the latest episode of Radical Thinking, Gove joins Aditya Chakrabortty to discuss the future of the right, his record on Brexit and austerity, and the Spectator’s position on Islam

Watch the full episode with Michael Gove here.

Aditya’s suggested reading:

To read the fruits of Michael Gove’s dalliance with the Marxism Today gang, look up his essay in a 1998 collection called The Moderniser’s Dilemma: Radical Politics in the Age of Blair

For a slalom ride through Michael Gove’s years in power, read The Demented Dalek by the historian Richard J Evans in the London Review of Books

To learn more on what’s become of the British right, there’s a Guardian column by Aditya

Phil Burton-Cartledge analyses in depth why the most successful political party is now failing in his book The Party’s Over: The Rise and Fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak

Phil also writes a very good blog on British politics, which keeps a close eye on how each party is trying to marshall a coalition of voters. Here he is on Kemi Badenoch

Geoffrey Wheatcroft does an entertaining short narrative in Bloody Panico!:

or, Whatever Happened to The Tory Party

For more on the economics of the Cameron years, this paper is acute on how the Tories failed to move the UK away from being a country of renters towards a country of makers. Two of its authors will join us for a podcast later in the series.

And if you want to read how Brexit may have cost the UK 8% of GDP, there’s this paper based on data from the Bank of England

Finally, on the Spectator, read Nesrine Malik’s recent Guardian column

Why has Britain’s oldest political magazine become such a rabid cheerleader for Islamophobia?

Indonesia, Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo together hold more than half of the world’s tropical rainforests. In 2022, when Indonesia hosted the G20 summit in Bali, the three countries pledged to cooperate on how to pay to protect those forests. The promise was one of South-South cooperation: developing countries working together rather than […]

The post Indonesia primed to lead a Global South forest protection bloc appeared first on Asia Times.

Climate change is making your home uninsurable! That's the headline, but look behind it and you find a press release by a PR outfit touting some very dubious claims about floods and finance, says Tilak Doshi.

The post No, Climate Change is Not Making Your Home “Uninsurable” appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

In a bizarre incident, Japan’s Meteorological Agency (JMA) issued a warning about what could have been the world’s worst earthquake ever. The agency retracted the warning a few minutes later, but it still alarmed large parts of the country and unsettled people who had witnessed horrifying disasters.

The JMA estimated a magnitude 9.9 earthquake in the Kuril Islands off Hokkaido on October 16, 2026, but quickly rescinded the alert on account of an error.

The early-warning system had incorrectly placed the earthquake’s epicenter in the Kuril Islands (Chishima Islands) off Hokkaido and calculated a magnitude of 9.9. However, JMA officials later said the system wrongly assumed the quake was about 680 kilometers farther from Japan than it actually was, near Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.

The JMA, which has a near-flawless warning system, warned that Hokkaido and the Tohoku region in northeastern Japan would experience shaking up to 7, the highest intensity on the country’s seismic scale. However, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake near Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula produced only intensity 1 shaking in Hakodate, Hokkaido.

The JMA withdrew the alert just eight minutes after issuing it, marking the first full public retraction of an emergency earthquake warning.

Officials said the magnitude was overstated because its computer system misidentified the earthquake’s focus, though they ruled out a cyberattack. Some local reports noted that one contributing factor may be applying magnitude-calculation methods designed for earthquakes within Japan’s dense observation network to a distant event outside coverage.

Ayataka Ebita, director of the agency’s Earthquake and Tsunami Observation Division, apologized to the public at a news conference, saying, “We deeply apologize for causing great inconvenience.” Meanwhile, Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara told reporters that the government regretted the incident. “We caused a great deal of worry and placed a burden upon those who took shelter or took action to ensure their safety, as well as on others such as transport systems and businesses that were affected,” he said.

Several Japanese citizens had learned about the alert through municipal public address systems, TV and radio broadcasts, or their smartphones.

As expected, the false alarm sparked chaos in several parts of the country, disrupting daily life and domestic transit. In Sapporo, Hokkaido, for example, 14 trams stopped for a few minutes after the warning until their operator decided it was safe to continue service. Additionally, bullet train operations between Shin-Yokohama and Toyohashi stations on the Tokaido Shinkansen Line were briefly halted, although the operator later noted that the suspension was not directly caused by the earthquake warning.

Moreover, people sought shelter unnecessarily in some places, and social media later buzzed with netizens expressing confusion after the alert was retracted.

A false magnitude-9.9 earthquake warning jolted people because it is exceptionally scary, and no instrumentally recorded earthquake has ever reached magnitude 9.9.

According to publicly available information, the largest instrumentally measured earthquake in history—magnitude 9.5—was the 1960 Valdivia earthquake in Chile that killed more than 1,600 people, injured at least 3,000, and left two million people homeless. The rupture zone stretched 500 to 1,000 kilometers along the country’s coast.

A rupture zone is the area along a fault or rock mass where stress exceeds the material’s strength, causing it to break or fracture during an earthquake.

The false warning could have triggered panic because Japan’s geography puts it in an area of extreme seismic risk.  Japan sits at the convergence of four major tectonic plates—Pacific, Philippine Sea, Eurasian, and North American—along the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” making it one of the most earthquake-prone places on Earth.

In fact, about 20% of the world’s magnitude-6.0 or larger earthquakes occur in or around Japan.

Initially, the system located the epicenter near the Kuril Islands off Hokkaido, where a possible magnitude-9-class event is believed possible. Official scenarios for such an event have earlier predicted tsunami heights of up to 30 meters in some places; possible death tolls of close to 100,000; and widespread destruction of buildings and infrastructure.

The so-called erroneous warning predicted intensity 7 shaking across northern Japan. If it had come true, nearly all buildings would have suffered severe or total damage, and landslides, ground cracks, and infrastructure collapse may have occurred.

In a country where even moderate earthquakes bring an otherwise bustling country to a standstill by triggering automatic train halts, elevator shutdowns, and immediate public action, a maximum-intensity alert over such a wide area may have shaken the people.

The eight minutes that the alert was live may have brought back the trauma of 2011 when Japanese people stood witness to the worst natural disaster to hit the country.

The Shadow of the 2011 Disaster

In 2011, Japan suffered its worst natural disaster when a magnitude 9.0 to 9.1 megathrust earthquake struck off Tohoku’s Pacific coast, about 130 kilometers east of Sendai.

The earthquake hit on March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m. local time. On that fateful day, a massive undersea megathrust earthquake measuring 9.0–9.1 occurred in the Pacific Ocean some 72 kilometers east of the Oshika Peninsula in Japan’s Tohoku region.

According to publicly available information, the quake was relatively shallow, at about 24-32 kilometers deep, and lasted six minutes. However, it was so violent that it shifted the seafloor and generated a series of powerful tsunami waves.

The waves hit the coast about 30 to 40 minutes after the main shock, toppling seawalls and inundating about 561 square kilometers of land along Japan’s northeastern Pacific coast. In places such as Miyako, these waves attained a maximum run-up height of 133 feet.

The tsunami swept entire towns and coastal communities in Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima prefectures, among others, leaving widespread devastation. 

Following the tsunami, hundreds of people were reported dead, and hundreds more were reported missing.

As rescue efforts began and the scale of the destruction—particularly in coastal areas—became apparent, the numbers in both categories sharply increased. After two weeks of the disaster, about 10,000 people were officially counted as deceased by the Japanese government, and about 1.5 times as many were still listed as missing and believed dead.

Finally, the official Japanese government or Reconstruction Agency figures were reported to be more than 19,729 dead, more than 2,553 missing, and about 6,200 injured.

The vast majority of fatalities resulted from drowning in the tsunami rather than the earthquake shaking itself. Over 120,000 buildings were completely destroyed, with hundreds of thousands more severely or partially damaged. Furthermore, the disaster also severely damaged and disrupted critical infrastructure, including roads, railways, ports, airports, power lines, and water systems.

Adding to this massive toll on the country’s people and economy, the disaster also triggered a major nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

Although the earthquake triggered an automatic shutdown of the reactors, floodwaters inundated the facility and disabled both off-site power lines and emergency diesel generators. Without cooling, three reactor cores melted down, triggering hydrogen explosions and releasing radioactive material, which sparked evacuation en masse.

The event was subsequently rated Level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale—the highest level, shared only with the 1986 Chornobyl disaster.

The earthquake and tsunami following the disaster had long-term social, economic, and environmental impacts across northeastern Japan. In fact, recovery and reconstruction from the accident took more than a decade, including rebuilding communities, infrastructure, and coastal defenses, and managing the Fukushima site going forward.

Against this background, the recent false warning was uniquely unsettling because it briefly presented the public with a scenario worse than 2011, as it would have released roughly 20 times or more the energy of the Tohoku quake. Moreover, the predicted location lies along the same subduction zone system that produced the 2011 disaster.

The recent false alarm did not trigger an earthquake, but it may have forced the country to briefly confront the scale of another possible disaster.

• Contact the author at sakshi.tiwari13 (at) outlook.com
• Follow EurAsian Times on Google News

The post Tsunami, Then Nuclear Disaster: World’s Biggest Earthquake Alarm Revives 2011 Memories in Japan appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.