How wars change with digital transformation: social media war, hybrid war and Sun Tzu

The war has always fed on propaganda and counter-propaganda, but with the digital transformation of recent years there has been a paradigm shift and that in Ukraine can be defined as the first social media war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has gone from 500,000 to 6 million followers on Twitter in a few days since the invasion of the Russian armed forces, managing to show images of Mariupol hospital all over the world and calling for a rally around him the powerful of the earth with hashtags and tweets.
Thanks to the digital transformation, the new generations have grown up in a global world, accustomed to looking beyond the TV screen at home, resistant to being subjected to the view offered by the own government and the party narrative and in fact Russian public opinion, until it has been gagged completely, it has split in two: young people against the war on one side and adults and elderly sided with the dictator on the other.
Hybrid wars are increasingly being born around the world, fought under the threshold in the no man’s land between peaceful relations and formal fighting. Sun Tzu in the Art of War 2,500 years ago said “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting” and today governments, terrorist groups and even businesses hire hacking companies to open fire without declaring war formally.
Undoubtedly therefore, in order to successfully manage these new challenges of modernity, it is now imperative to update the “toolbox” on online communication and cybersecurity.