Three Axes of the Future War

There is a different vision of the future of war. While previously wars were growing increasingly massive in scale, today they are increasingly remote-controlled affairs as new technologies are influencing the nature of modern conflicts and worsening the international security environment. Information and cyber technologies make this vector practicable. Noteworthy in this sense is the evolution of strategic concepts in the leading countries, which reflects their perceptions of the likely future of wars. Any state expecting at least to endure a future war must timely identify the key risks involved in technological development and appreciate how it can contribute to the potential of a possible future military conflict. Mindful of the huge asymmetries in military budgets of various countries, the policymakers around the globe have to cut corners and look for alternatives to direct military confrontation, with an emphasis on the cyber and information spaces as most possible battlefields in a potential confrontation.

Given the huge developments in the world of military technologies, there is no denying the fact that the character of future wars will be different. But full realization of where these changes are heading will come after we enter a new technological cycle. Right now, however, we are approaching the end of the previous one. The combination of technologies, ideologies, and the new cycle’s social infrastructure will bear first fruit 12–15 years from now at the earliest. Interstate rivalry in this context will develop along at least three axes.

First, new technologies will emerge in military spheres. These include not only combat robots and drone aircraft, but also a likely new line of products that science can contribute – and is contributing – to the traditional army. For now, however, things are at a standstill, with further progress impeded by the present level of technological development. The main challenge is to discover a power source fit for modern machines, their platforms, and component units. A cheap, compact, and mass-produced power source is what will produce a revolution in military technologies within the next 20 years. A similar challenge impedes the effort to develop combat robots and massively introduce them to the army. Today, their self-sufficient operations and capabilities are restricted by the lack of a compact power source to fuel protracted battlefield action. Making a breakthrough in this sector would mark a serious bid for victory in future wars.

Drone aviation is also considered a promising avenue in most militarily-advanced states, and is thriving on artificial intelligence. Higher requirements for battlefield reconnaissance make drones more efficient, as battlefield surveillance tools and targeting information suppliers. Further progress in these technologies will call for new networking capabilities and even more sophisticated artificial intelligence applications in the military sphere. The next ten years will see drone systems acquire the ability to identify enemy equipment on the battlefield, classify and rank it in accordance with specific priorities. But drones will remain human-controlled for quite long. Yet, research and development on ground robots is lagging behind the aircraft development effort. For instance, military operation in Syria allowed Russia to test several models of this kind. It will, likewise, reach a high level of quality in remote-controlled robots within the next 10–12 years. For the time being, however, this sector is subsisting on 20^th century concepts

Finally, precision munitions constitute yet another promising area in military technologies, and the work to upgrade these is due to cut their cost and eventually phase out unguided weapons within the same 10–15 years.

The second axis is related to venturing into new spheres. Napoleon’s definition of war as the ability to use time and space to good effect is inspiring technological improvements of military practices aimed at attaining an edge in speed and manoeuvre. Geography should no longer impede operational missions. The reference here is not only to longer-range missiles, streamlined artillery systems, or more agile armoured vehicles. Technologies like battery-powered exoskeletons and load-bearing robots are, in fact, a solution to the eternal problem of limitations on infantry mobility. As soon as the issue is removed from the agenda, the earlier space and time calculations will have to be adjusted to the modern battlefield environment.

The battlefield itself has been expanding to new dimensions (cyber) and reaching new depths in the old ones (outer space and oceans). Wars fought in the last few years (specifically, Russia’s operation in Syria) illustrate the crucial role that surveillance and communications satellites, as well as GPS have come to play in warfare. In the future, as even more advanced systems are put in orbit, their operational and tactical importance will grow many times over to the extent that they will become indispensable in any military operation. The traditional fog-of-war effect will not be what it was before, or it will have to be made ‘denser’ through the use of new technological solutions.

Detailed research into the less explored submarine sphere seems to be perspective, with its progress accompanied, among other things, by military development of robots capable of operating at the depth of five kilometres. In the future, warfare at sea will not depend on the ability to locate ships and guess where they are headed, for sensor interdiction will help to obtain such data even before the conflict. This kind of the development in this sphere can significantly change the whole conception of naval warfare. Nonetheless, a complete portrait of character and potential of warfare in these new domains remains a job for science fiction writers.

Like in the former case, advances in artificial intelligence will count for much on this axis. Artificial intelligence is the third greatest innovation in warfare after gunpowder and nuclear weapons. But it is still early to say that we have full-blown artificial intelligence. Experts claim that at least 30 years are required to create an artificial intelligence that will address intellectually demanding tasks on its own rather than on an algorithm-by-algorithm basis as ‘machine intelligence’ may. Within the next few years, progress in this sphere will be fuelled by the effort to create target identification and image recognition libraries. In the mid-term, this could make stealth technology (a sub-discipline of military tactics that covers a range of techniques of decreasing visibility of military machines) redundant.

In parallel, opportunities are being studied to develop machine-to-man interactive systems that would be able to withdraw personnel from the battlefield and go on fighting in their own right. Computers have a proven ability of better risk calculation and selection of options within fractions of a second. Under the new circumstances, human response, including psycho-emotional reactions and cognitive function, is an encumbrance.

The main uncertainty in this context is whether or not a lower share of human involvement on the frontlines will further relax inhibitions with regard to entering into war. After all, in a situation where warfare is performed by machines, the main restraint – the desire to avoid war casualties – will be rendered increasingly insignificant.

But the trend towards ever more advanced technologies and effective procedures, given the reduction in the number of soldiers on the frontlines, does not necessarily mean that the battlefield role of humans will decline. Now, however, a relatively small number of personnel is required to perform the same missions as more massive armies did in the past. Modern individual weapon systems have unprecedented targeting accuracy and killing power, which is why it takes fewer people to capture and hold a territory, particularly when the military have advanced surveillance systems. The fl ip side of this process is higher demands on the quality of soldiers. Strength and courage – characteristics of the nature of war –are still respected, but a modern soldier in a combat environment must know how to operate sophisticated technologies and handle information supplied by complicated intelligence subsystems. It is increasingly difficult to find and train people of this kind. As estimated by US military leaders, a mere 29% of young people in the US are fit for military service as part of the US army. But there is an even greater number of people operating more complex systems behind the frontlines, such as aircraft and drones, modern encrypting systems, information transmitters, and communications networks. This trend is supposed to help soldiers on the frontlines, while at the same time making commanders think up more effective practices and procedures to derive maximum effect from the available technology, particularly in a situation where there is a threat of sustaining losses from identical enemy weapons. It goes without saying that training both these categories of military takes a lot of effort and money.

Finally, the third axis is about the total nature of warfare. Interstate rivalry, including with the use of brute force, will permeate all spheres of human and public life, such as the economy, finance, ideology, culture, and sport. It seems likely that wars of armies will evolve into wars of societies fighting for the projects they seek to advance. This scenario represents war as a conceptual process and phenomenon.

Going digital – possibly the main characteristic of the modern era –is already today linked to serious national security vulnerabilities and will be central to any war in the future. A scenario where cruise missiles capable of penetrating antimissile defences are launched at data centres, thus creating an immediate threat to the banking sector, food security, infrastructure, etc., no longer seems unimaginable. Such a state of affairs effectively eliminates the pain threshold to starting a war. A war will break out when one of the parties becomes confident of victory, with blitzkrieg preceded by protracted information preparations, a cognitive war of meanings, and attacks on consciousness in order to affect the morale, unity, and political stability as well as erode the enemy’s resolve to resist.

In this sense, the war of the future will be a combination of cybernetic and kinetic actions against the background of a protracted cognitive preparation to sap the enemy nation’s morale. This is a three-fold warfare – cyber, kinetic, and cognitive. It will be possible to hold out in such a war provided a country’s foreign and domestic policies are based on a combination of mental and technological methods and there is the requisite share of mental and organizational flexibility in both army and government structures. This will help them adapt to unexpected situations and promptly adjust to a changing environment. The first to adapt to a surprise will win. On the contrary, highly bureaucratized vertical structures have few chances of survival in the wars of today, let alone the wars of the future.

Clausewitz’s classical definition singles out among the aims of war the need to make an enemy incapable of resisting by making life difficult for them for a long time. In the 21^st century, this should be interpreted as the ability to control markets, the movement of capital, non-material flows, and critical industries. States failing to control the information, economic, and monetary spaces will lose