.
In the words of the narrator in the post-apocalyptic videogame Fallout 3, “War never changes.” Although fundamentally, he may be right, when it comes to procedures, strategy, technology, and the arena of war, he could not be farther from the truth. From women entering the battlefield to unmanned drones taking out targets, methods of war engagement have progressed tremendously in the past few decades. As technology continues to develop, we must prepare for a world where the farthest stretches of science fiction are the reality of future warfare.
Throughout the twentieth century, geopolitics was determined by the playbook of conflict between great powers. In the World Wars and Cold War, we saw the big dogs of geopolitics (America, Germany, Japan, Russia, etc.) face off against each other while developing countries tried to stay away from the destruction. As society progresses further into the 21st century and beyond, the characters of warfare takes on different personas in the forms of terrorism and revolution. Recent affairs have branded the present by a shifting in global power rank, demanding high tensions for establishing legitimacy. Modern power struggles, not much different than the Chinese-Japanese and Russian-Ukrainian relationships, set the stage for such reorganization of dominance. In a time of constant innovation, the threatening of U.S. allies gives rise to fears of confrontation, leading to warnings like that of Chinese journalist Han Xudong, “We must bear a third world war in mind when developing military forces.” As conflict escalates, methods of retaliation and defense are revamped and created—on both sides of the conflict.
The Invisible Starting Point: Defining the Future of Conflict
In the past, there has been a clear, distinct timeline of when an act of war is committed and a declaration of war is issued. In WWII Japan attacked the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. declared war against Japan the next day. Today, inter- and intra-national tensions are amorphous with no clear start date. In the future, wars will not be declared. Rather, war will be a continuous escalation in tensions and violence. On a note of foreshadowing, as China erects military infrastructure on piles of rock and coral synthetic islands in the South China Sea, the U.S. navy watches from a mere twelve miles away, protecting their freedom of navigation, gathering intelligence, and awaiting intervention. Tensions will continue to escalate and demonstrations of power will be displayed, but if this pattern continues, then the next move could mean violent repercussions. There will be no peacetime, no “Phase Zero” due to ever-present tensions between states defending their own interests.
With no concrete starting point, the sliding timeline of beginning clashes means the future of war will be a continuum of conflict, suggests Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle. Just as a gamer advances in difficulty through the video-game plot, every geopolitical relation begins at Violence Level One. As conflict evolves and tension increases, violence escalates to the next level. For every form of conflict, there will need to be a strategic procedure as a significant catalyst for change. The future of conflict will depend on these precise moves that cause and manage chaos. Once these moves are made, the continuum of conflict stretches onward, forcing the strategic planning for the next move to answer the “then what” question.
The Future of War on Land
Although cybersecurity will become vital for the future global society, the realist argument chimes in: humanity harbors an innate tendency to solve conflict via force. The future of war technology has yet to reveal the hopeful elimination of risking human life or the efficient killing of thousands more lives. The images of raw battle seen in movies like “Saving Private Ryan” will be replaced as war advances beyond just boom and bang, point and kill. The World in 2050 promises a field of technologies dedicated to the maintenance of peace. However, should global interests collide, those same technologies could usher in heightened security and greater risk should that security be breached.
Since 1940’s to present day, military innovation has come to a screeching halt, plummeting from an annual 7% growth to a dragging 3% in 2016. According to Barbara Starr, Pentagon Correspondent at CNN, the U.S. military alone is essentially fighting with almost the same kit of high impact weaponry it used for Desert Storm in the early 1990s. Innovation has been plentiful while implementation slow. When predicting the changes in ground warfare, General Mark Milley, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, concedes that there will be no earthshattering, fundamental changes to war technology in the next five to ten years. However, once the ten-year or even fifteen-year mark is cleared, Gen. Milley expects substantial changes in the character of war, specifically in the implementation of robots on the battlefield.
When imaging the future of war, humanity hopes for a significant decrease in casualties and increase in soldiers returning as healthy as when they left to serve. P.W. Singer of the New America Foundation paints this picture for us: a 42-pound explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) robot saving the day and hundreds of lives by locating and disabling/safely detonating a charge. All the while, the robot’s operator controls the situation from a secure distance. Largely due to the success of these robots, IED fatalities have dropped from 368 in 2010 to 0 in 2015.
EOD robots and their success rates have opened the doors for other possibilities for autonomous or partially autonomous machinery on the tactical ground battlefield. The Army Research Lab anticipates these robots to be fairly similar to systems in place today but with much more expansive capabilities, including machine reasoning and intelligent autonomy. By 2050, ARL hopes to employ robots capable of operating and communicating in “teams,” providing intelligent defense that warn about impending threats, and serving as advisors in situations of complex risk analysis and decision-making. “An associated major aspect of this battlefield development will be the seamless integration of human and machine decision making,” the ARL report states. Sensors are currently under construction that will be embedded into soldiers who will produce “sentient data” to be shared with other soldiers and computers, linking both humans and machine into the Internet of Things, where objects connect to the Internet which connects to other objects in a network of constant interaction between humans and machines.
In combination with these internally planted sensors, humans involved in ground warfare will need to undergo an upgrade themselves. To ensure the partnership between man and machine is as effective as possible, the human members of ground operations team will feature bullet- /explosive-proof exoskeletons that will enhance the wearer’s strength, speed, and precision. Genetic engineering will transform the human mind with exponentially enhanced sensing and cognitive prowess. In essence, armies of the future will be part sentient robots, part super human.
We can press pause on our futuristic war videogames for a moment, turning away from the animated disasters players see and commit. But at some point, these images are conditioning and training us for when the virtual warfare becomes reality.
Future of War in Cyberspace
The next fundamental change to the character of war is cyber warfare. Cyber weapons might not replace conventional or nuclear weapons—these just add a new layer to the existing system of terror. But in doing so, these also add their own risk of triggering a conflict. The computerization of future society offers both wonder and woe. The threat of computer hacking invites substantial dangers, like remote hostages or assassinations Adversaries could hypothetically hack data encrypted in medical implants or self-driving Uber cars while perpetrators demand ransom for the thousands of lives at stake.
Cyber threats are different from any other security threat the world has faced. As the technological improvement transforms the world, the most powerful countries in cyber offense will be the weakest in defensive cyber tech. These nations will be the societies that are the most connected because they will heavily rely on cyber networks and connection for civil society, economy, military, and beyond. Co-director of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation Amy Zegart estimates that for every 2500 lines of code encrypted in our devices and networks there is at least one defect. For perspective, the average Windows computer has about 40 billion lines of code. That is 16 million unlocked doors that cyberhackers will target. The future of technology will contain a plethora of machines and systems with masterfully complex coding that can even mimic human intelligence. The attack surface on future codes is massive. Foreign and domestic threats will have the ability to hack anything that requires a computer to operate. And in the future, that means everything.
Ready… Aim…
Prepare. The future of cyber warfare is cyber defense. With the computerization of military technology, creating programming that prevents our adversaries from causing cyber attacks, like the hacking of Ukraine’s power grid or the cyber-heist on the Central Bank of Bangladesh, is more important now than ever as these programs are the first defense against further conflict. Encouraging student to study the history of cybernetics and computer evolution prepares the next generation of cyber defense specialists in understanding the failures of previous defensive and offensive computer programs and creating stronger versions. Cybersecurity researcher Chris Domas created a visual translation technique for binary codes that made recognizing similarities and patterns quicker and more effective. In cyber warfare, this means cyber engineers will have the enhanced ability to become first responders in drastic emergency situations, like hacking of classified government servers. When seconds count, we’ve unlocked the means to stop the bad guys.
Tick tock. Or it’s Game Over.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
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One if by Land, Two if by… Hack? The Future of Warfare
A group of military helicopters and the silhouette of a soldier.
November 29, 2016
In the words of the narrator in the post-apocalyptic videogame Fallout 3, “War never changes.” Although fundamentally, he may be right, when it comes to procedures, strategy, technology, and the arena of war, he could not be farther from the truth. From women entering the battlefield to unmanned drones taking out targets, methods of war engagement have progressed tremendously in the past few decades. As technology continues to develop, we must prepare for a world where the farthest stretches of science fiction are the reality of future warfare.
Throughout the twentieth century, geopolitics was determined by the playbook of conflict between great powers. In the World Wars and Cold War, we saw the big dogs of geopolitics (America, Germany, Japan, Russia, etc.) face off against each other while developing countries tried to stay away from the destruction. As society progresses further into the 21st century and beyond, the characters of warfare takes on different personas in the forms of terrorism and revolution. Recent affairs have branded the present by a shifting in global power rank, demanding high tensions for establishing legitimacy. Modern power struggles, not much different than the Chinese-Japanese and Russian-Ukrainian relationships, set the stage for such reorganization of dominance. In a time of constant innovation, the threatening of U.S. allies gives rise to fears of confrontation, leading to warnings like that of Chinese journalist Han Xudong, “We must bear a third world war in mind when developing military forces.” As conflict escalates, methods of retaliation and defense are revamped and created—on both sides of the conflict.
The Invisible Starting Point: Defining the Future of Conflict
In the past, there has been a clear, distinct timeline of when an act of war is committed and a declaration of war is issued. In WWII Japan attacked the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. declared war against Japan the next day. Today, inter- and intra-national tensions are amorphous with no clear start date. In the future, wars will not be declared. Rather, war will be a continuous escalation in tensions and violence. On a note of foreshadowing, as China erects military infrastructure on piles of rock and coral synthetic islands in the South China Sea, the U.S. navy watches from a mere twelve miles away, protecting their freedom of navigation, gathering intelligence, and awaiting intervention. Tensions will continue to escalate and demonstrations of power will be displayed, but if this pattern continues, then the next move could mean violent repercussions. There will be no peacetime, no “Phase Zero” due to ever-present tensions between states defending their own interests.
With no concrete starting point, the sliding timeline of beginning clashes means the future of war will be a continuum of conflict, suggests Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle. Just as a gamer advances in difficulty through the video-game plot, every geopolitical relation begins at Violence Level One. As conflict evolves and tension increases, violence escalates to the next level. For every form of conflict, there will need to be a strategic procedure as a significant catalyst for change. The future of conflict will depend on these precise moves that cause and manage chaos. Once these moves are made, the continuum of conflict stretches onward, forcing the strategic planning for the next move to answer the “then what” question.
The Future of War on Land
Although cybersecurity will become vital for the future global society, the realist argument chimes in: humanity harbors an innate tendency to solve conflict via force. The future of war technology has yet to reveal the hopeful elimination of risking human life or the efficient killing of thousands more lives. The images of raw battle seen in movies like “Saving Private Ryan” will be replaced as war advances beyond just boom and bang, point and kill. The World in 2050 promises a field of technologies dedicated to the maintenance of peace. However, should global interests collide, those same technologies could usher in heightened security and greater risk should that security be breached.
Since 1940’s to present day, military innovation has come to a screeching halt, plummeting from an annual 7% growth to a dragging 3% in 2016. According to Barbara Starr, Pentagon Correspondent at CNN, the U.S. military alone is essentially fighting with almost the same kit of high impact weaponry it used for Desert Storm in the early 1990s. Innovation has been plentiful while implementation slow. When predicting the changes in ground warfare, General Mark Milley, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, concedes that there will be no earthshattering, fundamental changes to war technology in the next five to ten years. However, once the ten-year or even fifteen-year mark is cleared, Gen. Milley expects substantial changes in the character of war, specifically in the implementation of robots on the battlefield.
When imaging the future of war, humanity hopes for a significant decrease in casualties and increase in soldiers returning as healthy as when they left to serve. P.W. Singer of the New America Foundation paints this picture for us: a 42-pound explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) robot saving the day and hundreds of lives by locating and disabling/safely detonating a charge. All the while, the robot’s operator controls the situation from a secure distance. Largely due to the success of these robots, IED fatalities have dropped from 368 in 2010 to 0 in 2015.
EOD robots and their success rates have opened the doors for other possibilities for autonomous or partially autonomous machinery on the tactical ground battlefield. The Army Research Lab anticipates these robots to be fairly similar to systems in place today but with much more expansive capabilities, including machine reasoning and intelligent autonomy. By 2050, ARL hopes to employ robots capable of operating and communicating in “teams,” providing intelligent defense that warn about impending threats, and serving as advisors in situations of complex risk analysis and decision-making. “An associated major aspect of this battlefield development will be the seamless integration of human and machine decision making,” the ARL report states. Sensors are currently under construction that will be embedded into soldiers who will produce “sentient data” to be shared with other soldiers and computers, linking both humans and machine into the Internet of Things, where objects connect to the Internet which connects to other objects in a network of constant interaction between humans and machines.
In combination with these internally planted sensors, humans involved in ground warfare will need to undergo an upgrade themselves. To ensure the partnership between man and machine is as effective as possible, the human members of ground operations team will feature bullet- /explosive-proof exoskeletons that will enhance the wearer’s strength, speed, and precision. Genetic engineering will transform the human mind with exponentially enhanced sensing and cognitive prowess. In essence, armies of the future will be part sentient robots, part super human.
We can press pause on our futuristic war videogames for a moment, turning away from the animated disasters players see and commit. But at some point, these images are conditioning and training us for when the virtual warfare becomes reality.
Future of War in Cyberspace
The next fundamental change to the character of war is cyber warfare. Cyber weapons might not replace conventional or nuclear weapons—these just add a new layer to the existing system of terror. But in doing so, these also add their own risk of triggering a conflict. The computerization of future society offers both wonder and woe. The threat of computer hacking invites substantial dangers, like remote hostages or assassinations Adversaries could hypothetically hack data encrypted in medical implants or self-driving Uber cars while perpetrators demand ransom for the thousands of lives at stake.
Cyber threats are different from any other security threat the world has faced. As the technological improvement transforms the world, the most powerful countries in cyber offense will be the weakest in defensive cyber tech. These nations will be the societies that are the most connected because they will heavily rely on cyber networks and connection for civil society, economy, military, and beyond. Co-director of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation Amy Zegart estimates that for every 2500 lines of code encrypted in our devices and networks there is at least one defect. For perspective, the average Windows computer has about 40 billion lines of code. That is 16 million unlocked doors that cyberhackers will target. The future of technology will contain a plethora of machines and systems with masterfully complex coding that can even mimic human intelligence. The attack surface on future codes is massive. Foreign and domestic threats will have the ability to hack anything that requires a computer to operate. And in the future, that means everything.
Ready… Aim…
Prepare. The future of cyber warfare is cyber defense. With the computerization of military technology, creating programming that prevents our adversaries from causing cyber attacks, like the hacking of Ukraine’s power grid or the cyber-heist on the Central Bank of Bangladesh, is more important now than ever as these programs are the first defense against further conflict. Encouraging student to study the history of cybernetics and computer evolution prepares the next generation of cyber defense specialists in understanding the failures of previous defensive and offensive computer programs and creating stronger versions. Cybersecurity researcher Chris Domas created a visual translation technique for binary codes that made recognizing similarities and patterns quicker and more effective. In cyber warfare, this means cyber engineers will have the enhanced ability to become first responders in drastic emergency situations, like hacking of classified government servers. When seconds count, we’ve unlocked the means to stop the bad guys.
Tick tock. Or it’s Game Over.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
