The era of digital, transparent war has already arrived
War in Ukraine was a shock, not a surprise — it has been a clear and present danger since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. It also came as no surprise, because the world has watched for months as Russia assembles its forces on the border with Ukraine. In 2023, the war will become completely transparent, visible and understandable through the integration of information from satellites – commercial low-orbit cubesats and high-end geostationary military satellites and aircraft; all the digital footprints left by people and equipment in a highly connected world (from CCTV cameras and traffic data to bank cards and mobile phone locations); and distribution of user-generated content that can be found on social networks.
In 2023, it will no longer be possible to sneak up on a foreign country with an army, navy or air force or hide the death and destruction they cause. Armed forces around the world will try to counter this by assembling, moving from bases and maneuvering on the front line in a more dispersed manner, hiding as much as possible in plain sight. They will mostly fail, but a fleet of commercial vans hauling small amounts of heavy artillery rounds on a variety of west-to-east routes in Ukraine shows what can be done.
The success of both shoulder-launched and heavier anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles against columns of armored vehicles and streams of aircraft, plus the undeniable vulnerability of all of Ukraine to Russian long-range cruise and ballistic missiles, as well as the sinking of a Russian warship Moscow— shows that precision weapons are ending the primacy of platforms and headquarters that have dominated the battlefield since the early 20th century. One high-precision missile, even if it costs tens of thousands of dollars, can destroy a multi-million dollar platform and put the lives of its crew in mortal danger. It will change the way armies, navies and air forces are organized, equipped and operated. The limiting factor today is the cost and complexity of producing these weapons, but as the world lives with the existential danger of 21st century great power conflict, the urgency of lowering costs and increasing inventories will only increase.
In 2023, digital technologies will reshape confrontation and conflict as transparency and precision combine with advances in robotics, autonomy, connectivity, data in a secure cloud, and artificial intelligence. This combination will lead to the fact that the armed forces will no longer be just people operating equipment, but a rapidly developing group of inhabited, uninhabited and autonomous forces. It’s a process that starts with improving the organization, operation, and training of today’s military, but as technology advances and experience grows, it will be as transformative as Airbnb is for housing or Uber is for transportation. The digital age will bring about the most profound changes in how states confront and conflict. It will be a decades-long competition where the winners are brave enough to move fast and the losers succumb to the comfort of mild change.
Despite this transformation, nature war will never change: it will be about killing people and breaking their things faster than they can do it to you. It will continue to be a contest of wills, an aspect of human existence that is far from eradicated for all its ferocity, irrationality and desperation. The result will remain an unwritten mixture of reason, emotion and chance. Technology is only changing how we fight, not why.