war in Ukraine came as a shock, not a surprise — it has been a clear and present danger since Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. And it’s no surprise, since for months the world has been watching Russia’s build-up of troops on the Ukrainian border. By 2023, warfare will be fully transparent, visible, and understood by integrating information from satellites—commercial low-Earth orbit CubeSats and high-end geostationary military satellites and aircraft; all digital traces (from CCTV cameras and traffic data to bank cards and mobile phone locations); and the proliferation of user-generated content discoverable on social media.
By 2023, it will no longer be possible to send armies, navies, or air forces to infiltrate other countries, or to conceal the death and destruction they cause. Armed forces around the world will attempt to respond to this by massing, moving from bases and moving forward in a more dispersed fashion, hiding as much as possible from plain sight. Most of them would fail, but the convoy of commercial vans transporting a handful of heavy artillery on Ukraine’s variable route from west to east shows what we can do.
Shoulder-fired and heavy anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles successfully hit armored vehicle columns and groups of aircraft — plus the indisputable vulnerability of all of Ukraine to Russian long-range cruise and ballistic missiles, as well as the sinking of Russian warships Moscow– shows that precision weapons are ending the primacy of platforms and headquarters that have dominated the battlefield since the early 20th century. A precision missile, even if it’s worth tens of thousands of dollars, can destroy a multi-million dollar platform and endanger the lives of its crew. This will change how armies, navies and air forces are organized, equipped and fought. The constraints today are the cost and manufacturing complexity of these weapons, but as the world lives in the existential danger of 21st century great power conflict, the urgency to reduce costs and build stocks will only increase.
By 2023, digital technologies will transform confrontation and conflict as transparency and precision combine with advances in robotics, autonomy, connectivity, data in secure clouds, and artificial intelligence. This combination will result in the Armed Forces no longer being just humans operating equipment, but a rapidly evolving workforce of manned, unmanned, and autonomous capabilities. It’s a process that begins by enhancing the way the Armed Forces are organized, operates and trains today, but as technology advances and experience grows, it will be as transformative as Airbnb was to accommodation or Uber was to transportation. The digital age will drive the most profound shifts in the way nations confront and conflict. It will be a decades-long contest, with winners bold enough to move quickly and losers succumbing to the comfort of modest change.
Despite this shift, nature War will never change: it will be about killing people and destroying their stuff faster than they can do it to you. It will still be a battle of wills, an aspect of the human condition that is far from eradicated in its ferocity, irrationality, and despair. The result will still be an improvised mix of reason, emotion, and chance. Technology only changes how we fight, not why.
