In this era of Great Power Competition, it is largely accepted that there will be a peer-on-peer conflict in our lifetimes, perhaps even before this decade is out. But what will that conflict look like? Forecasts fluctuate between a counterinsurgency model mirroring the last thirty years, or Armageddon, but little in between. Using global technological trends as a guide, we imagine a realistic future of peer-on-peer conflict. How will technology change the tactical and strategic landscape, and how are Great Powers using research and development to posture today?
“If this isn’t what pre-war feels like, what does?”
I was standing at a bar in one of London’s ancient military clubs, speaking with a fellow defense professional. We were surrounded by people in smart suits, elegant dresses, and, perhaps more importantly, military uniforms of all types. An event had just ended in which a panel spoke about the state of the world. As I leaned against a bar made of wood older than my country, I contemplated his question. It wasn’t the first time I’d talked about World War Three, but this time it felt different, more immediate, more inevitable. It wasn’t what the man said itself, but who said it (confidential by Chatham House rules), and indeed who else was in the room: “Captain this”, “Retired Brigadier that”, “CEO of this big defense company”, “Chairwoman of that board”. The hum of the room stilled to a nervous torpor. Several of the other attendees joined our conversation. We stood in a ragged circle and nodded absently with thousand yard stares, contemplating his question and the future it foretold. In a room full of people dedicated to war, no one argued war was coming.
Perhaps even more alarmingly, looking out the window at the night sky, I knew without a doubt that we were not alone. Out there, somewhere beneath these same stars, there was another room, filled with other captains of industry. Perhaps they were drinking vodka or baiju, but the conversation would be the same. Both sides know, it is coming.
To paraphrase Michael Shaara and The Killer Angels, we imagine this coming battle with such stony clarity that sometimes it feels like it’s already a memory. But what does this memory tell us? If this destiny is so certain, what will it look like? Despite all of my travels through the world of technology, I cannot yet claim to have found a working crystal ball, however postulating about the future is not entirely speculative: we have an ongoing war in Europe involving a peer adversary, an ongoing counterinsurgency in the Middle East burning like a fuse next to the powder keg of global powers, and on the other side of the world we have another adversary who is very actively competing with us using science instead of sword. Russia is experimenting, and China is developing. To what battlefield will they lead us, and with what weapons shall it be waged?
From my perch at a bar that doubtlessly hosted toasts to the fall of New York, and later comforted weary veterans trying to forget Yorktown, I stare out at the stars and wonder: what will be the tales from tomorrow’s war?
Battlelab Ukraine: GPS Denial
Deep behind enemy lines, the Scouts crawled on their bellies, easing up a ridgeline. It was cold, the kind of cold that crawls under your gloves and lingers between the layers of your uniform. On frozen fingers and stiff joints, they sped up as they neared the ridge - they didn’t need to crest it to know what lay on the other side. The rumble of diesel engines and distant hum of voices told them that they’d found it: the convoy.
The terrain was sparse. Bright white snow blanketed the frozen ground, dotted by only a few trees and scrub - nothing that amounted to good concealment, much less cover. Five meters beneath the ridge, the Sergeant tapped the Specialist on the boot anxiously. “Hang back. Can you use the quad?” The Specialist grimaced; they’d gotten used to denial. The enemy would block all RF, including GPS, but not when they thought they were invulnerable. If it worked, that meant the convoy didn’t think they could be reached here. There was only one way to find out. The Sergeant pulled security, carbine raised towards the voices, while the Specialist drew the quadcopter from her pocket.
“Does it work?” the Sergeant hissed through clattering teeth.
The Specialist tapped her device screen with deft clicks of a stylus. In her hand, the blades of the quadcopter whirred to life. She grinned at the Sergeant; the enemy didn’t have EW up. The Sergeant smirked. “Got ya.”
The Specialist flew the quadcopter up until it just barely peaked over the crest of the ridge. The Sergeant kept one eye on his weapon sight, but he was too eager not to glance over her shoulder at the screen. The flickering FLIR showed a long line of vehicles, fat and riding low. Fuel resupply by the looks of it. Jackpot.
“Call it in.”
The Specialist toggled the crosshair onto the road in the middle of the convoy. Coordinates popped up underneath. She tapped at her device, patiently at first, then with increasingly frustrated taps. “Wait a second…”
“What? What’s wrong?”
Frustrated, she hit the controller with the palm of her hand. “GPS, it’s - it’s all over the place.” The Sergeant spied over the Specialists’ shoulder again. The quad was in a dead still hover, but the GPS readout scrolled wildly. “Sarge, I can’t get CAT-one from this”
That was bad news. Calling it in by hand would take time, and they’d have to expose themselves. “Give it a sec.”
Before he could finish his sentence, the quad dropped from the air and landed with a thud between them. The rotors were still. The Sergeant looked at her ominously. “Did you do that?”
She shook her head.
Sergeant turned back to the ridge. “They must have had counters up. Come on, we’ll call it in by hand.”
“Wait! They might have”
“We’ll be quick.” He hadn’t come all this way to go home empty handed. At the top, after bear crawling up to the peak, the Sergeant dropped to his elbows with his eyes just above the ridgeline. The map rustled in the Specialists hands by his side. He slid his glove off, hands rattling in his cold, and raised his lensatic compass. “Okay, bearing”
The Specialist tapped him on the shoulder urgently. “Sarge? Do you hear that?”
“What? Hear what?”
Something whistled, high overhead, and the Sergeant’s heart dropped.
***
Everyone needs someone who keeps them humble. For me, it’s a retired Master Sergeant with 20 years in the elite US Special Forces “Green Berets” with combat experience from Iraq and Afghanistan. For the sake of his anonymity, I’ll call him “The Operator”. The Operator and I have worked together for a number of years; I call him up with a good idea, and he spends thirty seconds telling me why it isn’t a good idea. He then stays on the line for another hour to tell me how to make it a good idea.
When I called him to talk about GPS-denial in the next war, he said “don’t worry dude I have that figured out: it’s called a compass.” Much to my chagrin, having built a career off GPS-denied navigation, he makes a good point. TE Lawrence crossed the uncrossable desert without GPS, Drake circumnavigated the world without GPS. Continental Europe was lost and won back dozens of times over countless millennia without the use of GPS. GPS has only been in use for 40 years, and yet today most defense professionals think it would be catastrophic to fight without. Not necessarily, says the Operator. “If a magic EMP blast wipes out everything, within thirty days experienced troops are going to push aggressively and dominate the battlespace. And I’m going to be the happiest [person] you’ve ever met.”
The military trains for contingencies. PACE plans - Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency - are standard; map and compass is still taught in infantry school alongside modern GPS and battlefield management systems. Soldiers know things can go wrong and they know what to do when the worst happens. The Operator and I worked out a rough tradespace: as technology decreases, small unit tactics - and indeed leadership - become more important. If a unit goes to war knowing it will be denied - either fully or in specific scenarios - they will adapt and overcome. Tactics will develop rapidly; runners will replace radios and orders will be simpler. As the fight evolves, the defense base at home will find and migrate to alternative solutions.
That’s how we hope it works; we should hope the enemy gives us that advantage.
The fear should not be sustained denial, but instead sporadic. Denial itself is not the problem, but rather it is the confusion, and delays, caused by denial that will be the deciding factor. Returning to our vignette of the Scouts, two factors decided their fate: electronic warfare that they did not anticipate made their primary course of action fail. This forced them to revert to a slower contingency. If they had started calling in fires by hand, perhaps they would have been successful. Given the choice, however, they chose a more expedient solution that sometimes worked. By the time they realized they were wrong, it was too late. The enemy was able to move faster, and win. The Scouts balanced risk, but the enemy controlled the risk.
Knowledge is the weapon of tomorrow’s war. Not of troop movements and battle positions, but of capability; theirs, and your own.
Perhaps “assured” is the most critical word in APNT.
Technological Dominance in Tomorrow’s War
While Russia is on the march in the West, we watch with equal trepidation as technological power emerges in the East. China is undoubtedly a technological powerhouse, both in terms of development and sheer capacity to produce. The world learned this perhaps most acutely during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, when the world abruptly realized that all modern conveniences, from vacuum cleaners to missiles, are dependent on China. Every day, headlines are filled with news of Chinese development in artificial intelligence, 5G, satellites - the advancements, and indeed implications, are dizzying. Meanwhile, though remaining peaceful on Earth, warning bells are beginning to sound in space, where China is becoming increasingly active, practicing highly complex - and provocative - maneuvers increasingly close to Western satellites.
Perhaps more niche, but no less relevant, is Chinese leadership in emerging technology, namely quantum. China has two functioning satellites distributing quantum entangled keys, while the west is yet to launch its first; China holds all the relevant world records for quantum development, while the West struggles to imagine a quantum future.
My friend and colleague, Dr. Elliott Hastings, has a PhD in quantum ground receivers from the University of Bristol. As one of a very few experts in an emerging field, he has become tragically used to being misunderstood. “Quantum technology stands out because it takes a PhD or mind-altering substances to understand.” Dr. Hastings spends much of his valuable time away from his immediate work attempting to help me understand his field to the depth of the former without benefit of the latter.
This alludes to the fundamentally confounding nature of quantum technology: by asking a question, you change the answer. This sounds like magic when applied physically; physicists have tried to explain quantum through the infamous Schrödinger's cat, who you may inadvertently kill by trying to see if it's alive. They have tested this with the baffling double slit experiment, in which particles seem to pass through all possible combinations of two slits simultaneously, until you put a sensor on one of the slits - then the particle mysteriously only passes through one slit. They call this “collapsing the waveform”, an idea that hardly makes sense theoretically, much less practically. And yet, it’s real.
Extrapolated, the double slit experiment can be taken to mean that the way we ask a question influences what answer we get. We ask which slit the particle goes through, and we get an answer - even though the answer doesn’t seem representative of what is observed to be happening. Said differently, by asking if a tomato is a fruit or not, you may overlook that tomatoes don’t go on a fruit salad. According to Dr. Hastings, “if we can build a quantum computer of sufficient size, we might find benefit in some of the biggest questions posed of us as a species, and entirely rewrite our conception of digital security.”
In China, they're asking the fundamental questions of science differently - which begs the question: what frightens you more, one enemy with kit a generation more advanced than your own, or a thousand enemies with old rifles?
To answer this, I spoke with a good friend and colleague from the British Army. A career officer in the infantry, he has spent the last several years of his life doing Army experimentation. Speaking to me under Chatham House rules, we’ll call him “the Officer”. I asked the Officer what role technology will play on tomorrow’s battlefield. “Lethality,” he says, “isn’t just about killing more effectively - it’s about creating decision dominance.”
Decision dominance - which I would suggest is synonymous with initiative - is a key concept both tactically and strategically. Battlefield commanders can create decision dominance, but so can political leaders. Decisions can be micro, like which hill to attack and how, or they can be macro - like whether to go to war; or indeed, whether to resist. The Officer tells me “to understand war, you must understand intent.” Wars are expensive, and only popular briefly, if ever. Few nations have the political will to fight a prolonged conflict, much less start one. “If you don’t want to fight an attritional war, you have to achieve a fait accompli.” If your French is rusty, this is a phrase commandeered by the military community meaning something that has already happened or been done and cannot be changed. The 1939 Blitzkrieg was a fait accompli; the annexation of Crimea in 2014 was a fait accompli. In the framework of decision dominance, a fait accompli does not allow your enemy the opportunity to decide, only to accept.
A fait accompli is powerful both militarily and politically, so how does one achieve this ultimate success? According to the Officer, it is a victory in the war of perception. “Our ancestors killed mammoths wearing furs to make themselves look big, painting their faces to look fierce. Tennis players live by look good, feel good, play good. They are fighting - and winning - the battle of perception.”
In 2014, the Russians annexed Crimea unopposed. Why? Firstly, the memory of World War Two was so distant that it was unimaginable for a European nation to invade another. Once Western leaders were forced to imagine, we reverted to our perceptions from the Cold War, that confronting Russia meant mutually assured destruction. Failure to anticipate took away time to decide, and with decisions due immediately it was not perceived to be worth the risk to oppose them. The Russians won the war of perception, and dominated the decision space.
So what might we make of an adversarial society that is increasingly provocative in space, whilst simultaneously focusing on science that is fundamentally different than our own? We have now entered the realm of conjecture, but perhaps our adversaries imagine a world where our satellites don’t work anymore, but theirs do. Such a future would mean they have all the connectivity of a modern society, whilst we do not. Perhaps they will maintain the ability to communicate in ways that are fundamentally different than our own, leading to the perception that they have reached a technological summit beyond our capacity - or will - to replicate.
The Officer and the Operator made the same point, independently of one another: in a prolonged conflict, tactics will win the day. History proves that exquisite solutions cannot keep pace in an attritional war; 50,000 poorly designed Sherman tanks defeated 2,000 exquisite Tigers. Technological dominance favors a fait accompli, especially technology which favors decision dominance.
Perhaps we should fear tomorrow’s war less than the one we missed this morning.
Conclusions
Earlier, I wrote about Russia dominating the decision space in 2014. My analogy, of course, was incomplete.
In 2022, Putin tried for a fait accompli again. This is another strong personal memory I have; watching missiles fall on Kiev with slack-jawed astonishment. At the time, I barely knew the name Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but watching the news I reasoned that his days were numbered. Rumors swirled that he had evacuated, and who could blame him? What could Ukraine do against the might of Russia? The war of perception had been won and lost in my head.
Then he came on the television, wearing body armor in a dark street as missiles fell behind him. He was surrounded by his cabinet, all of whom were also wearing body armor.
“I am here. We are not putting down arms. We will be defending our country, because our weapon is truth, and our truth is that this is our land, our country, our children, and we will defend all of this.”
Technology, economy, propaganda - these are the threads with which history is woven, but they have not kept Ukraine alive. That moment, that heroic decision to stand despite the perception that it would be hopeless, is why Ukraine is still fighting as a sovereign nation today. For all my speculation, I can only tell you one thing for certain about tomorrow's war: it will be decided by courage.
Thinking of that starry night surrounded by fellow defense professionals, I remember how proud I was to be in that room. Surrounded by men and women of all stripes and creeds, I didn’t need to see the medals dangling from their chests to know I was amongst courageous people. If tomorrow’s war is already a memory, I remember that I stood there, with them.
But tomorrow’s war is not a memory.
Tomorrow is yet to come, and we who are dedicated to the defense of democracy can shape that battle. Indeed, we must.
References
Chinese ambitions for conflict
https://media.defense.gov/2023/Apr/24/2003205865/-1/-1/1/07-AMONSON%20&%20EGLI_FEATURE%20IWD.PDF
Chinese satellite maneuvers
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/china-space-force-maneuver/
