The Future of Warfare

(5 minute read)

A few days ago, I watched a BBC report from Kherson in southern Ukraine that I found deeply disturbing. It showed Yurii, a 52-year-old vegetable seller, being hunted by a small Russian drone as he tried desperately to keep his van between himself and the machine. Each time he moved, the drone followed, circling the vehicle as he tried to escape until it finally hit him and blew up.
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Remarkably, Yurii survived, although he was wounded by shrapnel and hospitalized. What struck me most was not simply the attack itself, but how personal warfare has become. A relatively cheap flying machine could pick out one ordinary man selling vegetables, pursue him almost like an animal being hunted, record the entire encounter and then deliver an explosive directly to him.

War has always been brutal, but this felt different. For most of history there was a considerable amount of uncertainty and distance in battle. Artillery shells landed somewhere beyond the horizon, bombers attacked factories, bridges or cities, and soldiers often fired at people hundreds of yards away whom they could barely see.

Increasingly, modern technology is removing that distance. A machine costing a few thousand pounds, or sometimes considerably less, can now search for one individual and follow them with extraordinary persistence.

It made me wonder what warfare might look like when America celebrates its 300th birthday in 2076.

One of the most striking changes is already economic. Modern military equipment has become extraordinarily expensive. A sophisticated fighter aircraft may cost tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, while a modern warship can cost billions. Even individual missiles can cost millions. Yet increasingly those enormously expensive weapons are being threatened by drones costing a tiny fraction of that amount.

Aircraft carriers cost billions of dollars, yet I can foresee a future in which a swarm of perhaps five hundred drones, costing only two million dollars in total, attacks one simultaneously. Each might carry an explosive payload roughly equivalent to a mortar shell. If even a hundred broke through the carrier’s defenses and struck the flight deck, they could potentially put one of the world’s most expensive weapons out of action for a fraction of the cost.

A cheap drone may damage a tank worth several million dollars. A swarm of them might threaten an airfield, or an ammunition depot. The defender may then be forced to use a missile costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to destroy something that cost only a few thousand. The economics become increasingly uncomfortable. It is no longer enough to ask who can build the most powerful weapon. Militaries also have to ask whether they can afford to defend their expensive weapons against thousands of cheap ones.

Now imagine taking that fifty years further.

Instead of ten drones, there may be a thousand. Instead of every drone being controlled by an individual operator, artificial intelligence could coordinate the entire swarm. Some machines might identify targets, others attack them, while others provide communications or protect the swarm from enemy drones. If a hundred are destroyed, the remaining nine hundred might simply reorganize themselves and continue.

Science fiction writers have imagined things like this for decades, but the basic technology is becoming increasingly plausible. The really difficult question begins when we remove the human being from the final decision.

Artificial intelligence is already becoming extremely good at recognizing objects and patterns. Facial-recognition systems can identify individuals, while computers can examine enormous quantities of surveillance information far faster than any human intelligence team. It is not difficult to imagine a future drone being given a photograph and told to search an area for one particular person.

The crucial question is what happens when it finds them.

Does the machine ask permission to fire? Perhaps it will. But what happens if communications are being jammed, or if a military commander believes that waiting several seconds for human approval might allow the target to escape? At some point, somebody is almost certain to argue that the machine should be able to make the decision itself.

There are arguments on both sides that are more complicated than they first appear. Human soldiers become frightened, angry and exhausted. They sometimes panic or make terrible mistakes. A machine does not seek revenge because the soldier beside it has just been killed, and it does not become confused after three days without sleep.

In theory, a sufficiently advanced autonomous weapon could follow the laws of war with greater consistency than a frightened human being.

Machines, however, make different mistakes. A human soldier may look at a frightened child carrying a piece of metal and realise that it is probably not a weapon. A computer might classify the object incorrectly. If that happens once, one innocent person may die. If the same software is controlling ten thousand machines, the same mistake could potentially be repeated thousands of times before anyone understands what has gone wrong.

Future warfare may also become less visible. A war might begin without a single missile being fired.

Banks could suddenly stop processing payments. Hospital computer systems might fail. Electricity grids could collapse across entire regions. Traffic systems, water supplies and communications networks could all become targets. A country might find itself under serious attack before most of its population even realised that a war had started.

Satellites will become increasingly important as well. Modern militaries depend upon them for navigation, communications, surveillance and intelligence. Destroy enough satellites and even an advanced military could suddenly become partly blind. That means space may become a battlefield even if nobody initially intends to fight a traditional war there.

Artificial intelligence could also accelerate military decision-making enormously. Generals have always faced the same problem: too much information and too little time. Reports arrive from aircraft, ships, satellites, intelligence agencies and troops on the ground, and someone has to work out what matters.

An AI system could examine all of that almost instantly, identify where an attack is likely to happen and recommend a response before a human commander has finished reading the first report.

That sounds extremely useful, but it also creates another danger. If both sides have AI systems making recommendations in seconds, warfare could begin moving faster than human beings can comfortably control. One computer detects what appears to be an attack and recommends retaliation. The enemy AI sees that response and recommends another one. Within minutes, events could spiral far beyond anything either side originally intended.

There is, however, another side to all of this, and it may eventually save enormous numbers of lives.

Why send a twenty-year-old soldier into a building if a robot can enter first? Why risk a pilot if an unmanned aircraft can perform the same mission? Why put sailors aboard a ship entering dangerous waters when an autonomous vessel can patrol them instead? By 2076, it is quite possible that many of the most dangerous military jobs will increasingly be performed by machines.

That sounds like an obvious improvement, and in many ways it would be. If wars still happen, surely we should want fewer young men and women dying in them. Yet even that creates an uncomfortable question. War has always imposed a political cost because leaders know that their soldiers may die. Families grieve, public support changes and governments can fall.

What happens if your own side barely suffers casualties at all?

If most of the fighting can be carried out by drones, robots and computer systems, does warfare become easier to start? A government might be much more willing to launch an operation if it knows that very few of its own citizens will come home in coffins. Cheap warfare could therefore become more common warfare.

More populous nations have often enjoyed an advantage in warfare, particularly when they could combine greater manpower with superior technology. In the future, however, that balance may shift increasingly toward the countries with the most advanced artificial intelligence and the most capable autonomous weapons and robots.

For the foreseeable future, the United States and China are likely to remain the strongest contenders, with Russia also retaining significant capabilities. By 2076, however, demographic change could alter that balance again, strengthening the relative position of the United States while placing increasing pressure on both China and Russia.

That leaves us with a rather strange possibility. The wars of 2076 might be both more precise and more dangerous. Machines could reduce civilian casualties by identifying military targets far more accurately than the weapons of today, while robot soldiers could save thousands of human lives. At the same time, autonomous weapons, cyberattacks and AI-controlled swarms could make conflict faster, cheaper and much harder to stop once it begins.

Technology itself does not decide which of those futures we get.

A drone can carry medicine into an isolated village or an explosive toward a frightened soldier. Artificial intelligence can help a doctor diagnose cancer or help a military system choose a target. Nuclear physics can generate electricity for millions of homes or destroy an entire city. The underlying science is neither good nor evil. What matters is what human beings decide to do with it.

As a science fiction writer, I find this one of the most fascinating questions about the future. In Return to the Galaxy, advanced technology gives characters enormous power, but it never removes the moral responsibility for how that power is used. If anything, greater power makes those choices more important. The same may turn out to be true in our own world.

I suspect the battlefield of 2076 will contain far more machines than the battlefield of today. Some of them may be autonomous, some controlled from thousands of miles away, and some may operate at speeds that human beings can barely follow. If those machines mean fewer soldiers and civilians die, that would be an extraordinary achievement.

The danger is that we mistake technological capability for wisdom.

The weapons of 2076 will almost certainly be more intelligent than the weapons we have today. The more important question is whether the people controlling them will be wise enough to decide when they should be used at all.

What do you think? Would a world in which machines do most of the fighting make war safer, or simply make it easier to start?

Till next time,

Brian

BA Gillies
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