Future Warfare

Innovation leaders face the challenge of planning for their organizations’ future in a time of technological and economic upheaval; the rapid emergence and proliferation of intelligent systems will be a key factor in that upheaval, and a key technology that organizations must be prepared to manage. A foresight program can help organizations map the challenges and opportunities presented by emerging technologies and serve as a valuable input to organizational strategic planning. IRI and RTI International developed a foresight program for intelligent systems to guide companies in framing, exploring, envisioning, and acting on the impacts intelligent systems may have. Working from an intelligent systems research framework, the program identified 70 key drivers of change and developed three scenarios depicting plausible and thought-provoking visions of the future of intelligent systems.

FazarroABSTRACTAll branches of the U.S. military are currently conducting nanotechnology research, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Army Research Office (ARO), and Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The United States is currently the leader of the development of nanotechnology- based applications for military and national defense. Advancements in nanotechnology are intended to revolutionize modern warfare with the development of applications such as nano-sensors, artificial intelligence, nanomanufacturing, and nanorobotics. Capabilities of this technology include providing soldiers with stronger and lighter battle suits, using nano-enabled medicines for curing field wounds, and producing silver-packed foods with decreased spoiling rate (Tiwari, A., Military Nanotechnology, 2004). Although the improvements in nanotechnology hold great promise, this technology has the potential to pose some risks. This article addresses a few of the more recent, rapidly evolving, and cutting edge developments for defense purposes. To prevent irreversible damages, regulatory measures must be taken in the advancement of dangerous technological developments implementing nanotechnology. The article introduces recent efforts in awareness of the societal implications of military and national security nanotechnology as well as recommendations for national leaders

Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) suggest that this emerging technology will have a deterministic and potentially transformative influence on military power, strategic competition, and world politics more broadly. After the initial surge of broad speculation in the literature related to AI this article provides some much needed specificity to the debate. It argues that left unchecked the uncertainties and vulnerabilities created by the rapid proliferation and diffusion of AI could become a major potential source of instability and great power strategic rivalry. The article identifies several AI-related innovations and technological developments that will likely have genuine consequences for military applications from a tactical battlefield perspective to the strategic level.

Drone swarms—multiple unmanned systems capable of coordinating their actions to accomplish shared objectives—have major implications for the future of warfare. One important set of implications relates to the ability of drone swarms to complement, challenge, and even substitute for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons. For example, swarming drones might enable more effective CBRN delivery. Or they might facilitate standoff detection, search the oceans for nuclear-armed submarines, or otherwise impede an adversary’s ability to threaten or employ CBRN weapons. Conventionally armed drone swarms might serve as strategic deterrents in lieu of CBRN weapons. At the same time, many CBRN-relevant applications of drone-swarm technology entail significant technical challenges even for very sophisticated states, and even more so for non-state actors whose capabilities will be far more limited, so there is considerable uncertainty around whether, how much, and when drone-swarm technology will complement, challenge, or substitute for CBRN weapons

The high-energy lasers of the 1980s were unwieldy assemblages of tanks, tubes, and plumbing that produced light by burning flowing gases, and the space shuttle was not ready for “space trucking.” In the decades since then, though, laser technology has come a long way, and the giggle factor of these technologies – dubbed “Star Wars” weapons by their detractors – is gone. High-energy solid-state lasers, not available in the Reagan era, are now being tested to shoot down rockets, mortars, and drones at hundreds of meters or more on the battlefield. Their success so far has led the Pentagon to reconsider high-energy lasers and other directed energy weapons for missile defense and perhaps other military applications on the fringes of space and in orbit. But are new actors merely making the same mistakes again, in an updated setting?

Third, and closely related, it considers the increasing prominence of dual-use space technologies in Chinese military writings - notably space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) - as a critical means to project China’s military power within the near seas and potentially beyond - or a ‘second island chain’ strategy. Such a strategy, is analogous with the possession of a sufficiently networked space-enabled joint military force capable of locating, tracking, and targeting U.S. military bases and carrier strike groups (CSGs) in the Western Pacific with long-range precision-guided cruise and ballistic missiles (e.g. the DF-21D and DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missiles).

The article contends that intentional concepts might be useful for relatively simple problems for which the means and knowledge to solve a problem are already available to an armed force but they are inadequate for the complex problem of future force development because they inexorably and needlessly limit the space within which to explore solutions and innovate. The article’s specific purpose is to dissuade the Army’s senior leaders from sponsoring comprehensive future operating concepts and encourage its members to proffer new ideas by writing limited-scope explorative concepts.

Installations are not sanctuaries; they are vulnerable soft-targets for a growing host of sophisticated threats seeking to degrade U.S. Army combat capabilities long before they deploy. Now is the time to act and update U.S. Army installations or risk stifling current modernization efforts with an Industrial Age past.

convinced European general staffs that rapid mobilisation by rail, quick-firing artillery and a focus on attack would make wars short and decisive. Those ideas were put to the test at the beginning of the first world war. The four years of trench warfare on the western front proved them wrong.

Aleppo. Mosul. Sana’a. Mogadishu. Gaza. These war-ravaged cities are but a few examples of a growing trend in global conflict, where more and more of the world’s most violent conflicts are being fought in densely populated urban areas, at a tremendously high cost to the civilians living there.