What We Know About the Wars of The Future.

100 YEARS I The Next 100 Years
SAM COLE
P.W. Singer and August Cole
What We Know Now About
the Wars of the Future
August Cole and P.W. Singer, two leading experts on national
security, co-authored Ghost Fleet. The novel envisions the unfolding of World War III and the technologies that would be
used in the fight.
Ghost Fleet’s fictional Type76QY
Autonomous Littoral Surveillance
System fires a shot.
In all these changes that loom, future
conflicts will see the old lessons of the last
100 years . . . still ringing true.
44 AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MAY 9-22, 2016
bat, the identity of the combatants and the skills they
need to bring to the fight.
Wars in cyberspace will
draw in players including
military organizations that
did not even exist a decade
ago, loosely tethered cybermilitia and wholly independent hacktivist networks. In
turn, even F-22 fighter pilots
now act more like battlefield
data managers than the
leather-helmeted aces of old.
And artificial intelligence
(AI) has evolved from the
pages of science fiction novels to powering everything
from cruise missiles that hunt for targets on their own to
IBM’s Watson—which has both already won the game show
Jeopardy and competed for a Pentagon contract.
But in all these changes that loom, future conflicts will see
the old lessons of the last 100 years Aviation Week has faithfully reported on still ringing true. Whatever the technological advance, war is human in its core elements, from its
causes to its dynamics. The adages endure: The fog of war
is not going away, and no plan will survive first contact. The
adversaries will compete against one another, learn from
one another and constantly strive to get inside each other’s
OODA (observe, orient, decide and act) loop, be it with prop
plane or AI. And, most of all, innovation, organization and
implementation will triumph every time. c
SAM COLE
T
he wars of the future might start by accident, such as by a pilot hot-dogging
and bumping into another plane, the loss and outrage from the accident
escalating into outright battle. Or they might be driven by some crisis boiling over, a dispute over a new policy or even a new island, with other powers drawn into the fight by old alliances. Alternatively, the conflicts might
reflect deliberate choices to go to war, perhaps to avenge an old wrong or
remake a new world order to reflect emergent
economic and military powers.
The cause and course of such future conflicts are unpredictable, but there are some
things we can be certain of. The air domain
will be key, but perhaps in ways the U.S. has
not experienced in a long time. Indeed, the last
time the U.S. Air Force truly contended with
a peer for control of the air, it was called the
Army Air Corps. The last U.S. ground force to be bombed by an enemy was a unit
deployed to Laos, hit by North Vietnamese pilots flying propeller-driven Russian
Antonov cargo planes turned bombers. The kids born in the last year that there
was a dogfight of any kind are about to become draft-eligible themselves.
Yet a future fight will very likely feature critical air battles, be it with state
adversaries contending for air dominance with large numbers of combat aircraft,
notably of the same generation, or to nonstate actors projecting power into the
sky in a way they have never been able to do before. Indeed, this latter future may
already be here. In the Iraq/Syria war, every side has now flown unmanned aircraft
systems (UAS). U.S. air operations there depend on UAS for targeting and strike.
Even the Iraqi military conducted its own strikes with UAS it received from China,
while the self-proclaimed Islamic State jury-rigged commercial drones to give it
intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities that even nation-states
did not have a generation ago.
The wars of the future will also be multidomain, with fights likely kicking off
in places where we have never fought before. Unlike the pounding footsteps of
German troops advancing into Liege, Belgium, in 1914, the
droning of Val dive bombers over Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the
“Shock and Awe” explosions of cruise missiles more recently
over Baghdad, the opening shots of the next war will likely be
silent. The reason is that the first battles may well play out
in the vacuum of low Earth orbit or with software in cyberspace. The outcome of what happens in these two domains
could prove determinant, as they are where the modern
American way of war, in both its business and operational
sides, is most vulnerable to disruption from new players.
The future of war may also see long-held tech advantages
disappear. Part of the reason why so many other states are
now building fifth-generation fighter jets or flying Predatorlike drones is because of these new realms and modes of
conflict. The winners and losers of coming air battles may
well be determined by already-lost battles in cyberspace,
most notably from data heists at leading American aerospace and technology corporations. It is hard to win an arms
race when your research and development investments also
pay for the other side’s advances.
But leaders determined to defend the status quo should
not be so arrogant as to think adversaries are simply stealing and copying them. Unsatisfied with what it is getting
from Washington’s Beltway, even the Defense Department
courts Silicon Valley in a race to just keep pace with private-sector innovation. In turn, China’s government and
private-sector researchers are working together on a variety of homegrown game-changing technologies, such as
self-driving cars made by Chongqing-based Changan Automobile Co. that just completed a road trip of 2,000 km (1,242
mi.) and the Tianhe-2, the world’s fastest supercomputer.
These developments will also reshape the nature of com-
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