If we want to know what the next world war will look like, we need do no more than watch what is happening in Ukraine.
Just as the mass aerial bombings of the Second World War could be witnessed first in the Spanish civil war two years earlier, and the Boer war revealed the shortcomings in the organisation of the British Army that had to be rectified by the time of the Great War (when new ones arose), so now we can peer into the present to better prepare ourselves for a European conflict that is feeling inevitable.
It might be said to be the first “modern” war of the 21st century, the first in which a variety of new and evolving technologies are deployed, and with devastating effect.
The most obvious is, of course, the drone – cheap and highly effective, provided its signals don’t get jammed. But there are others, including the kinds of cyberattacks on companies and national institutions launched by state actors, unofficial proxies and purely criminal gangs who might be persuaded to turn mercenary for a share of the loot in return for assistance from the military.
We’ve seen in recent years what cyberattacks can do to the NHS, banks and, most recently, retailers, and they are as devastating as any air raid. Nuclear weapons have barely been mentioned in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and the early assumptions that it would be Second World War, Kursk-style massed tank battles proved short-lived.
Over in the merciless war in Gaza, the lessons about the future of combat are less clear – except that the Israeli “Iron Dome” system proved almost completely effective against Iranian missile attacks, and thus effectively disarmed the ayatollahs as a force to be feared. Now, Donald Trump wants such a defensive shield for America, which is understandable, given that the Americans designed Israel’s smaller version.
So warfare is being transformed. It is reassuring that the British government seems alert to what is happening.
John Healey, minister of defence and one of Labour’s unobtrusive, low-key success stories, has announced £1bn to fund more brigades of “keyboard warriors” and non-human soldiers, this time to create a “new Digital Targeting Web”.
Troops on the ground will be better directed by intelligence gained via satellites, aircraft reconnaissance and drones. That will help them avoid being blown up by enemy ordnance and assist them in moving faster to hit the other side. Artificial intelligence, like every new technology invented by man before it, is finding an early military application, which will no doubt speed its own evolution, as happened with, for instance, powered flight a century ago.
It is not too fanciful, in fact, to envisage a world where human beings will be replaced by humanoid robots on the battlefield, fighting one another and vast swarms of drones overhead, all controlled by AI military “brains” thousands of miles away. Just as will become the case in trade and industry, the human being will become redundant in the cyberwars of the future, except as victims and casualties.
Wars will probably be even more destructive than those in the past, because the “productivity” of a modern war machine powered by AI would be so much greater. It actually makes the arguments about military spending a little less relevant: if a country makes the wrong choices about future procurement and strategy, it doesn’t matter how much of the GDP it spends on the wrong stuff.
If the Royal Navy’s majestic Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers are basically defenceless against squadrons of cheap drones able to overwhelm their defences, we will feel as foolish and vulnerable as when the Japanese went round the back of the biggest coastal defence guns in the world and walked into Singapore in 1942.
President Trump says his “Golden Dome” will cost some $175bn (£129bn); if so, and if it works (not yet obvious), it will be a bargain.
The UK’s strategic defence review is set to be published on Monday – and not before time. How we expend our scarce national resources on defending ourselves is just as crucial as how much the Treasury is prepared to cough up. The abiding lesson of history, however, is that preventing and deterring war is a lot less costly than fighting one.
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