Michael Clarke is Visiting Professor of Defence Studies at King’s College London, and former Director General of the Royal United Services Institute in London. He is currently a Defence and Security Analyst at Sky News. His most recent book is Great British Commanders: Leadership, Strategy and Luck (2024). 

The fundamental nature of warfare has not changed over the ages. Literature abounds with examples as to why this appears to be so. Warfare is a battle of wills, embracing the capacity to kill or be killed, to impose and to endure physical suffering, in pursuit of some essentially political objective: survival itself, outright conquest, or, more commonly, some mix of less extreme objectives. It is a battle of willpower in the application of lethal force. As warfare in Europe has shown over the last 35 years, that battle of wills can take place simultaneously in space and low Earth orbit, as well as in miles of muddy trenches on the ground that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers would have well understood. The primeval nature of warfare is, in that sense, unchanging.

 

While the nature of warfare is constant, the character of warfare—the actual ways in which it is fought—is persistently changing with every new technological and social turn of the evolutionary wheel. In this respect, it is difficult to think of previous eras and “revolutionary” breakthroughs—like the advent of gunpowder, the arrival of airpower, or the age of the missile—that are as different from the immediate past as the last 40 years have proven to be for warfare in the present era. The character of warfare never seems to have changed so dramatically or quickly as it has in the very recent past.

A Hologram of Warfare | Source: Shutterstock

 

The technological character of emerging twenty-first-century warfare is so complex that it cannot be represented satisfactorily even by some three-dimensional model. Contemporary warfare suggests a more dynamic and ever-changing version of its form. If it were represented visually, it would resemble something close to a hologram or a shape-shifter. The fighting of state-on-state modern war is simultaneously both hugely expanded and highly compressed. And it oscillates constantly between the poles of expansion and compression as it runs along the widening fault lines of contemporary global society. Military and political leaders have to contend with both “expansion” and “compression” as they contemplate fighting wars or becoming involved even in lower-profile conflicts.

 

On the one hand, warfare has never covered such a broad spectrum of social and human activity. The direct ordnance of war has not changed very much in a century. It is mainly a combination of kinetic projectiles from the very small to the very large, explosives, fire, gas, or even radiation. But the application of such traditional ordnance—how and where it is applied—has entered intangible realms of technology that don’t flow intrinsically from any headquarters, and don’t necessarily originate in the military. Rather, the military headquarters tries to tap into those parts of different independent processes it has some power to access.

 

In wars in Syria, Iraq, or Ukraine, for example, troops hunkered down in largely traditional ways. But they were targeted by aerial weapons, including from aircraft, artillery, and especially drones. These, in turn, were navigated from GPS space satellites, and based on intelligence derived from satellite images, or mobile phone emissions, or the triangulation of completely disconnected information brought together and interpreted by the apparently unlimited power of artificial intelligence. Physical infrastructure can be attacked in modern wars with much of the same ordnance that was employed during World War II, albeit by using missiles and drones instead of waves of aircraft or endless artillery barrages. But national homelands and their critical infrastructure can also be attacked very efficiently by something as intangible as cyber-power that has no geographical base, or by misinformation designed to provoke panicked citizens to overwhelm some of the enemy’s own infrastructure.

 

AI has the ability to create a “single synthetic environment”—a detailed, dynamic model of how another society works, including its electricity grid, water supply, cash and credit systems, traffic lights, rush-hour flows, transport timetables, and retail food distribution. The all-too-tangible human misery of winter cold or food shortages—used as a weapon of war—can be enabled by the essentially ephemeral powers of the cyber domain or the autonomous learning abilities of AI. These technologies can execute human intentions and determine the methods of doing so without human interference.

 

In addition, AI is on the verge of exploiting a new revolution in quantum computing. Quantum computing possesses the power to smash through all known encryption systems, and while only a small part of applied quantum technologies is available so far, the quantum revolution is in full swing as more of its era-changing computing power becomes available to the powers big enough to develop and exploit it. AI and quantum computing can be expected to feed from each other, and as they do, the weaponization of some of their combined potential will reveal new ways in which societies and their armed forces can be disrupted and harmed in an ever-widening spectrum of destructive possibilities. At present, we can only speculate about the ways in which the AI and quantum technology revolution will be weaponized.

 

Warfare is a widening challenge, too, because wars involving advanced societies have to be fought more intensely at home, in addition to the fight taking place abroad or on a battlefield. The proliferation of multiple information channels, social media, and digital society itself has made every community more vulnerable not just to disruption and destruction, but to greater misinformation and manipulation than ever before, whether by its own government or foreign groups and powers. Official information sources or mainstream news channels have to compete with a cacophony of privately generated information and opinion that is easily manipulated and can be carefully targeted by an adversary to undermine domestic commitment to a military cause. More or less everything that truly happens in a battlespace—and quite a lot that simply isn’t true—finds its way into the blizzard of information, images, ideas, and opinion that accompany military activities.

 

This phenomenon potentially works the same against the leadership in autocratic and democratic states alike. In a sense, every state fighting an international war also has to fight its own civil war. For advanced societies, that has become an intrinsic part of the “strategic” level of command; the impacts of war on domestic society connect more directly than ever before into what happens on the battlefield.

 

The hologram of war, therefore, enlarges and diffuses as it encompasses a uniquely wide spectrum of fighting domains. But the hologram also shimmers with the perversely opposite effect that this widening of the spectrum is accompanied by the phenomenon of extreme compression in other respects. Extreme “strategic compression” simultaneously faces all modern leaders and commanders.

 

Twenty-first-century technologies have the effect of compressing the time, space, and functions in which military power is exercised across these widening domains. Military operations get rolled into a tight ball of interactions and cascading consequences that are inherently difficult for one person, or one staff organization, to comprehend. Though if they can remain in control of it, strategic compression also offers some advantages. It loads the dice of command heavily in favor of the most agile operators.

 

Compression takes place up and down the strategic-operational-tactical command chain. Communication technologies can telescope the whole command chain from top to bottom. In May 2011, having authorized the raid to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden, U.S. President Barack Obama sat with his staff in the Situation Room in the West Wing of the White House while SEAL Team Six assaulted Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan’s Abbottabad, 7,000 miles away. Commanding U.S. forces over the border in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus watched the same live feed, prepared, if necessary, to launch rescue operations if the raid in Pakistan went wrong. They all watched the whole 40-minute assault as it unfolded. Of course, the President had more sense than to intervene at the tactical level with what SEAL Team Six was doing, but it would have been technically possible for him to do so.

 

This sort of compression—instantaneous communication links that are sensitive and accurate over any distance—has many more mundane implications for commanders. From the 1991 Gulf War onwards, U.S. leaders were able to have some degree of direct access to the battlefield and were increasingly tempted to use it to form their own judgments about successes and failures in active operations. In the aerial campaign against Colonel Gaddafi’s regime in Libya during eight months in 2011, then British Prime Minister David Cameron notably clashed with his Chief of Defence Staff. The Prime Minister had access to the same tactical picture and was sorely tempted, it seems, to suggest short-term tactics when the operation seemed to be dragging on and imposing a domestic political price on the government.

 

The same communications compression, however, can also work heavily in favor of one side if it is used carefully. The first year of the war in Ukraine demonstrated how Kyiv’s forces could derive great tactical advantages against Russian forces by being able to download satellite data, vital to immediate targeting of, say, enemy artillery guns, directly to the mobile phones, laptops, or tablets of individual soldiers. Immediate tactical information did not need to come through a brigade or battalion organization, nor even necessarily from observers or forward air controllers. In this case, a Ukrainian lieutenant or sergeant directing counter-battery fire had instant access to what the Starlink satellite constellation, privately owned and operated by Elon Musk, provided to troops on the ground. Ukraine’s own improvised counter-battery software (GIS-Arta), built around Starlink during the early months of the war in 2022, could detect, fix, and call down fire on enemy artillery positions—all in less than a minute. It was immediately successful.

 

Such strategic compression has become the norm in modern warfare and shows no sign of slackening. Indeed, the trend is strengthening all the time. Modern analysis currently recognizes six “domains of warfare”—the areas and aspects in which warfare takes place. They are: land, sea, undersea, air, space, and cyber. The hologram of warfare at once creates the breadth of operations—from the trenches to space, from the kinetic to the cybernetic—while digitization and the communications revolution compress the potential response to it by offering the promise of meaningful integration between all six disparate domains of warfare. In other words, it generates the ability to fight synergistically across all domains at the same time.

 

This, of course, is much easier said than done. Originally, the “integration of the domains of warfare” was a game only the United States had the technologies to play. But the aspiration has rapidly become the chief objective of military planners in all advanced states, not excluding big autocracies like China and Russia. Some will get nearer to it than others, but all modern militaries recognize the potential of domain integration in creating another “revolution in military affairs”—an otherwise overused cliché—if it can be done with at least partial success.

 

The implications of future warfare, which is simultaneously wider than ever before and yet so compressed that speed and domain integration are a real possibility, raise other important conceptual questions for traditional military thinking. Some suggest, for example, that for long periods the future battlespace may seem strangely empty. Neither military hardware nor personnel will be greatly in evidence. Much of a battle will be fought through cyber competition, intelligence manipulation, and long-range missile attacks on rear areas in what is characterized as the “deep battle.” In modern conditions, it is extremely dangerous to concentrate forces—say, an armored brigade or an air wing—anywhere within ballistic or cruise missile range of an enemy. Much of an operation, even a discrete battle itself, may be fought in ways that are not immediately evident to an observer. It may be a deep battle for long periods. Then at some point, the old principles of warfare will apply. Forces must then be concentrated to defeat or annihilate an enemy force, to occupy the ground, in some way to take physical control of the battlespace. When it is required, there is still no substitute for physical military power on land, sea, or air, however large or small its most appropriate units may be. The trick, say the modern military doctrine writers, will be an ability to keep traditional forces dispersed and effectively concealed until the moment arrives when they will concentrate quickly at the decisive points of attack. Hiding forces large enough to launch meaningful attacks when the time comes will be a highly complex exercise conducted as much in cyberspace and the electronic spectrum as in any physical space adjacent to a battle area.

 

That, in itself, presents daunting conceptual and organizational challenges. It is also unclear how this model of operations will affect the understanding of other, closely related battle concepts. In particular, how such a model might redefine the meaning of important military principles like the “mass” and the “scale” of one’s own forces in a conflict, and the “culminating point” of a battle or campaign, or the “center of gravity” of an adversary. These are fundamental concepts for any battle planning.

 

In 2021, British General Robert Fry wrote about the possibility of the “Midway moment” now arriving in the land warfare arena. In June 1942, the Battle of Midway was one of the turning points of World War II, and it changed the nature of maritime warfare thereafter. It was fought at a range of more than a hundred miles by ships that never saw each other or engaged directly. The outcome was determined by the aircraft—the individual torpedo bombers and bombers the carriers launched. Fry sees the land environment going through a similar “Midway moment” of remoteness, dominated increasingly by concealment, surveillance, the first-round accuracy of artillery, rockets and ballistic missiles, robotic devices, cyber-power, and the application of AI. This is not merely science fiction; it is a picture that modern military planners anticipate for the future. That conception may come more easily these days to the more technocratic maritime and air forces, but it suggests some fundamental, and possibly revolutionary, changes for ground forces. For ground forces, it is difficult to anticipate in these circumstances how some of the key concepts of “mass” or “preponderant force” should be defined. Theatre commanders working at the operational level traditionally need to understand where and when a culminating point exists. That point determines where it matters to win, where one can afford to lose, and where and when the final outcome is likely to be determined. Successful war leaders understand the principles of organizing forces at scale, assembling sufficient “mass,” and recognizing the culminating point of a battle or a whole campaign where “mass” would achieve the objectives and an enemy is pushed beyond a “critical point” where defeat becomes inevitable.

 

Yet many modern war planners openly wonder if mass and scale of forces will have any place in the outcome of future military campaigns. Most analysts still resist that conclusion and point to Russia’s war on Ukraine as evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, some practitioners keep worrying about how a commander is expected to find the center of gravity in an adversary who is conducting the deep battle largely through electronic and cyber means, in an anonymous and decentralized way, from bases that cannot be located—or, if they can, cannot for some political reason be attacked. And if commanders can find the center of gravity of their adversary’s campaign and think they know where the culminating point is likely to be, which elements in their own mix of exotic forces are they seeking to concentrate to bring “mass” to bear at the right place and time?

 

As military planners seek to embrace these challenges, they are also aware that they may point to a deeper crisis of military culture in their modern societies. The military utility of any individual soldier may have to be reassessed as armed forces take on a far wider range of skills. The “warrior ethic”—certainly required by some parts of the military establishment for employment at some point in the warfighting cycle—may be far less prevalent in the armed forces of the future. “Age, gender, and bellicosity,” it has been said privately by one general, may not be the defining characteristics of the typical serviceman or woman of the future. Different skills and characteristics will be required that will not easily be accommodated in armed forces structured as they have traditionally been for more than a century in the powerful states of the world. Some fundamental rethinking about the nature of military personnel and painful restructuring of the forces themselves will be required in any military establishment that aims to remain effective amid the conditions of contemporary, high-tech warfare.

 

These rapid evolutions in the character of warfare are likely to be tested in the real world and on a larger scale sooner rather than later. The era of global politics that arose after the Cold War, in which international conflict was primarily driven by the weakness and collapse of states, has been superseded by a harsh return to great power politics, in which outright warfare between “peer competitors” is now a more distinct possibility. Western military establishments, in particular, are deeply affected by this new era that has come upon them with a suddenness that has certainly taken political leaders—if not security analysts—by surprise. Some Western military establishments have had a very busy 35 years since the end of the Cold War. They have been frequently “on operations” in fractured and weak societies across many parts of the world. But going on “operations” and “war-fighting” are two different activities, and they make significantly different demands on military establishments and the societies that command and sustain them. Embracing what I have here called the “hologram of war” makes the difference between “operations” and “war-fighting” starker than ever. It poses challenges to the military and political leaderships of modern states that they are only now beginning to fully appreciate. They still have a long analytical journey ahead of them.

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