If the day comes when you wake to find the tap produces no water, your mobile has no signal and your local supermarket is out of essentials, you may have become an unsolicited participant in cyber war. If that day includes the destruction of key power stations, 10 Downing Street demolished and the Bank of England left a smoking wreck by high-precision ballistic and cruise missiles, you will be witness to war in the Information Age.
If the day ends with the underpinnings of modern life shattered: the undersea fibre cables that connect all developed economies cut, the destruction of international airports and all oil refineries, then that war will be "existential", a matter of national survival. This is fortunately a fiction in our comfortable life of today, but it is not science fiction: just as the Fourth Industrial Revolution is transforming our lives it is already changing - and will change profoundly - how we confront each other and fight in this century.
We in the west have lived our recent lives free of the sense of existential peril that loomed over us in the 20th century and we declared dead at the end of the cold war. We do worry about terrorism at home, but unless this turns to the use of weapons of mass destruction (think home-cooked anthrax being sprayed in busy city centres) we don't sense that it threatens all our lives at once. But the present comfortable period in our history is not guaranteed to endure as our world changes, and there are already modern military capabilities (beyond nuclear weapons) that could affect our homelands and vital interests abroad, at virtually no notice and with devastating consequences.
We should not be surprised by this. War is war, a feature of human existence as old as mankind itself and unchanging in its essential nature: brutal, feral, unbounded and irrational in how it plays out, even if rationally committed to at the outset. It is about killing and destroying faster than the enemy, and likely driven by red mist more than good judgement, until the will to fight is depleted by blood, devastation and a widespread sense of futility. This is the lived experience of millions today, from Aleppo to Mosul to South Sudan. This is the threat hanging over the Korean peninsula, and even over Europe and Russia amid testy relations.
A peaceful generation in Europe does not change what war is. Yet the character of conflict - how war is fought - always changes as thinking and technology advances. The arrow gave way to the bullet, the horse to the tank, the battleship to the aircraft: these inflection points (always processes rather than events) occur throughout history - and in our time the power of information (in data, processing, connectivity, AI, robotics, bio-science, materials, autonomy and all the rest) is the latest inflection.
We are already living with rapid advances in the precision, range, stealth and lethality of ballistic and cruise missiles. Big military platforms such as ships and airbases can be struck from very long distances. Used with the strategic cyber capability some states now operate, war can be made by "stopping daily life" through the targeting of all forms of critical national infrastructure. Just as in the Blitz of 1940-41, civil society is once again "on the pitch" in modern war.
The unhindered access to the skies and the sea that Nato enjoyed during the Balkan, Afghan, Iraq and Libyan campaigns is no longer a given. The missile is starting to trump the aircraft and the ship, and the west has lost its edge. Russia and China have looked at western militaries since 1989 and invested in equipment to secure territory in air and sea, dominate space and the electro-magnetic spectrum, and to strike at iconic capability like aircraft carriers rather than match them. The west will struggle to penetrate these defences or stop missiles that may one day come in large numbers.
Nor is war in our time just, even mainly, about explosive destruction. Important as bombs and missiles are, the synchronised and constant manipulation of all forms of communication: political; diplomatic; state, commercial and social media; paid-for influence; and expert cyber intrusion is now a daily part of how states compete, confront and conflict. For some, there are few constraints and no obligation to value the truth in prosecuting "full spectrum" information activity. Liberal, values-based, law-abiding democracies are at a disadvantage here. "Fake news" is just a taster of what harm can be done through pervasive information manipulation used against open societies as a weapon of war.
The same wide span of Fourth Industrial Revolution technology (data, processing, connectivity, AI, robotics, bio-sciences, autonomy and so forth) that is changing how we live, work and play will now transform the way war is waged - in a process spanning at least a generation. The lead is with rapid and large-scale innovation in the civil sector, as seen in Silicon Valley and many other sectors.
Military transformation will largely be about the rapid adoption and adaptation of civil-sector-derived technology and methods in disruptive military applications. Open-source big data and AI will be at the heart of intelligence systems; commercial low-Earth orbit CubeSats will provide much of the imagery formerly done by expensive geo-stationary military satellites - in a far more accessible and low-cost way; unmanned vehicles on land, at sea and in the air will replace some of the humans now in harm's way - reflecting how Amazon runs its warehouses and Google makes driverless vehicles.
The future of military success will now be owned by those who conceive, design, build and operate combinations of information-based technologies to deliver new combat power. Caution, bureaucratic inertia, vested interest and institutional preference for evolution won't work: this will only leave room for competitors to steal decisive advantage in the most challenging of competitions on Earth.
So it is going to be a race to victory, and it is sure to raise lots of interesting questions.
Read more: No nuclear weapon is safe from cyberattacks
In our connected, globalised world, if there is nowhere that can be considered "off the pitch" in confrontation and conflict, the idea in the west that wars only happen abroad and only on the west's terms will not persist. Cyber vulnerabilities are the most striking example, yet how many governments, institutions and businesses see that they may be confronted by more than disaster and terrorism - and what are the legal and other obligations to even consider about this? For example, how much military control can be delegated to AI in acquiring and assessing intelligence, analysing data and working out courses of action? Where does accountability sit?
How do we feel about autonomy? It will be perfectly possible to build machines that kill on the basis of AI-enabled algorithms without a "human in the loop". It raises powerful ethical and legal questions. Even if we in the west shy away from this, others in the world will likely not - so there is at least a defensive risk to deal with. But if war can be fought by putting machines in the vanguard rather than our 19-year-old sons and daughters, why would we not want these machines - and might we then be tempted to go to war more easily?
At what point do we withdraw from the current stars of big military inventories? They must give way, but the politics, the consequences for alliances, the trauma for current militaries and the costs will be immense. The potential costs of not changing will be greater.
Finally, the key to success is to be bold and transformative in building military competitive edges, but how will this be done? In most cases the technology is led by the civil sector with no thought of the military applications, and militaries really do not know what is out there that could be adopted. Some have started: the Pentagon's Third Offset initiative is exactly about this. Getting it done well, at pace and against stiff competition will need bridges and partnerships between government, armed forces, industry, research, academia and the law.
It is time to get going, and it needs the people who know technology in our universities and industry to put ideas to governments and armed forces. The sort of agile collaboration that hot-housed dealing with complex, mass improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan showed what can be done. Now let's do it.
General Sir Richard Barrons was Commander, Joint Forces Command, from 2013 to 2016
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
