The Warfare Of The Future Is Already Here

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The Warfare Of The Future Is Already Here

AI and drones are changing the scope, scale and speed of battle.

Ibrahim Rayintakath for Noema Magazine

Credits

Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.

When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 with a direct assault on Kyiv, the conventional odds were that Russia’s post-Cold War military prowess, replete with a world-class nuclear arsenal, would readily conquer its former Soviet republic and fold it back into the restored empire.

Four years on, the battle not only still rages but it has also changed the nature of warfare as the first conflict to use AI-assisted precision-guided drones. Though pounded regularly by Russia, not least with hypersonic missiles as well as waves of drones, Ukraine has achieved the once unimaginable. It has increasingly brought the war deep into the Russian homeland, most recently hitting St. Petersburg — 1,000 miles away from Kyiv — with a drone strike on an oil refinery and military base supporting Russia’s war effort.

Similarly, the most damage done to the integral infrastructure of the oil-and-gas-rich U.S.-allied Gulf States at the height of the hot war with Iran was inflicted by inexpensive drone swarms launched by the theocratic state.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has moved on from fostering AI development at the tech giant to founding companies that have become key innovators of battlefield drone warfare in defense of Ukraine. In an interview with Noema, he looks at the big picture of the technological shift in how war is waged. He calls the introduction of AI and drones into combat “the largest revolution in military affairs in history.”

From A War Of Platforms To A War Of Systems

As Schmidt sees it, the first thing to understand is that we are shifting from the conventional “war of platforms“ to a “war of systems.”

“The right unit of analysis,” he explains, “isn’t the drone or the missile or the launcher. It’s the integrated architecture that lets a military see, decide, communicate, strike, survive and update faster than your adversary. In the future, the front line will be a new form of the no-man’s land of World War I, as sensors and drones mean that anything that moves can be struck.

“Second, every weapon will be supported by AI in the system I mentioned. Third, and this is the part I think people are slow to appreciate: In future wars, the humans will go in last, not first. Today, the basic order is humans first, with the technology supporting them. In the next war, that principle inverts. You send the robots in first to absorb fire and clear the battlefield.”

I asked Schmidt about the role humans will still play in this future. Will they remain in the loop?

He noted, “In March of this year, 96% of Russian casualties were caused by Ukrainian drone units. The drone operator is now the highest-value target on the battlefield — Ukrainians prize killing a Russian drone operator even more than killing a tank. So the pressure to move the human farther from the battlefield is already very real.”

He continued: “The question then moves into what systems replace the human operator on the battlefield. The future will entail ‘humans on the loop’ of a distributed system, rather than always ‘in the loop’ — supervising, auditing and intervening when something looks wrong, but not necessarily authorizing each individual shot. This is really just the algorithmic form of the delegation down the chain of command that has marked militaries forever.”

One wonders if precision targeting by AI will make war “cleaner,” with less collateral damage, or just invite a broader scope of destruction.

“We are in an era of ‘precision mass’ in warfare,” Schmidt argues. “In conflict, you used to have to choose between mass and accuracy. Either you fired a great deal of artillery inaccurately, or you fired a small number of expensive precision-guided weapons accurately. What has changed in the last few years is that cheap drones, cheap GPS and cheap sensors have upended that trade-off.

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“You can now field huge numbers of weapons that each hit exactly what they aim at. The war in Ukraine and against Iran have shown what this means. In Ukraine, FPV [First-Person View] drones in the hands of trained operators have produced minimal collateral damage in the engagements I’ve seen. The dumb war of mass artillery flattening a city block is far worse than a $500 drone going through a single window. This is the strongest case for the era of precision mass.”

"The drone operator is now the highest-value target on the battlefield — Ukrainians prize killing a Russian drone operator even more than killing a tank."

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