Introduction

In theory, the future of the war–state relationship seems assured in the Western world. There is a consensus that we have returned to a new era of great power competition, which has been reaffirmed by the recent Russian intervention in Ukraine. Other non-traditional threats are tacitly acknowledged but, as in the past, the driver of strategy and operations remains fixed on the high end of the military spectrum. Within this context, capital-intensive warfare, including nuclear weaponry, and the expansion of warfare into space and the cyber domain will ensure the state remains the principal agent through which increasingly expensive military technologies will be developed, deployed and sustained. This is so even though the cost of these capabilities is increasingly beyond the means of the nation state. The logic of this strategy can be questioned as demonstrated by the use of less expensive dual-use technologies, which in theory, challenge the traditional dominance of platforms like tanks, aircraft and ships. Such a development offers hope to smaller states and violent non-state actors eager to exploit these technological substitutes. However, as illustrated in the last chapter, recent operational experience indicates that specific and local conditions may have allowed cheaper disruptive technologies to prevail in engagements between Russian and Ukrainian forces. As such, it is difficult to extrapolate a meaningful trend from this analysis. In addition, countermeasures are available to challenge these technological disruptors and, for now at least, a conservative orthodoxy continues to shape and drive the war–state relationship. However, while the preservation of the status quo seems plausible and sensible over the coming decade, could this vision of war and the state set out in the previous two chapters be overturned by developments either discounted or not seen in the longer term? In this final chapter, I want to look at how technology in the future will shape and drive war and the state, and their interaction. My argument is that as we move into the fourth industrial revolution technologies, many of which had their genesis as military R&D programmes and were then spun out into the broader economy, are now feeding into politics, economics and society, and this will have significant consequences for the war–state relationship.