One Year In: What Are the Lessons from Ukraine for the Future of War?
Wars are not just contests of weapons and will; they are also laboratories of a sort. Their battles provide lessons that will shape not just what happens next in that particular conflict, but also in all other conflicts to follow.
The most momentous of these insights can create inflection points in history. They become turning points in the story of war, influencing how, when, and even where to fight from that time forward.
Like so many other major wars, the last year of fighting in Ukraine has shown this effect. Every other military in the world is studying it to inform their own approach to future conflicts. Thus, we’ve seen signs of not just what will happen next in battles there, but also in future wars elsewhere.
Opening the Pages of History
The most obvious type of inflection point in the story of war is when a new weapon is introduced that fundamentally changes or even ends the fighting, such as the atomic bomb’s debut in World War II. Yet, more common are when a new technology is introduced that points the way to the future of war, but with an initial impact that is not all that powerful in the present. This is usually because new technology is at the nascent stage of its own development, needing more time and experience both to make it more capable and learn how to use it. But once it has been introduced into war, there is no going back: Future wars will surely see more and more of that technology in more and more powerful ways.
A classic example is the first use of an airplane in war, less than a decade after its invention. On October 23, 1911, during a war between the Kingdom of Italy and the Ottoman Empire, an Italian pilot took to the air in a canvas-winged monoplane. He flew at what was considered then an incredibly fast speed of 45 miles per hour, circling over Tripoli, in modern day Libya. With this new ability to look down upon the Earth, he was able to carry back to his commanders news of where enemy positions were located. But the effect of this new technology was not just better reconnaissance.
A week later, the same pilot decided to bring up into the air with him four hand grenades, which he dropped over the side of his plane upon the Ottomans below. This first ad-hoc bombing certainly didn’t affect the outcome of the war, but the era of air warfare had begun and there was no turning back.
So too in Ukraine, we have seen similar examples of new technology in use—not drastically shaping the fighting, but providing signs of what’s to come.
One area is the utilization of artificial intelligence (AI). The conflict in Ukraine has seen various forms of AI deployed in an ever growing variety of ways—from using face recognition software to identify enemy soldiers to deploying machine learning to make military and aid supply chains more efficient. AI has even been harnessed to advance propaganda and information warfare: Russia’s invasion in Ukraine is the first war to see the use of “deep fake” videos, which morph the line between the real and machine generated.
The use of machine intelligence in all its forms in war is only going to grow as AI both advances in its own capability and takes on more roles and importance in our world beyond the realm of war. No other area of technology is presently being as funded as deeply and involves as diverse an array of actors as this space. It involves not just all the world’s governments and thus their armed forces, but also the leading civilian corporations. Indeed, Wired magazine summed it up well: “In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI.” And, of course, the same is now happening in the defense economy, where the joke in the Pentagon is that the generals don’t know what AI is, but now want to buy it by the barrel.
Another new inflection point started with what might seem just a joke, but actually opens a serious new front in both cybersecurity and warfare.
The internet began in the 1960s as a U.S. military research project space for improving human communication. Ever since, the cyber threats to this network of networks have been about attacking these very same human communications, whether to steal them or block them.
