New War: Imagining The Battle Technology Of The Future

by Judith DubinIn every main installment of the post-apocalyptic hit game series, “Fallout,” a familiar narrator voiced by actor Ron Perlman introduces players to the series’ bleak mantra. “War. War never changes,” he intones.That may be true in a big picture sense, but according to political scientist and warfare strategist Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow for the non-partisan think tank New America, some of the ways we conduct war certainly will change as we get further into the 21st century.“If you’re imagining a war in the future, it’ll involve all sorts of crazy science fiction-like technology,” Singer says, “but it’ll also share parallels with all the wars in the past, because it will still have humans at the center in terms of the cause and it’ll also come with human cost.” Singer envisions that technology’s changing influence on war will break down into five broad categories, some of which we can already see the earliest roots of.The swelling proliferation of robots, for instance, is a prime example of shifts in our hardware. The U.S. military already has some 10,000 drones in the air, Singer explains, and at least 80 other countries are sporting some amount of robotic tech. On the other end, the burgeoning growth of artificial intelligence to go along with that drone power exemplifies changes in software, as does our ability to track people with greater ease and precision.Getting more trippy, Singer points to the development of laser technology that can shoot down drones as an early sign of what he calls waveware, or the use of new energy sources as a weapon.Not only will the weapons change, Singer notes, but also how we make them — thanks to advances in direct digital manufacturing. 3D printers have given people the ability to not only create iPhone covers but also drones, and to do so in their own homes and places we would have never imagined otherwise. (Take, for instance, 3D printed gun blueprints, which are already widely available on the web.)Lastly, there’s us ourselves. Your classic cyborg may not be a near-reality, but our armies may someday soon feature soldiers with mechanical and biomedical enhancements that rival what we’d see in the latest Marvel blockbuster, Singer says.More challenging than predicting how any single technology will influence warfare, though, is how these shifts will interact with one another. “It’s like the equivalent of having the changes of the printing press, the computer, the steam engine, the atomic bomb all playing out at the same time,” Singer says. “They’re creating an all new synergy that’s fundamentally going to change the world.”
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