What could the future of warfare look like?

Science has always shaped war. From the invention of gunpowder, the tank, radar and the atomic bomb: a weapon that was born from theoretical physics. But today, new technologies are pushing those boundaries even further. Autonomous drones, artificial intelligence, gene editing, and space-based systems are changing what war could look like in the future. To conclude this episode, here’s Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College and author of Space Warfare in the 21st Century: Arming the Heavens…

Joan - Technology always outpaces policy and strategy for use. What worries me, as someone who focuses on space, is that too little thought is being put into the endgame. How do you end a space war? What's the off-ramp? Although many space war games are highly classified, we do know from summaries that distance is a major problem. You don’t know what’s going on. You don’t know if your satellite went out because it was hit by debris, malfunctioned, or was subject to a hostile act. There’s a tendency to assume the worst and act on a “use it or lose it” basis, which means things escalate very rapidly, even into the nuclear zone. Space is where all the nuclear assets are, and everyone wants to adopt a “use it or lose it” approach. How do you dial this back? Once the assets are lost, you’re entering some really tricky realms.

Chris - But it would be an excellent way to be really disruptive, wouldn’t it? Without doing too much damage on the ground initially, at least. If you caused major havoc in space, you could blind your enemies, really mess up their economy—you couldn’t even take cash out at the bank if we knocked out the GPS system.

Joan - You knock out the GPS system and bad things are going to happen, not just to the military and not just to the country being targeted, but on a widespread basis. I think people don’t think enough about the secondary and downstream effects of taking out space technology. We know from past tests, even dating back to the 1960s, that breaking up a satellite creates a lot of debris, and that debris doesn’t discriminate between your satellite and someone else’s. These secondary effects in space technology are hard to predict. We learn strategy from the past, but we have nothing like that to study in space. We can predict, but we don’t really know. So if you start thinking, “Let’s take out that satellite, let’s blind that satellite,” you don’t even have to blow it up to make it dysfunctional. You can blind it—but is that an act of war? And is it an act of war that’s going to bring retaliation or escalation?

Chris - One of the reasons we’ve had wars in the past is concern over biological threats. This sounds a bit “yesterday” compared to AI and cyber security, but is it still on the table? Or have people learned their lesson, thinking, “No, we always end up shooting ourselves in the foot, so we won’t go down that path”? Or is biological warfare still regarded as a realistic threat?

Joan - It must still be considered a threat. I think there are individuals and groups for whom biological weapons might be the easiest to access. From past military programmes, do we even have an accurate inventory of what was developed? What happened to it? Was it destroyed? We would be remiss not to consider biological warfare a threat, not just because of the past. Countries will continue to develop responses to biological threats, which could themselves create new issues. Any time something becomes a threat, it’s very difficult to put it in a box and declare it gone.

Chris - A lot of the things we worried about in the past are now regulated under international frameworks, like landmine treaties. But what about the new threats—the speculative things we’ve been discussing, which are almost certainly being looked at behind the scenes? Is the law keeping up?

Joan - Not at all. For example, in space, there is an entire field of space law, but most space technology is dual-use—valuable to both military and civilian populations, and with both offensive and defensive potential. It’s just a piece of hardware; it doesn’t inherently carry intent. It’s about how it’s used and what policymakers decide. Policymakers don’t want regulations on how they might use a technology in conflicts, warfare, or last-ditch scenarios. Much of the law is what we call “soft law”: it is expected to be followed, but there is room for reconsideration if the situation warrants. Policy and law are always the last elements to catch up with technology use and development. I say that as a policy person who has spent many years studying space policy, often hearing military people say, “If we have it, we want to use it. We don’t want restrictions on it.”