In this edition of The Naked Scientists, how is science helping to shape the future of warfare?
In this episode
What modern warfare is like
Aliona Hlivco
From Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan to Myanmar, war is not something that happens elsewhere. It is present and it shapes economies, borders, families, and futures. But modern warfare doesn’t just happen with boots on the ground. It’s deeply entangled with science and technology - from surveillance satellites and missile guidance to drones, cyberweapons, and battlefield algorithms. In this episode, we explore how science is transforming the nature of war, and what that means for the people living through it.
We begin with Ukraine, where a war that started with tanks and artillery has become a testing ground for modern military science. Here, drone footage is analysed by AI. Soldiers carry smartphones as often as weapons. And behind each trench line is a network of digital systems shaping what comes next.
Aliona Hlivco is a Ukrainian political analyst and defence strategist. For her, war isn’t just a story on the news. It involves her family, and her brother in particular…
Aliona - Yeah, he's been on the front line for exactly three years already. He volunteered in March 2022, probably not anticipating that it would last this long, but he's part of a reconnaissance unit. That's just about as much as I can share, meaning he's always on the front line or sometimes even too close to the action, which always keeps us worried and on our toes, shall I say.
Chris - Given your knowledge of how this is all playing out and what you do professionally, what does this actually mean to you? How have you experienced what's happening to your old country, and given the family connection with all this?
Aliona - Well, it's been a very interesting experience because on one hand, acknowledging that there's a full-scale war in your country definitely puts you in a state of shock for at least six months. And having spoken to some Ukrainian friends, they've gone through a similar process, but also at the same time, I was living in a peaceful UK, in London specifically. So I needed to still stay sane, stay on top of my day-to-day job, my bills. So it was very much a dual existence for me, almost like a parallel reality where you need to coexist between work and war back home.
Chris - This presumably though, and I don't mean this in a rude way, but it must have been good for business because this is your business.
Aliona - That was the upside, yes. And I do fully agree with the statement that every challenge provides an opportunity and it of course takes resilience and sobriety, I guess, and a will to take whatever you have to face and turn it into something productive. So it 100% accelerated my career unwillingly, because at the time of the invasion I was just working in a think tank, and then I went on to run it, to become a managing director here in Westminster, and eventually even launched my own consultancy, focusing on exactly all of the things that the war in Ukraine is producing at the moment in the world, if that's the right way to say, because it is creating a new stage of modern warfare as we speak.
Chris - What is dominating that? We hear about drones; they're probably the biggest thing that has really risen to prominence, but what is different about this conflict in Ukraine that has moved warfare on to a new level?
Aliona - I think drones and autonomous systems are definitely grabbing the headlines the most because it's a novelty, but what's talked about less is the multi-dimensional approach to war these days. So modern warfare now exists in multiple domains. We see the trench warfare with engagement of infantry and artillery and heavy weapons being used as much, if not even more than the First World War or Second World War level. At the same time, we're seeing a new digital dimension of this war, the development of modern technology, operating drones through artificial intelligence and deployment of that. Electronic warfare is spiralling and booming, and I think that's going to be the biggest challenge for the Western nations to tackle when it comes to facing adversaries, but also other domains like economic warfare, the geostrategic struggle of trying to form new alliances and build new partnerships at the time of geopolitical fragmentation. Cyberspace is a really big one and the one where Russia, for example, and China with their surveillance capabilities are getting more and more effective every day. So all of those domains exist simultaneously. And when you're fighting this war, you need to sustain all of those fronts at the same time.
Chris - We've spoken to a number of military and defence specialists on a range of topics in recent years here on the programme, including about the war in Ukraine. And the one thing that they're saying is that while Western countries are arming Ukraine, they're also quite keen to do so because they're seeing how a lot of these modern generations of weapons and tactics actually play out in a real-world circumstance where they wouldn't normally be able to test them like that until it was the real thing for them. So I suppose in that respect, they're quite keen to collaborate with Ukraine up to a point because they actually get to test things.
Aliona - Yes, Ukraine has definitely become a very effective testing ground for modern weapons. And it goes to everything from long-range missiles to tanks and armoured vehicles to potentially very soon fighter jets as more F-16s are coming into Ukraine and being used in Ukrainian skies. But it's also about the drone technology that you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation and all the modern developments. Whichever Western countries or even companies have access to Ukraine's battlefield, they can create something, deploy it on the battlefield and get live feedback of what to improve or how it can be improved. But it's also about learning from Ukrainian producers. The key to Ukraine's ingenuity is the lack of resources and the willingness to survive. And that combination creates a very quick and agile innovation cycle of about two weeks. So Ukrainians can create their drones in the garage with basic elements and parts, and then they would deploy it to the front line, they would learn the lessons, they would see how Russia is reacting to them. And by adjusting that to the electronic warfare signalling and jamming and basically the ability to destroy the drone and its ability to perform whatever tasks it was created to perform, the companies and the countries are learning very fast the innovation that they need.
What is stealth warfare?
Ramsey Faragher, Queens' College Cambridge
Modern conflict is very much a game of cat and mouse where combatants try to stay hidden. Stealth warfare - as it is called - is not just a tactical advantage, but a field of applied science. It draws on physics, signal processing, materials engineering and mathematics - all designed to outpace the systems built to detect and destroy. To understand how stealth works, I met Ramsey Faragher - CEO of the Royal Institute of Navigation - at Queens’ College, Cambridge. I began by asking him how submarines attempt to avoid detection…
Ramsey - The primary thing they try to do is stay incredibly quiet. They move very, very slowly, typically at just walking pace when they're trying to be quiet underwater. From the very beginning of the vessel’s design, silence has been carefully considered. So there are padded floors to reduce vibration from people moving around inside the submarine, and no big clunky, whirring, banging equipment on board. Another trick they employ is to hide among other sources of noise. If it's raining heavily, submarines can hide beneath the sound of the raindrops on the water. And even at certain times of the year, in certain parts of the world, they can hide behind the sound of plankton mating.
Chris - My goodness, what does that sound like?
Ramsey - Lots of loud chittering in the ocean.
Chris - How do they know where they are, though? Because when they're underwater, they don't have windows. You can't look out and search for landmarks. So how does a submarine actually navigate?
Ramsey - That is an excellent and very, very expensive question. They have the world's most expensive accelerometers and gyroscopes on board that monitor every change in speed and orientation, accumulating those changes in acceleration and rotation. That's called inertial navigation. Over time, the uncertainty about where they are increases, so they still need some kind of positional fix. If they're confident they can raise a periscope, they'll do so with a GPS antenna and get a quick GPS fix. Then they might not need to come up again for an entire day, relying on the gyroscopes and accelerometers. Submarines also have favourite particular places where they'll take depth readings. They'll go to known features, ping once, and measure the depth against an undersea mountain or similar structure to get periodic position fixes.
Chris - When we want to see where things are, we often use radar. In World War II it was a game-changer, wasn't it? Being able to see through mist and fog and detect things before they even knew you were there. How does radar do what it does?
Ramsey - Radar is a radio signal that is transmitted very, very loudly from a big transmitter with a very specific pattern. The radar then listens for that pattern to reflect off objects and come back. As you said, radar was invented just before World War II, but it's still the predominant way we detect aircraft at long range today. The vast majority of stealth technologies are about hiding from those pings.
Chris - When you want to hide something from radar, though, how effective is that? Is it really possible to hide from radar, and how does that work?
Ramsey - One method is to coat an aircraft or ship with radar-absorbent materials, usually advanced versions of iron filings in rubber or paint. Various tricks are used to absorb the radio signal. The second method is to design the shape of the vessel or aircraft so that radar pulses bounce away from the source rather than straight back. A classic example is the corner reflector: any L-shape or 90-degree angle, such as a traditional aircraft tail with its vertical fin and horizontal stabilisers, acts as a perfect corner reflector. A radar pulse will bounce straight back to the source, making the plane light up like a fighter-jet Christmas tree. Stealth aircraft avoid these right angles in their main structure.
Chris - Retroreflectors, aren't they? Isn't that how cat's eyes work in the road to reflect light from any angle? You see the cat's eyes illuminate the road ahead. It's the same principle.
Ramsey - Exactly. Bicycle reflectors work the same way, reflecting visible light. Large metal structures a few feet long are excellent for reflecting radar. There is also a third, rare and expensive trick called active suppression. The aircraft quickly captures the radar pulse, makes a copy, and sends it back out of phase to cancel the incoming signal.
Chris - Wouldn't that make a gap, though? If you've got an astute radar operator, they'd see an area darker than it should be, corresponding to a patch of sky. In fact, you'd be looking for the absence of something that tells you, “Whoa, something is trying to hide there.”
Ramsey - In terms of the direct radar return, it would look as though nothing is there, which is what you'd expect. But you're right that with bi-static or multi-static radars—where the pulse is emitted from a different location than the receiver—you can detect things that have absorbed energy. For example, if you usually see radar pulses bouncing off a mountain range and then notice a gap in that return, it could mean a stealth aircraft absorbed the energy that normally reflects back from that spot. All of these sorts of tricks are used both above and below the water.
Chris - Warfare has really shifted with the current conflict, for instance in Ukraine, towards much smaller aircraft. It's not dominated by huge jets and bombers above the skies of Ukraine and Russia. This is being fought by drones. This is really the first time we've seen this on a major scale, isn't it?
Ramsey - Yes, and stealth is quite different in this case and sometimes not needed at all. If you can launch thousands of incredibly cheap drones, they don't need to be stealthy. They can simply overwhelm the defences of the target. And because they're very small and often made of plastic or composite materials, they're often quite invisible to radar too. So you get a double advantage: they’re hard to detect, and there are so many of them.
Chris - The interesting development I've seen more recently is that they're now being flown via fibre optic cables because of jamming. Drones appear, people jam the radio signals controlling them, and now they're making fibre-optic remote-controlled drones.
Ramsey - Yes, exactly. It's the constant evolution of the weapon, the countermeasure, and then the counter-countermeasure. The original weapon was drones flown via radio using GPS. The countermeasure was jamming those signals. The counter-countermeasure was to attach 15 kilometres of fibre-optic cable to each drone and fly them via fibre. This shows just how complicated and rapidly evolving that theatre of war is.
15:54 - The evolution of cyberwarfare and espionage
The evolution of cyberwarfare and espionage
Ciaran Martin, University of Oxford
There are battles we never see at all. No tanks, no sirens, no smoke - just clever computer scientists and mathematicians going about their daily business. In the 21st century, conflict often plays out in cyberspace: through data breaches, ransomware attacks, sabotage of infrastructure, and the silent theft of state secrets. Power grids are disrupted, hospitals paralysed, and elections manipulated - but it rarely looks like an act of war. Modern espionage has evolved alongside it. Once it was characterised by briefcases in smoke-filled bars, now it involves malware, quantum encryption, and digital surveillance at the kitchen table. Ciaran Martin founded the UK's National Cyber Security Centre and he’s now based at the University of Oxford…
Ciaran - Cyber is pretty much always and everywhere a secondary or enabling effect. Now let's say you've got a well-designed power grid that doesn't have a single off switch and can detect intrusions. You might get a little bit of disruption, but you couldn't take out the whole thing. There are a couple of interesting examples going back to the pre-full war period in Ukraine. In 2015 and 2016, in December of both years during winter, the Russians targeted Ukrainian power grids. According to some studies, one attack took a year and a half to prepare and the other two and a half years, because they were enormously technically complicated. They achieved limited outages: about seven hours in one case and under two hours in another, affecting millions of people. It was pretty inconvenient and scary, but compare that to what a fighter jet, a bomber, or a missile can do. In the Russia-Ukraine war, you're seeing a fierce intelligence contest where the Russians spy to find where Ukrainian civilians are hiding. They discover they're in the Mariupol theatre, use cyber to work out what's happening there, and then send in the bombers, which are far more devastatingly effective. You see a huge information war, digital reconnaissance before fighter jets strike power grids, and so on. In the words of the former head of the British Army, General Sir Patrick Sanders: you can't cyber your way up a river, you can't hold ground with cyber, and you can't conquer a territory the size of Ukraine with just cyber. But it's an important and very nuanced supporting capability for intelligence, information, and enabling disruption and military effect.
Chris - And you can of course also, through propaganda, influence elections, which means you can put the right person in the right job at the right time, which might load the dice.
Ciaran - You can, and I think when we're talking about that sort of issue, it's not just about elections; it's about the whole dynamic of democratic politics in many different countries. In the context of the Russia-Ukraine war, the manipulation of media and political discourse is enormous. One of the things you're seeing, for example, in terms of community relations in Western countries—many of which are divided over conflicts such as in the Middle East—is local Facebook groups being infiltrated with malicious, misleading content designed to provoke and divide.
Chris - And presumably the rise of AI is making some of these things a lot easier.
Ciaran - Again, it's important to look at the detail. At the end of 2023, people were looking ahead to the following year, which was going to be the year of elections, with most of the democratic world coincidentally holding national plebiscites. People were warning about the risks of deepfakes ruining elections and so forth—and none of that really happened. It's very hard, even with a sophisticated deepfake, to deceive an entire population. People notice, it gets exposed, and that spreads. What we actually saw in the US, and a bit in the UK, was what I just mentioned: clever, small-scale fakes in local areas and targeted agitation that flew below the radar of national media and discourse. A counter-example was when the Russians produced one of the most technically sophisticated deepfakes I’ve ever seen, pretending that the Ukrainian deputy national security adviser went on TV to claim Ukraine was responsible for the terrorist attack in Moscow in March 2024. Technically, it was brilliant—the voice and appearance were convincing—but it was completely implausible. Many people had seen the original show it was supposed to be from, where no such statement was made. The TV company released the original recording, and it just didn’t pass the smell test. There was no way a senior Ukrainian official would go on live TV and claim responsibility while the government was vociferously denying it. So you have to look for those more micro-targeted attacks. For example, turnout in the 2024 Democratic primary in New Hampshire was depressed because AI-generated robocalls went out to Democratic supporters telling them to stay at home. People who were isolated and vulnerable were far more susceptible than those engaging with peers who could immediately point out that it wasn’t true. So it’s a risk to watch, but again, the details of how that risk manifests really matter.
Chris - Where do you think we are vulnerable in this space, then? Where do we need to put our efforts to, A, showing that there’s a deterrent effect, and B, tightening up security to make sure we don’t fall victim?
Ciaran - We have to plan for every organisation, particularly critical ones, to be able to cope with the loss of a key network. Of course, try to defend against attacks, but you can’t defend against everything. How are you going to manage to an acceptable level if you are hacked? That’s the big worry, and it requires, to use the cliché, a whole-of-society defensive approach. Deterrence is much harder. People talk a lot about cyber deterrence and say we should hit back hard. The question you have to ask is: what activity are you proposing? We can, potentially—and we wouldn’t disclose this if we were doing it—hold other countries’ critical infrastructure at risk. But it’s unlikely that we’re going to hack civilian hospitals or put innocent people in other countries at risk. So deterrence is actually quite hard in that respect. That’s why one of the key strategies is deterrence by denial—making attacks harder—which brings us back to your point about protecting ourselves better.
22:52 - What could the future of warfare look like?
What could the future of warfare look like?
Joan Johnson-Freese, US Naval War College
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.”
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