The Future of War: Tomorrow’s Battlefields

The Future of War: Tomorrow’s Battlefields

The contents of this essay are based on conversations during the 7th India-US Forum

National security is driving geopolitics like never before. Geostrategic heft has always come from a country’s economic strength and wealth, but of late it has hinged on the ability to convert economic surpluses and technological advantages into currencies of hard power. 

In this regard, the arsenal of non-democracies like China, Iran, and Russia is faring far better than the arsenal of democracies. Ukraine is a good example of this. At one time, Ukraine was firing one lakh artillery rounds in a week. The combined unit of western allies, including the US, could only supply that volume in a month. On the other hand, North Korea has supplied artillery ammunition to Russia more efficiently than the collective West. The threat from China is pertinent as it is arming itself faster.

Democracies with open economies like India and the US are not faring as well as China where industry is dominated by the state. The need for consensus in decision-making from ideation to execution to outcomes slows down the process unlike in autocratic dispensations. Agility in the stages from ideation to creation to finalization of the contract is going to be the most important competitive advantage along with swift decisions on how to utilize modern technologies. 

While it is understandable that the execution process in democracies are slower than in autocracies, there is no reasonable explanation why non-democracies are quicker with ideation. Democracies today are allowing technologies to mature before putting them through a procurement pipeline and eventually subjecting them to the tyranny of L1. At the end, a new technology either becomes obsolete or loses out in the battle of contracts to a less impressive but low-cost option. 

The American defense budget is three times that of China’s, and China’s defense budget is three times that of India’s. Beijing causes displacement anxiety in Washington, but Delhi does not cause similar displacement anxiety in Beijing because Delhi is not building naval capacity, acquiring missile defenses, and delaying theater commands. Delhi needs to inject speed and scale in force structures. There are delays in Beijing too with the corruption in their rocket force, but that cannot be a point of solace for India.

Australia recently launched a project (AIR6500) to develop the joint battle management capability. The Australian Defence Force identified clear requirements that contractors had to meet for development, procurement, innovation, and production which enabled the contractors to get internal alignments within their companies. This approach allowed for agility in planning with the private sector making timely moves to capably deliver and collaborate with partners on integrating nodes in a network of indigenous as well as new systems.

If scaling on munitions and outpacing the stockpiles of the adversary is the only way to win, partnerships geared towards co-production and co-development with knowledge transfers will have to be prioritized. This will not be possible till export-control frameworks are amended. Frameworks currently in place reflect the Cold War mentality of knowledge protection and the only available avenue for transfer is via licensing. In the current context, licensing agreements cause problems when partners need to work on systems/ products that have not been developed in the US and for which there are no licensing agreements in place. 

Co-development implies taking a problem seamlessly from a concept of operations to a product but there are no rules in place to enable that. India, in particular, needs technology support from the US but irritants along the way like International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR) need to be resolved. In return for the technology, India could provide the US with AI business-case models.

Building up the traditional military arsenal on a war footing is an expensive endeavor for even the most developed economies but while deterrence is costly, wars are costlier. 

The invasion of Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas conflict, and the potential for conflicts in other parts of the world imply that deterrence has failed and if that is indeed so, capability asymmetry between offense and defense needs to be addressed urgently. If the cost of defending against a $1,000 drone with a 5-kg munition on it is going to be a million-dollar missile, then the defending side will lose. Till this cost to capability equation is addressed, the adversary with the $1000 drone will always want to escalate. 

There is an imminent need to assess how commercially manufactured technologies can be used to supplement military manufacturing. In the 1940s, one of the biggest advantages that the US brought to World War II was its ability to turn around manufacturing from other metal/ heavy industries towards tanks, ammunition, and weaponry. Today, supporting just one theater of conflict has become overwhelming for the military-industrial complex. It is advantageous to use existing plants and machinery that are making Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), for example, towards building precision-guided ammunition.

While conventional munition readiness is a lesson from Ukraine that can be applied to militaries globally, India and the US need to be careful about what else they can glean from Ukraine’s urban warfare environment. The expected theaters of future conflict for India and the US will be in either Ladakh or Taiwan. Neither are urban and both will need longer-range capabilities that can inflict damage deep into an adversary’s territory. Conversations about 20/30/50 minutes of endurance that are relevant for Ukraine are redundant in any part of the Indo-Pacific.

Another adaptable lesson from Ukraine is related to network capabilities. One of the first things that the Russians did when they went into Ukraine was take out all ground communications. The US has a new capability in low-earth orbit (LEO), that is, low-latency communication satellites which have kept Ukrainians on the battlefield so far. 

Deterrence has really failed in cognitive warfare where there is also an asymmetry of capability. The character of warfare has changed. It is no longer just kinetic or on the battlefield. It is now on media platforms and in AI applications. There is need for a deeper analysis on how the efficiency of recent large-language models affect the warzone. Increased investment in human-machine teaming is also needed. AI will create the new strategic haves and have nots by changing force design, architecture, and the way in which wars are fought. 

At the moment, autonomous capabilities are being looked at in silos with a long-term lens. Companies are thinking one product at a time, like building software that can help link sensors to shooters. Before considering innovations for the automation of sensor-shooter-kill chains, there is a need to assess how existing tools can be utilized with automation. 

This begins with addressing the fundamental problem of how information can become interoperable. For instance, if India is getting intelligence from a Boeing or a Lockheed platform while trying to take out an adversary using a weapon made in India, do they possess the technology and resources to do so? In the digital era, the military that can push out software faster is more likely to defeat other forces on the battlefield.

Disruptions in weapons innovation will come with established private sector players collaborating with startups. Another space ripe for identifying disruptions are the joint exercises undertaken in the Indo-Pacific where wargaming experimentations allow a chance to demonstrate new capabilities and show how to integrate a variety of capabilities that compel forces to get ahead on procurement.  

There are clear strategic goals that should guide the future of warfare. First, find a way to invalidate the capabilities of rivals. Second, invest in capabilities that can raise the costs of adversaries for causing conflict. Third, increase the scope and scale of the capabilities that a country can bring to the battlefield. 

As government and industry think about potential problems that could arise in future battlefields, they also need to revisit strategic assessments of the past regarding the future of conflict. The recent conflict in Ukraine can be a useful case study. 

Until a few decades ago, the Indian military planned its strategy assuming that conflicts in the future will be shorter. That strategic understanding has been reversed. The traditional military establishment believed that drones would not be able to inflict damage to artillery or armor. With the transformation of the drone-missile complex, even crude drones could inflict damage on the Russian Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol. 

There is a force modernization revolution underway, underscored by asymmetry and precision. Imaginative use of sensor architecture and the marriage of microelectronics with explosives has made dumb munitions precise. The air defense environment is evolving with surface to air missiles (SAMs) undermining fighter aircraft. Militaries need to adjust to these revolutions and hybridize their fleets. 

India is in the midst of its most comprehensive national security makeover since Independence. The prime minister delivered a speech to the combined commanders meeting in 2015, the substance of which is gradually unfolding. The Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) reforms are progressing, but given the China challenge a lot more needs to be done. The Indian military needs to change its character and profile from one designed to secure a $3 trillion economy to one potentially securing a $35 trillion economy. 

India is in a neighborhood of economically and politically fragile countries. Some of these countries are friendly with China but there is a risk that all of them could develop a reliance on China. 

India’s challenge currently is to find a balance between being a continental power and a maritime power. Looking at India’s geography, the major security threats are on the land frontier, most significantly along the LAC. Continental routes to the north are not accessible with China occupying Tibet, the west is closed because of Pakistan, and the east is troublesome due to the situation in Myanmar. India’s destiny, thus, lies in the seas. The Indian stake in a free and open Indo-Pacific is immense. 

India’s military structure needs to prioritize naval frontiers to address the threat from China. The current focus on land frontiers is fundamentally shortsighted. After the operational rebalancing, India has done what it could at the LAC. That frontier still cannot be taken lightly but the time has come to make a fundamental turn to the seas in terms of resourcing. Four hundred Chinese ships already have reasonable staying power in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) and it will grow phenomenally in the coming years. When that growth occurs, India will face a strategic squeeze from both the LAC and the seas.

India will have to consider three elements while confronting the challenge of expansion and hybridization. Currently, innovation spending is targeted towards platforms but there is a need to also focus on weapons. Second, there is a lack of emphasis on communications innovation; the Ukraine war has shown how easily a traditional military can be taken off the grid by an adversary. And third, while India is producing data in large quantities, it needs to develop the ability to utilize that data. 

The US still does not have a response to Russia’s tampering of the 2016 Presidential elections. Clearly, there is a lack of digital literacy that needs to be addressed. The information environment has undergone a dramatic transformation, and disinformation as a tool of warfare will be an even more pressing concern in the age of AI. There are some solutions on the table for watermarking data and protecting credible information but these need to be scaled up significantly. 

Like-minded countries must identify solutions to regulate cross-border data flows to ensure that hostile foreign powers do not have access to the quantum of citizens’ personal data. Companies of adversary countries operating elsewhere and being able to mine data is one part of the concern. 

 

 

 

Prerna Bountra

Prerna Bountra, Deputy Director, International Relations. Prerna leads Ananta’s work on the United States and climate diplomacy. She curates Track 1.5 and Track 2 dialogues for the Centre and has been the lead curator of the India US Forum since 2018. Her research interests are U.S. domestic and foreign policy, India-US bilateral relations, the US-China-India triangle, great power rivalries, the Indo-Pacific and the geopolitics of energy. She is a sociology honours graduate from Hindu College, University of Delhi; Journalism post graduate from Xavier Institute of Communication, Mumbai; and has a post graduate diploma in International law & diplomacy from the Indian Society of International Law. She follows Hindi cinema with a passion, watches many sports but plays none, and is known to arm wrestle people who trivialize pop culture.

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