Two great disruptors – new, confident and wealthy authoritarian regimes; and, advanced technologies like AI and robotics – are changing the shape and trajectory of war in the 21st century. This is hardly the first era of massive disruption of societies, and thereafter, military institutions. The end of the 19th century was also a period of significant technological and societal change which resulted in major changes in the character of war.
The Second Industrial Revolution, which straddled the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, resulted in widespread changes to how societies lived, communicated, and interacted. It also provided different means for waging war, with the birth of wireless communications, electricity, aircraft, the internal combustion engine and new materials and chemical sciences (including the development of dynamite).
This period also saw resulted in new production techniques being applied to military hardware which changed the increased the scale and lengthened sustainability of military operations. That the era has also been described as The Vertigo Years by author Philip Blom is an indication of the rapid pace of technological and strategic change.
The character of war, or the means with which humans fight wars, has continuously evolved throughout history. This evolution continues into the contemporary era. The ageless competition to develop and use the best weapons, achieve dominance over adversaries, and hone the best tactics and strategies for war has engaged the greatest – and sometimes the worst – minds over the past three thousand years at least.
Throughout the year I have sought to better understand, and write about, how the character of war is evolving before our very eyes. Back in February, I reviewed the strategic lessons from the war in Ukraine and how these had applicability in different environments and geostrategic contexts. You can
Besides this broader issue of the changing character of war, there have been a variety of themes I have examined in my articles this year. Each of these are worthy of deep study in their own right. However, most of the themes explored below also interact with each other in some way. This interaction adds to the complexity of understanding the trajectory of the war in Ukraine, and war in general. We should expect that this interaction will continue, and intensify, in the years ahead.
Below, I re-examine seven key themes in the trajectory of war that I explored during 2024, and provide links back to the articles related to these themes. The seven themes are:
- Leadership.
- Autonomous systems.
- Victory.
- Adaptation.
- Failure.
- Surprise.
- Mobilisation.
Content retrieved from: https://mickryan.substack.com/p/the-trajectory-of-war-in-2024-and?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web.
