Just Finished Reading: Future War by Christopher Coker (FP: 2015)

This was the last of my ‘Dark Future’ reads and the only one that didn’t turn out as expected. I was expecting speculation on robots and AI, the increased use of drones (and encounters with enemy counter-drones), wars in cyberspace and outer space and more besides – essentially geeking out on all things warlike. OK, there was some of that mentioned in passing that wasn’t really what this book was about. It was, primarily, about how to think about future war and less about the weapons that we will end up using in them.

This is, I think, for one very good reason the author spends some time on in the opening chapter – the difficulty (some would say impossibility) of predicting the future. Sensibly the author does not look too far ahead and, generally, restricts himself to the year 2035 – only 20 years in advance of the publication date. As technology accelerates forward and upward at an ever increasing rate this at least restricts the probability of deductive failure to acceptable limits. Speculating on the technology of, for example, 100 years hence is frankly silly in anything other than a science-fiction novel. One thing that the author does make a firm prediction on, and where I definitely agree with him, is that war will most definitely exist in a recognisable form over the next 50 years (and beyond) and shows no signs of going away as long as we can call ourselves humans. War and humanity are a package deal.

Before getting down to some detail – as much as you can in this sort of arena – the author speculated on some of the boundaries of future conflict up to and including a limited nuclear war which, some of his fellow futurologists speculate, could tip our overly complex civilisation into a crash scenario. He also points to some interesting studies which speculate that conflict and later organised warfare not only gave raise to our civilisations but deeply moulded our bodies and our brains effectively hardwiring war into our DNA. So much of our culture, indeed our very language, in derived from or centred around warfare (or its substitutes) that it’s hard to think of a world without it. War is a massive driver of our technology and is either directly or indirectly responsible for much we take for granted in the modern world from computers to international jet travel. War will also lead to another great technological breakthrough – the rise of intelligent robots. The author stresses here that robots will be used in their early incarnations as human assistance devices – to carry heavy loads, to protect or recover troops, to watch the skies. Only later, as the technology advances, will they go into combat themselves largely as human substitutes to help save lives in an increasingly dangerous environment. As machines start fighting machines there will be no place for humans on the battlefield – but then the question arises will whatever takes place still be war in any sense that we would understand?

What kind of war can we expect in the future? Will the Great Powers come to conflict? Will American eventually fight China for domination of the Pacific or are such direct conflicts a thing of the past? Will future wars be ‘cool’ wars fought through economics, the cyber theft of secrets, political manipulation and long-term sabotage and targeted assassination? Will war simply move into cyberspace leaving behind a seemingly peaceful world in reality (or hyper/virtual-reality) wracked by code wars? Will future conflict be non-linear, deniable, and sporadic even privatised or contracted out? Could future wars be the long anticipated corporate wars fought with hired mercenary soldiers over market share and resource acquisition? Or will future wars be fought between high-tech street gangs, drug cartels and state of the art para-military police forces is vast urban slums? Future wars will, inevitably, be multi-faceted and mutable in a world where technology can be downloaded, modified and used in ways its designers never envisaged and where the power to weaponise almost anything is in the hands of billions.

This is quite a hard book to pin down and an almost impossible one to precise adequately. It is primarily about the idea of war rather than the techniques and technologies of conflict. War is all too familiar but will it remain so? Can we predict how it will evolve so that we can shape the outcomes and prevent the kind of global catastrophes all too common in speculative science-fiction. If we are to survive the arguably inevitable future wars we need to understand them. This book attempts to aid that discussion and does a pretty good job too. Recommended.