Weapons and computer and robotics technology will continue to spur the decentralization of violence, making it ever more difficult to combat insurgency. From Peter W. Singer at defenseone.com:
The author of “Ghost Fleet” has some guesses — and some questions that U.S. defenders will have to answer.
Robots, artificial intelligence, cyberwar, 3D printing, bio-enhancements, and a new geopolitical competition; the 21st century is being shaped by a range of momentous, and scary, new trends and technologies. We should also expect them to shape the worlds of insurgency and terrorism.
With so much change, it is too early to know all that will shake out from these new technologies in the years leading toward 2030 and beyond. But we can identify a few key trends of what will matter for war and beyond, and resulting questions that future counter-insurgents will likely have to wrestle with. Below are three, pulled from a recent New America report on what the tech and wars of 2030 might portend.
The End of Non-Proliferation
A common theme in the diverse technology areas expected to change warfare most significantly (the hardware of robotics to the software of AI, to the “wetware” of human performance modification) is that they are neither inherently military nor civilian. Both the people and organizations that research and develop these technologies and those that buy and use them will be both government and civilian. They will be applied to conflict, but also areas that range from business to family life. A related attribute is that they are less likely to require massive logistics systems to deploy, while the trend of greater machine intelligence means that they will also be easier to learn and use—not requiring large training or acquisitions programs. These factors mean that insurgent groups will be able to make far more rapid gains in technology and capability than previously possible.
