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The Future of Conventional Warfare
It is not easy to describe the battlefields on which the U.S. military will find itself in 25 years because it is impossible to identify with any certainty the opponents it will face, but it is possible to identify with some confidence certain trends in the future of warfare. There are at least three general trends that will likely shape future battlefields regardless of the opponent. First, U.S. forces will increasingly deploy and operate from sea or distant land bases, rather than from a network of land bases close to the area of operation. Second, future battlefields will be the subject of persistent surveillance using multiple sensor phenomenologies. Third, all sensors, weapon platforms, and command posts will be connected using links that allow the realtime sharing of processed data regardless of the type of data or the means by which it is transmitted. But these trends beg several important questions requiring further analysis. Will enhanced surveillance and networking produce the same effects in all potential battlefield mediums or will they change warfare more in some than others? Will enhanced surveillance and networking work in the same way against peer or near-peer competitors with advanced electronic warfare capabilities as they appear to work against much weaker opponents without such capabilities? Will it be possible in the future to design a military to be optimal for one future battlefield or set of battlefields and assume that others will be dealt with as a lesser included case, as the U.S. arguably did during the Cold War, or will the range of possible different battlefields require more specialization in force design?
The Future of Conventional Warfare is managed by Owen Cote, a Principal Research Scientist in the MIT Security Studies Program.
