Op-Ed: Redefining the new global arms race: Unglamorous, secretive, and very big money, and war will never be the same

The new global arms race is all too real. Barely a day or a YouTube video goes by without new developments. Drones, humanoid robots, non-humanoid robots, UAVs, you name it, the new arms race is in full swing. Everything’s a secret until it kills someone.

The Ukraine war has effectively made the old military doctrines totally, irrevocably obsolete. There’s no going back. You can stage a mini blitzkrieg for a tiny fraction of the cost. Countermeasures are scrambling to keep up.

Logistics have turned into line items on production. If it weren’t for the internal combustion engine, that relic from over a century ago, nothing would be the same. Robots don’t need food. They don’t need water. All they need is an occasional recharge.

Russia’s total failure in Ukraine, very much the result of old doctrines, also redefines all operational levels. Even allowing for the total incompetence of the Russian military, an ex-superpower is now gutted and floundering in a war it can’t even pretend to win.

The US, unchallenged in the past, now has to factor in operations in a world that can easily arm itself to the teeth with the latest systems. Cheap, effective weapons that can take out big high-value targets are a very different proposition to the usual smattering of old Cold War weapons.

The “colonial wars” of the recent past against patchwork local forces can now reach globally, too. Nothing is untouchable to these new technologies.  Anywhere can turn into the Strait of Hormuz debacle with a little planning.

Despite the big capital in the old military-industrial era, the world’s militaries have got the message, more or less. China and Russia are now conducting joint exercises with arsenals that look nothing like the weapons of four years ago.  Meanwhile, big money is driving the development of new weapons at incredible speed. This could turn into the biggest arms race in history.

Unglamourous and dangerous

The days of rolling out a flashy new horrendously overpriced fighter have also gone. A processor chip is now probably far more dangerous than any platform in which it’s installed.

The military-industrial complex has been asking for this denouement for some time. Absurd prices for high-maintenance systems can’t work anymore. More to the point, they don’t work. The sheer deterioration of Russia’s old systems is as bad as the casualties and ridiculous lead times required to equip, reequip, and make a unit combat-ready. The old logistics were never designed for this environment.

With this Pantomime of Pathos comes a long list of new and ongoing requirements:

Training: Training includes not just operators, but every related system and support networks.

Physical deployment: Just getting these things operational on the ground is a saga in itself.

Systems integration: Systems have to be able to work together. Add a museum to any operational environment, and you can see what won’t work.

Competence levels: It took the Ukrainians a while to get to the level of operational fluency they have now. Competence defines effectiveness.

Production and backup systems: The high-volume production rollouts of thousands of drones are endemic to the new automated systems and all their support systems.

Communications: These are plug-and-play systems. All they need is communications to work anywhere. Ask your TV about who it’s targeting.

Weapons capabilities: “Bang for the buck” is still here. The yield capabilities of weapons, from explosives to nukes to chemical and bioweapons and area denial agents, have added grim new dimensions.

Intelligence: Information is a currency in military operations. Corrupt military, political, and industrial environments are cash cows. The secrecy is a whole herd of cash cows.

Space weapons: The militarization of space may be an incredibly stupid idea, but it’s now likely. This will affect all military operations on Earth.

Autonomous weapons

Some people may be a bit cautious about the risks of having a class of heavily armed, fully automated weapons which can hallucinate or otherwise malfunction, fluttering around overhead. Current best practice is the “loyal wingman” environment, with AI supervised by a human. This problem hasn’t really been solved, or even properly addressed.  

It’s possible that something like a blockchain process can screen AI for misalignment or bad data feeds. It might be possible to have “supervisory” AI agents in military systems to minimize errors. What’s needed is proof of principle, and that won’t be quick or easy. More to the point, it doesn’t exist, yet.

Nor is control likely to be easy. No kill switch equates to no control. Sleep well.

You can have your very own war!

Unstated in this rosy picture of the future of fully automated military bliss is that absolutely anyone can have access to these weapons. The arms black market has been doing very nicely for the last few thousand years, thanks for asking. This could be its biggest and possibly last gold rush.

This is all about scale. One person could be a war in progress. It’s not at all hard to imagine an automated arsenal that can fit into a Chanel handbag. High-yield explosives, catalytic weapons, DIY no-fuse bombs, whatever. All you need are the physics, a remote, and some cash.

This could also be the ultimate jackpot for terrorism. Anyone that anyone else feels like terrorizing can be hit from another continent. How, exactly, are you going to intercept a prompt that orders groceries and recodes its values to a third-party message board to initiate a series of bomb attacks? That’s just high school-level basic AI.

One thing for sure about all these new weapons is that nobody’s “overthinking” anything. That’s the problem.

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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.