War

The past few decades have seen the acceptance of a new calculus in the role that air power can - and will - play in the future security environment. This is the result of fundamental shifts in the character and conduct of war and the technology-aided ability of air power to rapidly adapt to emerging situations. Wars or conflicts that have been fought over the past half century have all been irregular in character even if the intensity, tempo and spread have been as much as, and at times more than, what could be termed high-intensity war.

Warfare is shaped by geopolitical, societal, technological, economic and military trends:
Geopolitical: The multipolar relations between ever bigger political entities with overlapping spheres of influences are defined by surpise and uncertainty. Smaller political entities will be weaker and proxy wars more common in the future. Detterence will be reinterpreted, vulnerable states more prone to aquire nuclear weapons and international norms weakened. Megacities will be central battlefields that leave ground forces vulnerable.
Social: Warfare will shift to the internet, it will be uncontrollably ‘open-source’, live and shocking, with ever more spectacular terror. Armies will be more network-centred, waging more personalised wars and will have to find new ways to interact with democratic societies. Women in combat and the disappearance of world war veterans change the way people think about war.
Technological: Mankind becomes more powerful over time, with non-state actors possessing capabilities currently restricted to super-powers. It will struggle to outlaw technological advances and wage war without violence. The West will lose its technological superiority and will have even bigger problems in knowing how and what to research. Both inferior and highly developed armies will develop new ways of engaging the enemy. Artificial intelligence (AI) will mean that democratic armies have to balance the ‘human in the loop’ policy against effectiveness.
Economic: The economy of the opponent will be a bigger target than in the past, with commercial and dual-goods becoming more important, and the environment a more widely used weapon.
Military: Possible future military situations will be more diverse then ever. Western armies will be vulnerable to cheap weaponry. The idea that wars will be easy to win will make the world more dangerous.
Key uncertainties are China, the cyber-dimension, robotics, autonomous systems and artificial intelligence, paradigmatic breakthroughs such as quantum computing, general AI and anti-ballistic systems, nuclear detterence and nuclear bargaining. Ten key questions for policy-makers focus on strategic autonomy, adaptation, balancing reserves, R&D, cooperation and export, interventions, China, weakening norms, anticipation, communication and procurement.

Geopolitics is the interaction between power and land. Noopolitics is the interaction between power and knowledge. This interaction is both reflexive and disruptive. It implies a profound change to geopolitics and the art of governance, because it is concerned with the art of allowing knowledge to reign over power. Above all, it aims to avoid the current situation whereby power reigns over knowledge, which has resulted in our most brilliant minds handing over their sciences to States, sciences that should be put at the service of humankind and peace. Noopolitics recognises the existence of a noosphere, which is an ocean of knowledge with which all States share a coastline and which they can use to make up for any deficiencies in their kinesphere, the sphere of their freedom of movement. As such, it is restricted States that are forced to innovate; all States are cognitive but their cognitive immaturity nevertheless results in them waiting to be restricted before they innovate – as with the example of China today. States, like individuals, are also unaware of their best interests, acting in accordance with a very limited rationale. While traditional geopolitics asserts that States are motivated by the acquisition of power over others, for its part noopolitics asserts that the only source of power is power over the self. This is the basis for state stoicism. Ultimately, wars can only exist due to the coexistence of knowledge and ignorance: knowledge is needed to cause the enemy harm, and ignorance to harm the conflict itself. Faced with absolute knowledge, wars can no longer exist.