The Third World War may be fought with weapons built in garages

“And out of the smoke locusts came down on the earth and were given power like that of scorpions of the earth…” – Revelation 9:3-5.

NATO has reportedly drawn up a plan for war with Russia in the event of a Russian attack on the Baltic states. At first glance, the document might seem unremarkable given the most senior officer involved in preparing it holds the rank of major, because every year, Russian and American military academies produce hundreds of officers capable of writing plans of this sort.

But two things make it worth paying attention to. The first is that modern military science is undergoing a profound crisis and the old methods of warfare are becoming increasingly difficult to use. Tank breakthroughs, deep encirclements and prolonged artillery barrages are all far more dangerous than they were even a decade ago because the battlefield is saturated with unmanned aerial vehicles.

The second is more surprising as military plans for a potential war aren’t usually made public, thus therefore NATO appears to be sending a message that we understand how warfare has changed, and we’re preparing for it.

The outlines of a possible non-nuclear Third World War can already be seen in such planning, but that assumes, of course, that nuclear powers could become involved in a global confrontation without crossing the nuclear threshold, instead fighting through local allies and proxies. What stands out in the NATO concept is the central role given to robotic and autonomous systems.

Fully autonomous warfare still belongs partly to the future, but even remotely controlled systems have already changed tactics more dramatically than almost any military innovation of the modern era. The closest historical comparison may be the arrival of rifled weapons, when massed column attacks became suicidal.

Only a few years ago, tanks were still regarded as the decisive instrument of land warfare, yet today a tank may struggle even to reach its firing position because the approaches are covered by drones, including so-called ‘waiters’ that land, remain concealed, and take off only when ordered to attack.

Technology has changed the battlefield with extraordinary speed and now NATO has published a defense concept for the three small Baltic states that appears to acknowledge this new reality. The importance of the document lies less in the rank of the officers who drafted it than in the fact that the alliance is publicly demonstrating its readiness for a different kind of war.I suspect that was the main reason for publishing it and the message is directed at an adversary that already has four years of intensive combat experience. The contours of a future non-nuclear world war are therefore becoming clearer. I’m not a military specialist, so I will speak only in broad terms. Human soldiers may increasingly be concentrated in elite formations and special forces, while much of the conventional battlefield is handed over to machines.

Back in the late 1980s, a special forces officer once told me that such units were becoming less useful when employed in support of large conventional armies and he predicted a gradual decline in the importance of elite formations, but history may now be turning in the opposite direction.

Perhaps the armies of the future will consist largely of small groups of highly trained soldiers operating in support of vast numbers of robotic systems. Drones have already transformed warfare and artificial intelligence and autonomous platforms may transform it far more radically.If that happens, enormous armies could become obsolete and inflicting strategic damage on an enemy may no longer require columns of armored vehicles or millions of soldiers. Nor would it necessarily require the gigantic defense-industrial complexes familiar from the 20th century as much of the equipment could be cheap and rapidly replaceable.

Even today, effective drones can be assembled in a garage, but of course, future combat systems will require increasingly sophisticated electronics, although it’s not yet clear how different many of those components will be from technologies already used in smartphones and consumer electronics.

This would also change the nature of military targets, for why attack an enemy’s tanks if you can disable the electricity that allows its entire military system to function?

Power stations will inevitably become heavily protected, but transmission networks are much more difficult to defend and it’s impossible to guard every kilometer of high-voltage cable. This could lead to a new emphasis on dispersed electricity generation and the Soviet Union already experimented with unconventional solutions in remote northern regions, including the use of nuclear technology originally developed for submarines. The economics of war would change as well given that drones are operated by small teams – or eventually by autonomous systems – and are cheap compared to the industrial machinery of traditional warfare.

They also reduce the enormous logistical burden associated with artillery, where a shell must be manufactured, transported by rail, moved again by truck and finally delivered to a gun. Even then, dozens or hundreds may need to be fired to destroy a single target. The scale of traditional warfare is difficult to comprehend. During one offensive in the First World War, the Entente fired roughly 25 million artillery shells, while the Central Powers mobilized about the same number of men over the entire conflict.

Modern precision weapons are far more effective, but they are also increasingly expensive, and massed artillery itself is becoming vulnerable to drones and counter-battery systems. That’s why the Third World War, if it comes, may look nothing like the previous two.It may not begin with millions of soldiers crossing borders or vast tank armies moving across Europe. Instead, it could consist of many simultaneous regional conflicts fought by smaller allies of nuclear powers, while the great powers themselves remain protected beneath their nuclear umbrellas.

A future world war may therefore not be one enormous battlefield but dozens of smaller ones, connected by drones, satellites, artificial intelligence, and the political interests of states that can’t afford to fight one another directly.