The EconomistJanuary 27th 2018 13THE FUTURE OF WAR21SPECIAL REPORTwhich America depends for its nuclear command and control,
including missile early warning, is also used for conventional
warfare. That means a conventional attack might be mistaken for
a pre-emptive nuclear strike, which could lead to rapid escala-
tion. Another difficulty is that an aggressor may be tempted to go
after cyber and space assets in the hope ofcausing major damage
to a target’s defences without actually killing anybody. That
would raise doubts over whether nuclear retaliation could be
justified. A third worry is that because of the potential speed and
surprise of such attacks, some responses might be delegated to
autonomous systems that can react in milliseconds. Lastly, there
is the possibilityof “false flag” cyber operation by a rogue state or
non-state hacker group.Don’t worry just yet
For now, the prospects of a successful disarming strike re-
main sufficiently remote to leave the strategic balance intact. Mr
Miller argues that it would require a “fundamental transforma-
tion in the military-technological balance...enabled by the de-
velopment and integration of novel military capabilities” to up-
set the balance.
Ominously, he thinks that such a fundamental transforma-
tion may now be on the horizon, in the shape of conventional
prompt global strike (CPGS) and new missile-defence systems.
Both China and Russia fear that newAmerican long-range non-
nuclear strike capabilities could be used to deliver a disarming
attack on a substantial part of their strategicforces or decapitate
their nuclear command and control. Although they would still
launch their surviving nuclear missiles, improved missile-de-
fence systems would mop up most of the remainder before their
warheads could do any damage.
Still, Michael Elleman, a missile expert at the International
Institute for Strategic Studies, reckons that for now those con-
cerns are overblown. As much as anything, he says, they are
talked up to restrain investment in the enabling technologies:
“They [the Russians and the Chinese] are saying to the US, the
trouble with you guys is thatyou never know when to stop.”
CPGSwould involve a hypersonic missile atleast five times
faster than the speed of sound and a range of more than 1,000
miles. This could be achieved in several ways. One would be to
stick a conventional warhead on an ICBMor a submarine-
launched ballistic missile—a cheap solution but a dangerous one,
because defenders would not know whether they were under
conventional or nuclear attack, so they might overreact.
The alternatives would be a cruise missile powered by a
rocket-boosted scramjet (a supersonic combusting ramjet) en-gine, or a boost-glide vehicle that would be launched from a bal-
listic missile and then fly towards its target like a paper dart. Glide
vehicles pull up after re-entering the atmosphere, using the cur-
vature of the Earth to delay detection byballistic-missile de-
fences. Both types would be manoeuvrable, and would be accu-
rate to within a few metres of their target. However, they, too,
could carry nuclear warheads, again leaving the target uncertain
what kind of attack it was under. America first tested a glide vehi-
cle in 2010, but seems in no rush to deploy them. Russia and Chi-
na have more recently tested hypersonic glide missiles.
Current American missile-defence systems, such as Patriot,
THAAD(terminal high-altitude area defence) and Aegis, provide
quite effective regional defence but are not designed to cope with
a salvo ofICBMs. The Ground-based Midcourse Defence system
in Alaska and California is supposed to provide some defence of
the homeland against a few missiles launched by a North Korea
or an Iran, but it was never designed to defeat a massive salvo at-
tack by a major adversary.
However, substantial improvements are on their way. Mr
Elleman describes the SM-3 IIAinterceptors, which could be de-
ployed as soon as next year on Aegis-class destroyers, as a “big
deal”. They are much faster than their predecessors, and Mr
Miller thinks that if hundreds of them were put on ships close to
America, they might support a late midcourse defence against
Russian ICBMs.
More exotic missile defences are not far behind. Mr Elle-
man says that in about five years’ time it may be possible to put
solid-state lasers on large numbers of unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs) orbiting at very high altitude. Small missiles could also be
put on UAVs as boost-phase interceptors, firing a minute or so
after launch. Interception at that stage is technically much easier
than later on because the target is much larger when all its stages
are still intact, and moving more slowly.
Mr Elleman believes that for now the advantage is likely to
remain with the attacker rather than the defender, but like Mr
Miller he fears that emerging technologies could “undermine cri-
sis stability very rapidly”. Yet if arms-control agreements could
be reached at the height of the cold war, it should surely be pos-
sible forAmerica, Russia and China to talk to each other now to
avoid persistent instability. 7A missile-test triumph for North KoreaPETER SINGER, AN expert on future warfare at the New
America think-tank, is in no doubt. “What we have is a se-
ries of technologies that change the game. They’re not science fic-
tion. They raise new questions. What’s possible? What’s
proper?” Mr Singer is talking about artificial intelligence, mach-
ine learning, robotics and big-data analytics. Together they will
produce systems and weapons with varyingdegrees ofautono-
my, from being able to work under human supervision to “think-
ing” for themselves. The most decisive factor on the battlefield of
the future may be the quality of each side’s algorithms. Combat
may speed up so much that humans can no longer keep up.
Frank Hoffman, a fellow of the National Defence Universi-
ty who coined the term “hybrid warfare”, believes that theseMilitary roboticsWar at hyperspeed
Autonomous robots and swarms will change the
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