Obstructive Warfare: Applications and Risks for AI in Future Military Operations

Amos C. Fox

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Introduction

This paper introduces a new theory of warfare — obstructive warfare — to sidestep the wide-ranging sensationalism associated with today’s new and emerging technology and instead provide an alternative assessment, based in causal logic, for how AI can be used in military operations. Obstructive warfare is anchored in the belief that all land wars carry with them a set of nearly unavoidable challenges, which are outlined later in this paper. Military forces cannot overcome these challenges solely with “attacks from above,” nor can battlefield transparency prevent these challenges from materializing. The challenges of land war often cause states to fight wars positionally, or through the purposeful use of movement in combination with location(s) to dislocate an adversary’s strength, accentuate one’s own power and generate favourable situational warfighting asymmetries to defeat or destroy the adversary (Fox 2017, 18). Considering positional warfare’s proclivity for forceoriented military operations that use movement, location and the application of power (i.e., military firepower), it is easy to understand how this type of warfare accelerates wars to an attritional character.