Mick Ryan
Back in February 2022 (that seems like a long time ago now), I published a book called War Transformed: The Future of 21st Century Great Power Competition and Conflict (USNI Books) It covered the key trends which were shaping contemporary strategic competition and conflict. The book also offered several hypotheses about key initiatives that might permit contemporary military institutions to better understand the challenges they faced, remain abreast of best practice and to undertake the organisational, conceptual and personnel adaptations required to do so.
Two great disruptors - new, confident and wealthy authoritarian regimes; and, advanced technologies like AI and robotics - are changing the shape and trajectory of war in the 21st century. This is hardly the first era of massive disruption of societies, and thereafter, military institutions. The end of the 19th century was also a period of significant technological and societal change which resulted in major changes in the character of war.
The Second Industrial Revolution, which straddled the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, resulted in widespread changes to how societies lived, communicated, and interacted. It also provided different means for waging war, with the birth of wireless communications, electricity, aircraft, the internal combustion engine and new materials and chemical sciences (including the development of dynamite).
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