Luigi Martino
Georges Clemenceau once remarked that “war is too important to be left to the generals”. Building on this perspective, we have to think if Clemenceau’s statement remains pertinent even in the face of rapid technological advancements and if we can replace “generals” with “politicians”.
In 2018, The Economist published a special report titled “The Future of War”, exploring what impact emerging technologies might have in the future, and how they will create “new battlegrounds”. According to the authors,technology and geopolitical competition are reshaping their character in the 21st century, yet Clausewitz’s axiom “war is still contest of wills” appears to remain valid. Highlighting a spectrum of disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous weapon systems, drones, robots, new biological weapons, and cyber operations, the report concludes that in the context of new wars, the competition for supremacy in these technologies raises the significant question: can this technological arms race be controlled, and is it possible to create rules that ensure human control over [these] systems?
This concern is so significant that Paul Scharre describes a “nightmare scenario” caused not so much by “Napoleonic” invasions relegated to the past century, but rather by malfunctions of these technologies due primarily to human errors (e.g., incorrect software coding) or cyberattacks perpetrated by adversaries.
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