Military Monday: Transparent Battlefields

The battlefield has become increasingly transparent, and that’s not changing

Predicting the future of warfare is far more likely to result in miscalculation than accurate prognostication.

However, some trends seem very likely. One of those is the trend towards increased transparency.

In recent history, we’ve flooded the battlefield with drones that conduct missions of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance—or ISR. We’ve placed unmanned sensors on the ground, in the sea, and in the air. And these sensors have increased in sensitivity, discrimination, and accuracy.

As states and actors continue to proliferate these sensors, we should expect the level of transparency to continue increasing, resulting in nearly or completely transparent battlefields where all belligerents are able to see (nearly) everything happening on it.

The result is that some of the “fog of war” is being burned away, creating ever increasingly faster decision loops but creating new challenges in how we fight.