Bombs away: Kashyap Kompella writes on the future of war

80 years since the end of WW2, the rules of engagement have been redrawn. Conflict is decentralised. Fallouts are global. The battlefield is everywhere

There is a symbolic story about early humans who discover how to use flint to make a flame. They fight over control of it. Their first word is fire; their second word is war.

(HT Imaging: Puneet Kumar)

For as long as there has been something to control and protect, we have fought over how to do it.

War remains a central feature of our world.

Eighty years since the end of World War 2, that conflict is still shaping our reality. The battle in Gaza really began amid the fallout of World War 2. The perceived threat Russia presents to its European neighbours is rooted in the polarisation of the 1940s.

The ideological residue of the war still shapes alliances, defence budgets and threat perceptions. Meanwhile, the myth of the Long Peace (the idea that the absence of a third world war indicates an era of accord) ignores the reality that conflict has not vanished; it has merely become decentralised.

Regional tensions continue to flare up with alarming frequency. Proxy wars, terror outfits, militias and cartels demonstrate a new type of asymmetry: non-state actors operating within and against sovereign nations.

International conflicts masquerading as civil wars have reshaped resource control, redrawn borders and identities, and challenged the very idea of statehood.

Today, amid nuclear restraint, the climate crisis and the rise of artificial intelligence, the means of warfare have undergone a mutation. What was once a spectacle of trenches and treaties has become a hidden but relentless game of double-blind chess. The tussles play out between satellites systems, through backdoor code, and in hacked electricity grids.

Conflict, or the potential for it, is embedded in our cloud infrastructure, food supply chains, social networks and semiconductors. New “arms races” are underway.

In 2024, over 100 countries, of the 169 tracked by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, raised their defence budgets. Global military expenditure reached $2.7 trillion, marking the tenth consecutive year of growth. Nations invest in ships, tanks, cybersecurity, satellites, autonomous drones; part of the budget is even set aside for social-media influencers. (Some armies use them to drive recruitment, while some countries deploy them as unlikely spies.)

The new battlefield is everywhere.

And almost anything valuable can serve as a weapon.

Rare earth minerals? Undersea internet cables? Semiconductor lithography machines? Dams and water? Each of these is now part of the strategic calculus. Each can be withheld, sabotaged, rerouted. Each has the power to destabilise a region faster than a division of tanks ever could. Supply chains are the new frontlines.

What would happen, for instance, if something shifted in Taiwan, China’s largest piece of unfinished business, and the semiconductor capital of the world?

With ideology and traditional allegiances counting for little in a world with so many crossed wires, there are, in effect, no shared rules of engagement.

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Even that once-holy grail of shared economic interests cannot ensure peace between nations.

It used to be called the Golden Arches theory. In 1996, the economist Thomas Friedman, pointed out that, since no two countries with McDonald’s outlets in them had ever gone to war, we could assume that when a country clicked into the globalised economy to that degree, it would hesitate to rock the boat by going to war.

Peace would prevail, he posited, because the costs of war would simply not be worth it.

Then, in 1999, NATO conducted air strikes on Yugoslavia, and the Golden Arches theory fell. Even if one didn’t consider that a conflict between two states, Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, putting the theory to rest once and for all.

Newer theories contend, in fact, that democracy, national sovereignty and hyper-globalisation may not be mutually compatible at all.

You can only have two of the three, argues Harvard economist Dani Rodrik. The three together may represent not a trifecta for peace, but a “trilemma”. (See points made earlier about shadow conflicts, stressed supply chains and a scramble over scarce and dwindling resources.)

Meanwhile, the ancient causes of war remain: something to defend, protect, control.

And so, with agonising regularity, conflicts play out between India and Pakistan, within the Middle East, between Russia and its neighbours, Iran and its neighbours, Israel and its neighbours, and elsewhere in the world.

Syria smoulders. Yemen’s ceasefires mask starvation and blockades. The people of Iraq and Lebanon are caught between regional proxies and internal power tussles.

In Africa, conflicts rage on as the outside world pretends they cannot see. In Sudan, a civil war between military factions has been underway, on and off, since the early post-independence ethnic conflicts in the mid-1950s. In Congo, militias battle over minerals and mines. Somalia suffers famines and militia rule. In Mali, Burkina Faso, and Mozambique, insurgencies rise, and state rule comes under threat, in a repeating cycle.

These wars are global, in effect. There is cobalt from Congo in our smartphones. Libyan oil powers European grids. Refugees reshape world politics.

We simply do not call them world wars.

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Out there, the battlefields are morphing.

The invasion of Ukraine has marked a return of trench warfare, combined with high-tech weaponry. In the Donbas region, soldiers dig trenches like it’s 1916, but at the same time, naval drones skim the water with explosives, and propaganda wars are waged on Telegram.

This is not the future of war. It is every war, all at once.

AI systems curate targets, direct drone swarms, simulate adversary moves, scramble satellites, manipulate markets, and generate chaos faster than adversaries can identify intent. The Geneva Conventions, designed for an era of rifles and uniforms, are insufficient. What constitutes proportionality when war occurs at the speed of thought?

AI’s most profound impact will likely be in the theatre of psychological warfare, as its programs remake reality, generating fake news and real panic, cloning voices, altering opinions and outcomes.

Meanwhile, in a world where giants seem to be stumbling, new dragons are being born; ideology has been replaced by the imperative to keep economies growing, and allegiances must necessarily be flexible.

No two states can be certain, in such a world, of who is friend, who is foe, or what the war they are entering into is for.

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In the 21st century, war may not be ruptures of the kind we have seen with Pearl Harbor, Blitzkrieg, Hiroshima. The next large-scale battle may involve internet blackouts, frozen banking systems, satellite takeovers and cities grinding to a halt.

Regardless of large-scale events, smaller conflicts will persist: diffused, ambiguous but constant. Stability will become a factor of a system’s resilience to disruption. Strength will be determined not just by the ability to strike, but by the capacity to endure, absorb, and shape the narrative.

If war is changing, after all, so too must peace.

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TRENCHES & TWEETS: HOW THE DIME DOCTRINE HAS EVOLVED

The Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, writing in the 19th century, called war “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will”. That description still holds, but the force is no longer only military. It is diplomatic, informational and economic too.

In recognition of this, the US Department of Defense christened these forms of engagement the DIME framework (Diplomatic, Informational, Military, Economic). The concept was born amid the Cold War, and influenced how the US wielded power and enacted conflict in the international arena.

The DIME doctrine envisioned a world held together by alliances, negotiations and treaties (aka diplomacy), propaganda, narrative control and psychological operations (the informational element); military force (both deterrent and kinetic); and economic tools such as sanctions, trade and development aid.

Around the world, DIME became a way for countries to organise their pursuit of strategic objectives without defaulting to open warfare.

The four pillars are no longer controlled entirely by the state, though. As a result, they cannot always be deployed sequentially or in a targeted manner.

They often operate simultaneously, invisibly, across every active and latent conflict. What once required cables and conferences now unfolds through hashtags, sanctions and drone deployment.

The speed, scale, and saturation of digital systems also means that the entire DIME arc can be compressed into hours. Diplomacy occurs via crisis tweets. Airstrikes are livestreamed and UN resolutions follow later. Information warfare is not supplemental; it is part of the frontline.

DIME is a useful lens through which to understand modern conflict.

In the Ukraine war, for instance, all four elements operate at maximum bandwidth. Diplomatic efforts shuffle through ceasefire demands and alliance summits. The informational dimension is so central that battles for narrative control are fought alongside battles for territory. Military systems from ancient trench warfare to sophisticated hypersonic missiles are involved. Economic pressure is applied in a range of ways, from sanctions to energy blackmail and frozen assets.

Every modern conflict, and the world of international relations in general, is a DIME operation in disguise.

(Kashyap Kompella is a tech industry analyst and author of two books on AI)