Wars of the future and the present

The combat of new civilian applications, the massive use of swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and the flood of information from combatants, with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence, paint a picture of radical change in the art of war. 

This is the main global conclusion drawn by the numerous participants in the 37th International Security and Defence Seminar organised by the Association of European Journalists (APE) and held in Toledo. The main implication of this conclusion is that the wars of the future, which are in fact already here, will be longer and bloodier, and will be characterised by long-range exchanges between the combatants. 

General Carlos Javier Frías, director of the Army War and Leadership School, pointed out that Ukraine's use of AI solutions radically changes combat scenarios. To begin with, the adaptation of techniques used in civilian life to enable citizens to inform their local council, for example, of the existence of a pothole or a traffic light failure so that they can be repaired immediately, transferred to military information of all kinds, also immediately turns all Ukrainian citizens into invaluable ‘information units’, thus making it possible to know the enemy's movements at all times and eliminate the ever-feared element of surprise. 

By way of comparison, General Wellington was unaware of what Napoleon was plotting on the other side of the Waterloo mountain before the final battle (1815), a mystery that would be meaningless today, given that satellites and drones provide such information instantly. This avalanche of information makes impossible what was so exciting to both the protagonists and spectators of any conflict: the art of deception. 

The new scenario obviously leads us to wonder who will emerge victorious in the wars of the future, characterised by these long-range exchanges. The predictive answer would be that victory will be on the side of those with the greatest sustained military industrial capacity and the largest population to withstand the bloodshed that such prolonged confrontations would entail. And today, the power with the greatest virtual capabilities in this field is China. 

No less important is the emergence of new technologies applied to warfare, which make everything much more lethal, according to General Fernando Luis Morón Ruiz, Director of Research, Organic Doctrine and Materials. For this military man, one of the major changes is cyberattacks, through which the human mind, and its corresponding manipulation, has become a space for confrontation. Those who, until very recently, considered the subconscious and emotional aspects of human beings to be virtually impregnable will now have to admit the evidence that they are much more manipulable than they thought. 

All of this should lead Western armies to overcome their disadvantage, in that their culture of war always requires them to suffer an armed attack worthy of the name in order to exercise their power of retaliation. Today, it is increasingly common for aggressors to operate in the so-called ‘grey zone’, where hybrid warfare combines clearly military actions with sophisticated terrorism or actions that are not strictly classified, to the point where it is extremely difficult to identify the aggressors. 

Cognitive warfare is therefore the newest domain of confrontation, requiring, among many other measures, the development of resilience techniques for both political leaders and the general public to resist attacks on the population's cognition. It is curious, however, that this new scenario of war was already foreshadowed in some way in the 1946 UNESCO Constitution, which Miguel Ángel Aguilar, secretary general of the APE, reminded the audience: ‘Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.’ 

As was to be expected, Europe and NATO occupied a large part of the seminar's sessions and dialectical exchanges. In this regard, it is worth highlighting the commendable and persistent efforts of former European Commissioner Margaritis Schinas to try to erase the entrenched national-emotional feeling that problems as pressing for the security of the European Union as the Sahel, Libya and the Sahara are not strictly the responsibility of France, Italy or Spain, given their past colonial rule in these territories, but are European problems affecting the entire EU. And that, if stable solutions that settle populations and encourage their development continue to be lacking, the first consequence, among many others, will be a strong destabilising Sahelian emigration to the Canary Islands, Italy or Greece, with obvious repercussions for the rest of the EU.

The debates also revealed some evidence that makes the enemies of a united, strong and globally influential Europe rub their hands with glee. The main one is the absence of real EU diplomacy, which acts through cross-vetoes, a weakness that leads, for example, to US President Donald Trump keeping Europe out of major international decisions on ongoing conflicts. 

‘Do we have the human capital in European centres of power to make the decisions that are needed?’ asked Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). A rhetorical question with the implicit answer that NATO leaders do not behave as such. And that those of the European Union, who debate alone in their meetings and are capable of reaching important agreements, as soon as they leave the meeting room, do not abandon their hackneyed habit of “nationalising” joint successes for themselves and blaming the EU itself for joint failures. 

This makes it impossible to find anyone among the 27 who is willing to die for the European homeland. Admittedly, this is surpassed in Spain, where, according to the Gallup Institute, 53% of Spaniards say they are unwilling to fight for their country in the event of war. 

This reality contrasts with the wielding of grand concepts such as strategic autonomy, which should be reflected in a European defence industry model, just as we had the European automotive industry model in the 1950s, which significantly boosted the economies of countries and the well-being and prosperity of their citizens. 

The coincidence of this seminar in Toledo with the NATO summit in The Hague sparked debate about Spain's alleged exception to the joint document accepting that each country will invest 5% of its GDP in defence over the next ten years. For María Dolores de Cospedal, vice-president of the Elcano Royal Institute, ‘words (in reference to Pedro Sánchez's muddled argument) are carried away by the wind, and what is written and signed remains written’. 

Thus, there is general agreement that if Europe wants to be a major player on the international stage, it will have to prove that it can defend itself. This is an axiom already put forward by the former President of the European Commission, Luxembourg's Jean-Claude Juncker: ‘We know the diagnosis and the solutions... but then we have to win elections’.