Future War

by Christopher Coker

Will tomorrow's wars be dominated by autonomous drones, land robots and warriors wired into a cybernetic network which can read their thoughts? Will war be fought with greater or lesser humanity? Will it be played out in cyberspace and further afield in Low Earth Orbit? Or will it be fought more intensely still in the sprawling cities of the developing world, the grim black holes of social exclusion on our increasingly unequal planet? Will the Great Powers reinvent conflict between themselves or is war destined to become much 'smaller' both in terms of its actors and the beliefs for which they will be willing to kill?

In this illuminating new book Christopher Coker takes us on an incredible journey into the future of warfare. Focusing on contemporary trends that are changing the nature and dynamics of armed conflict, he shows how conflict will continue to evolve in ways that are unlikely to render our century any less bloody than the last. With insights from philosophy, cutting-edge scientific research and popular culture, Future War is a compelling and thought-provoking meditation on the shape of war to come.

Genres: Politics

244 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 29, 2004

About the author

Christopher Coker was a British political scientist and political philosopher who wrote extensively on war.

Reviews

[Ilana · Rating 3 out of 5]

The topic is interesting and there are some good takes but I couldn´t come along at all with the writing. Nonfiction and political/military topics can be well written as well...

[Miracle Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

A frustrating book in many ways! I found its analysis ultimately incisive and I admired the way that it looked to fiction first as a way to preview the future in order to perhaps find a way to move beyond Clausewitz (or rather, perhaps to more expertly interpret Clausewitz). However, I felt ultimately that this analysis was too perfunctory and that the book skitted over the surface of many fascinating concepts without doing the work of plunging into one or two all the way. It is rare that I want a book to be more comprehensive, but I do wish the author had been slightly more ambitious in their survey, perhaps going deeper on the human struggle against AI or on the contours of information warfare.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have to admit being rather disappointed by this book. At the outset, I wasn't quite sure whether this was a book about the future of war, or if it was about war in the future. In the end, it was neither. What it did cover was a narrow range of developmental technologies that could be used in warfare and the ethics of their use. As a futurist, I found this uninteresting.

The book is overweight on digitised future technologies. Smaller, faster, cheaper, more connected, highly automated. We know the drill. What the book didn't cover were the social technologies of warfare, the use of hybrid interventions, and a whole range of other potential technologies that could be used in the projection of force, such as warfare at the level of DNA. We were given a highly focussed view of future conflict, that, in my opinion, misses a good deal of interesting peripheral vision. That was a shame.

The argument then drifted into whether or not we would feel empowered to use these technologies, once we have them. It is my belief that we would because, once things get hot, there is very little restraint over what is and what isn't used. Of course, there would be second and third order consequences. There always are. But it seems that, in the middle of a conflict, the policy choice would be to deal with those as they arise, if they arise. At that point, the killer robots may have run amok, but there you are.

I found that vision of the future to be unconvincing. The author seems to take the predictions of technologists too uncritically. We have been close to an AI breakthrough for most of my life, and I'm an old man. We are constantly told that this time will be different, and it never is. So perhaps the author is worrying unnecessarily?

I would have liked the book to focus on war in the future. How it would be engaged and by whom it would be engaged. There is a lot of interesting work in this area. The studies of the future of war tend, in my view, to move into technology forecasting too readily, which is why I find them uninteresting. Every new weapons technology in war triggers a new social technology to harness that weapon, and a countervailing social technology to counter it. I am far more interested in the novel social technologies. I admit that's my preference, but it also explains why I found the book to be disappointing.

The author generally writes well, but is hard pressed to make interesting a subject in which the reader has little interest. Perhaps more anecdotes could have helped things along? This is really a book for the dedicated aficionado. It wasn't for me.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall I felt this title gave some interesting views as to the challenges of warfare in the future, with some of Coker's fortes (ethics and war in particular) shining through. However, I felt that the title was perhaps not a prescriptive as others in the field in describing what warfare in the future may look like. In comparison to other titles however, this is not necessarily a bad thing - a number of authors fall into the trap of looking at popular technology, and defining that as how the world will be shaped in the future (e.g. Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century). As a result, they lose their ability to retain currency within a few years of publication as projects change and the global security picture shifts due to political paradigms.

Coker's writing style is also a little difficult at times to approach - sometimes it comes up as very academic, others an approachable academic, and sometimes in the popular style of books such as Singer's. As a result, it is approachable for a wide variety of audiences.

I was given this book as an advance review copy, but have yet to receive a follow-up to check against.

[Dan Zarfati · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is concerned mainly with two aspects. The idea of human alienation and its relationship with tools and weapons from a Heideggeraian point of view and the relationship of warfare and trends on the post-humanist issues, I am a bit disappointed because the author did not expand on the new weaponry strategy, but only speculated on post-humanist strategies.