The Arms of the Future. Technology and Close Combat in the Twenty-First Century

By Jack Watling

Dr Jack Watling, a Defence Academic at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), has decided to examine current developments in land warfare assessing the impact of new technologies upon the conduct of close combat operations. As such, he has taken his inflection point as the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and has attempted to project forward to sometime analogous to the mid-21st century. He has focused on the unwelcome return of state-on-state warfare, but of course has to an extent been overtaken by the Israel-Gaza War, characterised by the Israeli Defence Forces battling a combination of militias and state-backed proxy forces. Both conflicts have seen the rapid deployment of new technologies, not least Uncrewed Air Systems (UAS), otherwise known in the international media as drones. The future alluded to by Dr Watling seems to be arriving faster than he has predicted. How that fast-approaching future in the close combat battlespace is conceptualised is essentially the problem that Dr Watling has set himself, and he provided his readers with some answers too. He has the humility to acknowledge that his solutions throw up problems of their own, but these are not necessarily explored in any great depth (Stabilisation – which will be considered later – would be a good example of this).

Where the book is strong is that it focuses on the problem at hand in a logical sequence of chapters divided into three broad themes i.e. From mechanised to informatised warfare, The arms of the future and The continuation of policy. For our purposes, the most relevant part of the book is Part 1 From mechanised to informatised warfare, with its second chapter devoted to ‘Contesting the [electromagnetic] spectrum.’ In Chapter 1 Navigating the transparent battlefield, Dr Watling talks about two increasingly common technological components, fused multi-sensor arrays and machine learning. For Dr Watling, the transformative effect of machine learning is not just the centralised fusing of information at higher echelon but also the drastic increase in the effectiveness of distributed sensor arrays, whether passive or active, across the force.

He argues that against the array of modern sensors which will permeate the near future battlespace, it is seriously doubtful whether operational surprise is achievable by the current force. For Dr Watling the uncomfortable truth is that large manoeuvre formations e.g. a modern combined arms brigade, will be seen. If we are to accept that achieving surprise is critical to this formation’s likelihood of succeeding, then the key principles to be explored are the difference between stand-off and stand-in sensors; the value of ambiguity; the virtue of being self-conscious; and the difference between system speed and component speed.

In order to set the next scene, Dr Watling opens Chapter 2 with a contemporary quotation:

Whoever can limit the capacity for precision for the adversary through electronic warfare will win this war.

Colonel Ivan Pavlenko,

Commander, Ukrainian CEMA Command

Reviewed by, Major Jason Fensome

Published by Bloomsbury Academic, collaboration with the Royal United Services Institute, 430 pages

ISBN 978-1350352964

Link to full article.