The Future of War: From Weapons of Mass Destruction to Asymmetric Precision Warfare?

As the saying goes, we always prepare for the last war. And the best-laid plans regularly collapse with the arrival of a new paradigm.

To truly prepare for the future, can we imagine today what tomorrow's war will look like?

Until now, wars have typically been classified into five successive generations, each shaped by technological evolution and its impact on military strategy:

• Pitched battles (1GW): Dominant until the Napoleonic Wars, characterized by massed formations and direct engagements

• Trench warfare (2GW): Attritional warfare reliant on industrial-era technologies such as machine guns, artillery, and railroads (e.g., World War I).

• Maneuver warfare (3GW): Exemplified by Blitzkrieg tactics, integrating tanks, aircraft, and infantry in rapid, coordinated assaults (e.g., World War II).

• Guerrilla and counterinsurgency warfare (4GW): Marked by irregular combat in the post-Hiroshima Cold War period, under the shadow of nuclear deterrence (e.g., the Vietnam and Afghan wars).

• Cyber and information warfare (5GW): Today’s digital battlespace, focused on cyberattacks, psychological operations, and disinformation campaigns.

This generational framework can be misleading: A new generation doesn’t replace the previous one—it adds a new layer of complexity. All can ultimately be combined. Nowhere is this more evident than in the war in Ukraine. It includes elements of 5GW (cyber warfare), yet it began in 2014 with the Donbas separatist insurgency (4GW), escalated in 2022 with Russia’s "Special Military Operation Z" Blitzkrieg (3GW), and today involves intense trench warfare (2GW)—albeit with major strategic and technological shifts, including omnipresent satellite surveillance, drones, loitering munitions, and hypersonic missiles.

In this regard, Ukraine has become the laboratory of 21st-century warfare. What does it tell us about the future of war?

That tomorrow’s war will be intensely technological:

• With a unified battlefield and an information space made transparent by omnipresent Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) systems—radically transforming tactical and strategic planning.
• And with the rise of autonomous weapons: robotic tanks, self-guided missiles, intelligent drones, and more.

All of this fuels debates around the emergence of 6th-generation warfare, marked by the massive integration of AI and autonomous systems.

But does this mean that tomorrow’s war will be a return to mass warfare—this time AI-automated?

That’s what many military command centers are preparing for. We can see this in the power race between the USA and China, particularly in the hypothesis of a confrontation over Taiwan. With the US planning to increase its already massive $895 billion defense budget to $1 trillion by 2026, and rushing toward AI-driven warfare through the Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) program (1). And with China ramping up technological investments in AI and robotics in response, rolling out its "Multi-Domain Precision Warfare" (MDPW) doctrine (2) and deploying futuristic innovations such as autonomous combat robots or the drone mothership it recently unveiled. 

Clearly, technology will be central to tomorrow’s battles.

As always, are there weak signals pointing to alternative strategies—ones that could rewrite the rules of engagement?

Recent operations outside Ukraine, especially in the Middle East, offer compelling clues:

• The hacking of the globalized supply chains of pagers and walkie-talkies that enabled Israel to disorganize and weaken Hezbollah.
• The destabilization of Iranian military command and scientific networks through targeted assassinations—mirrored in the AI-powered Lavender program, which identified thousands of Hamas operatives for individual elimination.
• Covert drone strikes on high-value Iranian targets, deep inside its territory—similar to Ukraine’s drone operations against Russian strategic bombers on Russian soil.

These are not isolated tactics—they may represent the emergence of a deeper structural trend.

What if tomorrow’s war isn’t mass war—even if automated—but precision warfare?

And what if the future marks the return of asymmetric warfare?

Back in 1999, two Chinese colonels published a strategy manual that made history: "Unrestricted Warfare". Their thesis: to counter the American hyperpower, China would have to step outside the traditional battlefield—using cyber attacks, economic disruption, cultural counter-influence, and more (3).

But now that Russia and China have regained full-spectrum military capabilities, what if the tables have turned—and it’s the West that may soon hit a wall?

What does this say about the nature of tomorrow’s conflicts?

• That the idea of fixed front lines is disappearing. With drones, the threat can strike anywhere, including deep behind enemy lines—even at the highest levels of command.

• And while weapons of mass destruction remain state-controlled, we may see the proliferation of democratized precision weapons—within reach of small autonomous groups or private military companies (PMCs), able to infiltrate and carry out hyper-targeted strikes using AI, drones, bioweapons, and more. The aim: to disrupt the enemy system so that it collapses internally—or at the very least, to weaken it significantly without the need for large-scale confrontation.

In short: are we transitioning from Weapons of Mass Destruction to Asymmetric Precision Warfare?

In this emerging world, the Israeli-American campaign against Iran and its proxies (notably Syria and Lebanon) might well be the first true skirmish.

By circumventing the traditional balance of terror through hyper-targeted attacks, often via proxies, below the threshold of massive confrontation, sometimes even below the threshold of deniability, will these new approaches allow us to avoid the generalized 4th world war that many fear?

Nothing is less certain.

By blurring the line between war and peace through precision strikes, individual targeting, and even state-sponsored terrorism, the asymmetric approach fits well within the framework of new doctrines, which aim to prioritize "war before war." Paradoxically, it makes the boundary between confrontation and conflict more blurred, and crossing the threshold even more uncertain, as we highlighted in our previous article "Back to the Unthinkable."

Is the West well-armed within this new paradigm?

While Israel and the US have succeeded in destabilizing Syria and Lebanon, efforts to destabilize Iran through precision warfare and targeted terror—exploiting its ethnic divides—have so far failed.

Meanwhile, our own societies are growing more fractured. Could we ourselves become the soft underbelly of these new forms of warfare?

In the US, a population of 350 million now includes over 50 million foreign-born residents, with an estimated 20 million undocumented immigrants. In major European countries, nearly 20% of the population is of non-European origin (4)—just as the influx of refugees and illegal migrants is surging - mostly young men often coming from war-torn countries.

As civil tensions simmer across the West (5), do we still possess the social cohesion to resist asymmetric attacks?

The latest U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Annual Threat Assessment report made it clear: the biggest threats to America are no longer just rival states, but transnational criminals and terrorists—narco-trafficking gangs, smugglers, and cybercrime networks. To perpetrate targeted in-depth attacks on America's soil, these networks would be easy to infiltrate and manipulate.

While our societies have never been more fragile, we'll need to be careful to avoid the boomerang effect.

The second post in our new "The Future of War" series will be published at the end of July. Click here to subscribe > 

_{(1) The Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) is a U.S. DoD initiative to connect sensors, platforms, and shooters across the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force into a single, AI-powered network for predictive threat analysis, autonomous decision-making, and cyber resilience.}

_{(2) Multi-Domain Precision Warfare (MDPW) is China’s answer to CJADC2, leveraging AI and big data to detect vulnerabilities and deliver precise, kinetic or non-kinetic strikes across all operational domains—land, sea, air, space, cyber, and the electromagnetic spectrum. It is rooted in China’s “systems destruction warfare” strategy, which targets the critical nodes of adversarial networks.}

_{(3) These tactics are not new. The West has long employed underground strategies: economic warfare, financial pressure, cyber sabotage, destabilization operations, and regime change via color revolutions or Arab Spring uprisings. Until recently, however, its overwhelming military superiority allowed it to also opt for direct confrontation (Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Syria...). The war in Ukraine has revealed that this superiority is no longer absolute.}

_{(4) This is confirmed by EU reports, with official studies showing that native Europeans are 'becoming a minority' in the neighborhoods of many large European cities. Historically, such mass immigration tends to occur at the peak of a declining empire’s wealth, driven by elites eager to secure cheap labor (see “The Golden Age of the Elites” in our "History's Formula" post). This often triggers populist backlash—as seen in the U.S. during the second secular cycle with Irish and Polish immigrants, and more recently with the MAGA movement and rising anti-immigration parties across Europe. Immigration itself is not inherently negative; much depends on its quality and scale, as well as a society’s capacity to integrate it. But today’s pace—particularly in Europe—is historically unprecedented and exacerbated by the massive demographic gap between Europe and Africa.}

_{(5) Civil wars are common at the end of secular cycles, as described in Peter Turchin’s cliodynamic theories. While this view is debated, a growing number of analysts now estimate that the risk of civil conflict in the West is increasing due to deepening cultural and political fragmentation. Recent U.S. riots—linked to tensions between MAGA supporters and immigration protest movements—and unrest in the UK may be early warning signs. These issues are now gaining traction in academic circles, with some scholars predicting that civil wars in European countries could become likely within the coming decade.}