Introduction Part One: From Mechanised to Informatized Warfare Chapter One: Navigating the Transparent Battlefield Chapter Two: Contesting the Spectrum Chapter Three: When Protection is an Illusion Chapter Four: When the Tail Needs Teeth Chapter Five: Blood in the Streets Part Two: The Arms of the Future Chapter Six: The Geometry of the Future Battlefield Chapter Seven: The Manoeuvre System Chapter Eight: The Fires System Chapter Nine: The Assault System Chapter Ten: The Support System Part Three: The Continuation of Policy Chapter Eleven: Divergent Domains Chapter Twelve: Priorities in Transformation Chapter Thirteen: An Instrument of Power Conclusion
Based on extensive first-person observation and hands-on experimentation, this book explores how emerging military technologies interact, and their implications for how armies will be organized and fight on the battlefields of the future.
Jack Watling is Senior Research Fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute in London where he works extensively with the British and allied militaries on force development and operational analysis. Jack has also worked in Ukraine during Russia’s invasion, in Iraq during the campaign to defeat Daesh, in Mali, Rwanda and further afield. He is co-author, alongside Nick Reynolds, of War by Others Means: Delivering Effective Partner Force Capacity Building (2021).
You can put down your ‘future war’ novels and read instead the
actual study of the deployment of modern weapons and systems from
someone who has seen many of them in action, often as a frequent
visitor to the battlefields of Ukraine. Jack Watling examines
critically and thoughtfully how forces will fight in the
mid-decades of the century, exploding the hyperbolae, war-scares,
and myths with some very hard truths. For each technology, working
from the tactical to the strategic, he focusses on its functional
logic and its dependencies. If you want to know how to ‘find, fix,
and finish’ in the battlespace, and you want to know how the
technology works in practice, you have just found the book you
need.
*Dr Rob Johnson, Director of the Office of Net Assessment and
Challenge, Ministry of Defence, UK*
In the last ten years, Dr Jack Watling, a research fellow at RUSI,
has become a leading commentator on military affairs in the UK. In
this perceptive, timely and provocative book, Dr Watling lays out
his vision of the future of ‘informationized’ land warfare. In the
light of ubiquitous sensors and long-range precision fires, the
twentieth century doctrine of manoeuvre and its associated forces
structures, so ingrained in contemporary military thinking, may now
have become obsolete. In its place, Dr Watling describes a new
battlefield geometry in which attacks forces will have to remain
dispersed and concealed out of range of enemy strikes, until they
have created the opportunity to concentrate for an attack on an
objective, which will almost certainly be urban. To prevail on this
battlefield, Dr Watling convincingly argues that land forces will
need to be re-organised. This book represents a major contribution
to current debates in military science and will be of profound
interest to military professionals, scholars, and policymakers.
*Anthony King, Warwick University, UK*
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