The speed of developments has been dizzying, and is forcing neighbouring countries and international organisations to plan on the hoof. Many have opted to close their embassies and consulates, and evacuate their staff. The UN is pulling out most of its internationals — the UNDP, for example, is down to a handful in the country. Multiple border crossings — with Tajikistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, and (on Wednesday) with Pakistan — have fallen to Taliban control, blocking customs revenue which is practically the only source of government income except for international aid.

The Taliban, a highly decentralised franchise-style operation, but with an excellent social media team, have been broadcasting videos of Talibs repairing roads in Kandahar, treating captured government soldiers well, and ogling vast mounds of captured American-sourced rifles and ammunition. The most poignant videos are of young Talibs enjoying swings and slides in children’s playgrounds, perhaps savouring for the first time the childhoods they never had.

But nobody is fooled: this week a gruesome video surfaced showing Taliban militants executing surrendering Afghan government soldiers. The veracity of this content was denied by the Taliban but confirmed by CNN. It’s clear that the advance of the Taliban is a complete disaster for the young, educated, progressive generation, who are used to the internet, and music, and mixing between the sexes — to normal life, in other words. And it’s doubly worse for the women, who, under Taliban rule, would be unable to, among other things, leave the house without a male relative .

Many of this generation are making increasingly desperate attempts to flee the country. The US has made belated efforts to accelerate the relevant visa programme and get them out of the country, but it is bittersweet for many Afghans: they feel utterly betrayed by the United States and its allies. Meanwhile the Taliban leadership, based in Qatar, have been touring the neighbouring countries, meeting with government officials, acting like a government in waiting.

But what has happened is government weakness, rather than Taliban strength. Many of the districts that have recently ‘fallen’ were remote districts, difficult to supply, and only possible to maintain with western air support. In June, the Defence Ministry decided to retrench from many of these areas in order to concentrate on strategic defendable areas (a retrenchment the Americans had been encouraging the Afghan government to make for over a year). Now, the government still controls the cities, and has an air force, which the US has stated they will continue to support (with spares, contractors, and repair facilities in other countries). The US will also continue channelling massive amounts of financial aid into the Afghan government. After the USSR pulled out of the nation in 1989, the Afghan government managed to survive with Soviet funding — until 1992, when that funding dried up. And it will probably survive now, at least in the medium term.

The deluge of videos and reports ricocheting around social media shows that the Taliban is a fractured movement. Local aid workers and contractors report that they are being taxed by the “Taliban” to continue their projects in an area, and then the next day being taxed by other “Taliban”. Some government prisoners are allowed to go home, others are executed where they stand. In some areas locals are left alone, in others they are being whipped for minor infringements. At a local level, many Talibs are fighting for individual, rather than “national” reasons.

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At a higher level, there appears to be an internal argument within the Taliban between the political and military strands of the movement. The political leadership, conscious that Afghanistan will need international aid on an ongoing basis, seem to be pursuing negotiations in order to become a legitimate government recognised by the global community. The military side, flush with their recent advances, are convinced they can take over Afghanistan by force, much like they did in the 1990s.

It’s also not clear to what extent different factions within the Taliban are working together, or will work together if they get closer to government. A range of groups with very different interests united against American occupation — now that it’s over, they’re likely to fall on each other. This is especially true when you consider that the Taliban political leadership just announced that they will ban opium production and trafficking if they get into power — many factions, like the Mansur drug networks, depend on the trade.

The most likely scenario, then, is a stalemate, with the government controlling the cities and most of the ring road, and eventually regaining control of their border posts, which the Taliban don’t appear to know how to operate anyway. Any negotiations between the Taliban political leadership and the government are unlikely to be successful. There are just too many sticking points, like women’s rights; neither the Taliban nor the government can concede enough while maintaining the support — from the military wing of the Taliban and the Kabul progressives, respectively.

But it’s not just Afghan politics that’ll shape the aftermath of America’s withdrawal. Geopolitics abhors a vacuum. All eyes are on China, a nation with huge interests in Afghanistan — centred around minerals, counter terrorism, and connectivity via its Belt and Road Initiative. Like every other surrounding power, it has hedged: its offer of development funds to rebuild infrastructure has been made to both the Taliban and the Kabul government. In return the Taliban leadership have declared the Uighurs an “internal affair” for China — an astonishing about-face for a movement that hosted Uighur separatists in the 1990s and 2000s. Given some factions are distinctly pro-Uighur, this declaration may well make it even more difficult for the Taliban to hold together.

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Until recently, China outsourced a lot of its Afghanistan policy to its ally Pakistan, but this might be about to change. Pakistan’s actions in supporting the military wing of the Taliban are seriously increasing the chance of a civil war. Completely missing from most media — as they breathlessly chart the advance of the Taliban —are multiple credible reports of Pakistanis fighting against Afghan government forces. Meanwhile, Talibs wounded or killed in Afghanistan are being taken back to Pakistan for treatment or burial — something even admitted by the Pakistani Interior Minister in late June. But Pakistan’s government has realised (not for the first time) that it doesn’t control its proxies in Afghanistan. It will likely come under increasing pressure from China to do just that. Bizarrely, the US did little to reduce Pakistani influence over the years, preferring instead to fund the Afghan government, at the same time as funding the Pakistani government, who were funding the Taliban, who were fighting the Afghan government and NATO. No wonder Afghans are disgusted with the US.

Pakistan’s ideal scenario is a negotiated settlement leading to a friendly Taliban government in Kabul — a deeply worrying prospect to Pakistan’s old nemesis India, which has a long-standing and deep relationship with the Afghan government. India has reached out to the Taliban leadership, unsuccessfully, and is now actively considering training Afghan troops, as well as other means of supporting the government military effort. Afghanistan to India is, of course, a way to challenge Pakistan’s regional foreign policy.

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Afghanistan is, then, an arena in which conflicts between multiple nations are playing out. There’s also jostling between China and Russia. The latter doesn’t share a border with Afghanistan but its proxy, Tajikistan, does. A couple of weeks ago, over 1000 Afghan soldiers fled to the neighbouring nation, raising concerns that the conflict would spill over. Memories of Tajikistan’s own civil war, in the 1990s, are still raw. Russian troops in Tajikistan are considering deploying to the border to help seal it, with the very highest levels of the two militaries in discussion. In the last decade, China has been steadily usurping Russia’s traditional influence in the Central Asian states; it’s not clear how a Russia military deployment so close to China would be viewed in Beijing.

Plenty of other countries have skin in the game, too. For instance, Iran’s traditional proxies in Afghanistan — the Shia Hazara — have among the most to lose to a Taliban takeover, because the Sunni Taliban view the Shia as basically non-Muslims. It is inconceivable that Iran would leave them hanging — particularly after many Hazara recently fought in Iranian-organised brigades in the Syrian conflict. They’ll support and further arm the Hazaras as the conflict progresses, pouring yet more weaponry into a country where the price of a Kalashnikov is already among the cheapest in the world.

In the midst of all this, there’s a distinct lack of global power-broking. The one organisation that could provide a framework for regional political discussions, the UN, is largely absent, not being the fastest moving bureaucracy. And so, everyone is stuck: assessing the situation, hedging their bets, and waiting. Meanwhile, the Afghan government is clinging on for dear life. It’s likely to survive, but there’s a distinct possibility it will collapse and Afghanistan will fragment, with some areas going to various parts of the Taliban franchise, some areas going to local warlords, and at best a rump Kabul government remaining. At this point, the nation would be a free-for-all, with outside powers diving in to protect their interests and support their proxies in the hope that they can gain ascendancy — or just survive. And this chaos would be the worst of all possible outcomes, for everyone, but above all, for the Afghans.

The statues’ demolition certainly lived up to the depiction of the Taliban in international media: they were a group of religious fundamentalists who beat women, banned music and measured the lengths of men’s beards to make sure they tallied with the religiously mandated length. This was the government of the day: coherent and imposing its will on the people of Afghanistan, whether they liked it or not.

But who are the Taliban now? Surely this is an important question, particularly if you are trying to work out what to do about Afghanistan; that country for which there were such high hopes after the supposed defeat of the Taliban in 2001, but which is currently disintegrating before our eyes. Yet those responsible for Afghanistan’s future don’t seem to be asking these questions. Which is, of course, one of the reasons that Afghanistan is collapsing. Nobody bothered to find out what the place was like.

Now, after nearly 20 years of hunting terrorists (Al Qaeda), conducting a counterinsurgency (against the Taliban), fighting a drugs war and developing the country, all foreign troops — including 2,500 Americans — are due to leave Afghanistan by the start of May.

This follows the signing of a peace accord between the US and the Taliban in February 2020. The agreement, which astonishingly was negotiated without the participation of the Afghan government, had few stipulations. The US would reduce its troop numbers and would release several thousand prisoners. The Taliban, meanwhile, would agree to peace talks with the Afghan government, and would prevent anyone using Afghan soil to threaten the United States and its allies.

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In reality, this was not a peace agreement, but a fairly obvious smoke screen for a US withdrawal (much like, it has to be said, the Russian withdrawal 30 years earlier). The US had failed to achieve its goals and was leaving.

Since the signing of the accord, the US has broadly followed its side of the bargain, reducing troop numbers and releasing prisoners. The Taliban, however, have not — instead upping its attacks on the Afghan government, while stonewalling any attempts at negotiation.

And so reports from Afghanistan indicate that several provincial centres, including Kandahar, arguably the most important city in Afghanistan after Kabul, are in danger of falling from Afghan government control. Newly elected President Biden is said to be reconsidering whether it is safe for the US to be leaving Afghanistan at all.

All of which sounds like very sensible analysis, and reflects the sort of article you might read in the New York Times. But it is based on a massive assumption: that the Taliban are a coherent organisation with a defined membership, an organisational structure, a guiding framework of ideas and a leadership able to exert control over its fighters.

In turn, these assumptions support the so-called insurgency narrative: that the Afghan government and its international partners have been fighting an insurgency called the Taliban who grow drugs, throw acid in girls’ faces and are generally evil. In this telling, the Afghan government and its international friends are, by definition, good. It is a binary depiction of the war: good versus evil, black versus white, us versus them.

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But what if this dynamic wasn’t actually what was generating most of the violence? For most of the violence in Afghanistan today is driven by hyper-local issues, such as land disputes, access to agricultural water, fights over drugs, generational feuds and abuses of administrative power. Indeed, when the Afghan communist party, heavily supported by the USSR, took power in a coup 43 years ago and precipitated a civil war which has been raging ever since, it unleashed a series of pent-up tensions in the country between conservatives and progressives, the educated and non-educated and, most importantly, between various local interest groups — mostly based on kinship — desperate to control their territories.

This same multifocal civil war continues today, with most of those people fighting the Government doing so for personal or local reasons. Perhaps they have had their land stolen by a warlord. Perhaps they are the victim of predatory behaviour from a local official and need to fight back to maintain their honour. Perhaps they are trying to sell their drugs, or protect their village, or enact a feud. The reasons are endless, but all of them are exacerbated by the fact that Afghanistan has nothing resembling a central government that adjudicates disputes and sets rules that apply to everyone. In fact, the Afghan government is as riven by local factional motivations as the Taliban.

What those on both sides do share, though, is a willingness to accept weapons from anyone — including, but not limited to, the Americans, the Russians, Pakistan and the Taliban — in order to pursue their own personal aims. Importantly, because of the strength of local issues in driving the conflict, the degree to which all these sponsors are able to control the on-the-ground actors is highly questionable.

So, what does this look like in a district in, for example, Kandahar Province? Imagine two villages, A and B. Running between these villages is a water course that both need for their agriculture. Because there hasn’t been a functioning government in Afghanistan for two-thirds of a lifetime — life expectancy is 65 — there is no functioning water management, and these villages are locked in a zero-sum battle over access to water (layered, no doubt, with multiple personal feuds).

Luckily, someone in village A has a relative in the provincial police and manages to have the village militia enrolled in it; they now have access to weapons and the confidence to label village B as “Taliban sympathisers” or some such slur. Village B, in response, decides to send an elder who fought in the mujahideen to the Taliban leadership in Quetta. When the elder says that village A are “westerners”, he is given enough weapons for village B to create their own militia.

Of course, whether village B accepts weapons from the Taliban before or after they are labelled “Taliban sympathisers” is a moot point — the key thing is that everyone is manipulating everyone else in order to access resources that will bolster their cause. That partly explains why commanders and militias change sides all the time, and most actors very sensibly maintain feet in both the government and Taliban camps.

In 2011, I remember meeting a local Taliban commander who had been welcomed into the Afghan government and supplied with motorbikes and weapons to form his own (government-aligned) village defence militia. He had switched back less than a month later: in Afghanistan, survival always trumps ideology. Even the Afghan government sometimes deploys the Taliban and ISIS as spectres to ensure funds and commitments from international partners, such as the US.

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Yet this mythologised Taliban died in 2001, when Pakistani funding all but dried up. So to describe the country’s civil war without reference to its vast array of tribal alliances, as a recent New York Times article does, is to miss the fundamental point. Likewise, while it may be hard to describe exactly what the Taliban are, it is not difficult to describe what they are not; they are not, as this BBC article helpfully describes, a coherent organisation. But it is upon this assumption of Taliban coherence that the plans of the Afghan government, the US and all the other involved countries rest.

And that could have serious repercussions. For assuming that the US continues on their withdrawal (and other countries follow them, because they can’t exist without the massive US logistical footprint in the country), the country is going to fragment, much like it did in the 1990s when the Russians withdrew.

In a mirror of today, it was assumed then that the mujahideen, who fought the Russians throughout the 1980s, would take over the government. But they were utterly divided, more interested in pursuing personal interests, so they ended up fighting each other. History is meant to rhyme, and not repeat, but in Afghanistan, the latter seems highly plausible.

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When I speak to friends in Kabul, they are terrified, and trying to get themselves and as many relatives as possible out of the country. Afghanistan, they say, is about to collapse into tens or hundreds of fiefdoms. Those over 35 or so have memories of the different factions fighting over Kabul in the early nineties — the rocket attacks, the rapes and the brutal pogroms inflicted on the neighbourhoods of opposing ethnicities. Afghanistan’s current leadership, whether government or Taliban, won’t be able to be control it any more than anyone else.

And so we come to the recurring question of the last 20 years: what should the US President do about Afghanistan? Well, President Biden, there are a number of practical decisions to take. If you want to stop Afghanistan splintering into random fiefdoms, you should keep a minimal number of troops in the country and spend enough money necessary to keep the national ring road open (there is only one main road in Afghanistan), and the provincial centres in government hands. Accept that you are there for the long haul, like in Germany or South Korea, and see it as part of your policy towards China, a neighbour with acute interests in Afghanistan and the surrounding countries.

But as you reconsider America’s policy towards Afghanistan, you would do well to remember that, above all else, you will not be able to beat the Taliban, because what you understand as the Taliban simply do not exist.

Now imagine this was carried out by robots, without any human control. Scary? Yes, and it could be our reality in the next decade.

Britain’s most senior soldier, the Chief of the Defence Staff General Nick Carter, said earlier this month that “robot soldiers could make up a quarter of the British Army by 2030”. This is not idle speculation: autonomous systems (in effect, robots) make up a non-trivial part of the Ministry of Defence’s budget proposal that is currently under consideration by No 10. He went on to suggest that “I suspect we can have an army of 120,000, of which 30,000 might be robots, who knows,” Carter told Sky News.

If there is one thing guaranteed to cause speculation and reams of newsprint, it is killer robots. If something is depicted in science fiction and then features in real life, of course people get excited. The classic image for killer robots, of course, is from the Terminator series of movies — there, I’ve done it, I’ve mentioned Terminator; now I can get on with the article — but it is highly unlikely that future military robots are going to be humanoid-shaped cyborgs. These are only mechanically efficient on rough and broken terrain for one: ‘killer robots’ are far more likely to be drone-like, or tracked (or swarms of both).

So, how long before Insectdrones^TM are patrolling our streets?

It is worth stating upfront that warfare over the next 20 years will be a story of increasing autonomy. This is not just true among the British, with Carter — a known reformer — at the helm. It is true of British allies, and potential adversaries too. The US plans to spend $1.7bn on researching autonomous systems (drones, robots and the like) in the next financial year. It is much harder to tell what China is spending on its military (or what autonomous systems it has under development), but it is already extensively using unmanned systems such as aerial drones which have a degree of autonomy built into them.

The reason that the world’s militaries are investing so heavily in this domain is pretty obvious. Weapons systems without humans are much, much faster in attack and defence, helping you get inside your opponent’s decision-making cycle (the so-called OODA loop). They can also be much smaller and more robust, allowing them to get places that humans can’t. They don’t tire or need feeding, they don’t have morale problems. Finally, and particularly appealing to democracies: you can launch actions without risk of casualties. In strict military terms, autonomous systems are a no-brainer.

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But the lack of casualties is where the ethical problems begin. Imagine you are a leader, who has to make a decision about whether to launch a military strike. You would consider the benefits of military success and the chances of achieving that success (e.g. enemy target destroyed), against the costs of the mission and potential for failure (e.g. casualties, captured personnel, or making your country/military look weak). Using autonomous systems removes most of the downsides, which lowers the threshold for action — and so you are more likely to launch more attacks.

We have arguably seen this pattern already with the rise of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, over the past two decades. And it is not a good thing, even for the progenitors of the attacks, because it encourages easy, consequence-free use of lethal violence, which means that we tend to end up treating the symptoms of violence (rather than the causes), and sometimes even becoming a cause of further violence through the ubiquity of our own violence. Scholars now argue, for example, that drone strikes along the Afghan-Pakistan corridor create rather than eradicate suicide bombers, generating feelings of shame and humiliation among the targeted communities. In not-so-many words, these unmanned systems encourage us to be tactical rather than strategic.

But there is actually a much more profound problem: our entire ethical and legal systems are built upon human intentions and judgements.

Think about murder, for instance. In order to prosecute someone successfully for murder, one has to prove that the accused had the intention to kill the victim (this concept — mens rea or intent — is actually technically necessary for all criminal prosecutions). So too with the Law of Armed Conflict, which rests on four overriding principles: military necessity, distinction (between targets), proportionality and avoiding unnecessary suffering. And in applying these concepts under the law, the judgement and intent of the soldiers and officers involved is taken into account.

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How do we apply these concepts to autonomous systems?

Imagine that the attack on the village described earlier was carried out instead by a helicopter under human control. Depending on the circumstances, it could be argued that the action did not draw enough distinction between military and civilian targets, or perhaps it was a disproportionate use of firepower for a minor military target. Or perhaps the intelligence was wrong.

Let us now say that this incident became the subject of a court case. This is not unrealistic; in fact there are tens, if not hundreds, of cases being brought against the Ministry of Defence for the conduct of British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a court case, we might expect the commanders in charge to be questioned about their views on whether the attack was proportionate, or whether appropriate care was taken to distinguish between military and civilian targets. This is also not unrealistic — when dropping bombs on targets where there is a risk of danger to friendly troops, the pilot will ask for the ground commander’s initials as his or her acceptance of increased risk.

In short, most militaries go to great lengths to avoid breaking the Laws of Armed Conflict, and a key way of doing this is making one person responsible for the use of lethal force so that their judgment and intentions are on the line. And, fairly obviously, you cannot do this with autonomous systems. Who do we blame if it goes wrong? The “commander” of the robot? The robot itself? The person who wrote the algorithm? If innocent villagers die, who do we blame?

Going back to General Nick’s announcement, it was not made clear what roles these robots might play in the future British Army. Or whether, if they were able to deploy lethal force, humans would be kept ‘in-the-loop’ (i.e. humans pull the trigger – like a drone), humans would be kept ‘on-the-loop’ (i.e. humans can stop the robot pulling the trigger – like a heat-seeking missile once fired), or humans would be ‘out-of-the-loop’ (i.e. a fully autonomous system with no human oversight). This is probably because he doesn’t know.

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These very real legal and ethical challenges are top of the in-tray for many countries: at the end of 2019 the US military issued guidance on the use of lethal autonomous systems that was notable for asking the US Congress to help find a way through the minefield, and explicitly putting the subject of arms control on the table for discussion (something I have written about here and here with other types of weapons).

The real problem with autonomous weapons systems comes when you put strict military expediency in the short term up against complex legal and ethical challenges that may only come to fruition in the longer term. What if, when facing a near-peer competitor, a country is attacked with fully autonomous systems — with all of the military advantages outlined above. Weapons systems with humans in the loop would be quickly overwhelmed. One can imagine in those circumstances of survival that the current positions of the UK and the US (and many other countries) — that humans should always exercise oversight, authority and judgement over lethal autonomous systems — might crumble rather rapidly.

This, rightly, terrifies everyone: warfare is a human endeavour, and it requires humanity in its prosecution. Without that, we all lose.

I am not saying that Russian has not developed, and is not using, a relatively sophisticated set of clandestine schemes to operate in the online world. But Russian activities on the internet (and on social media) receive much more prominence in the news relative to their actual importance in shaping the world in which we live. Most probably this is because journalists are obsessed with social media: it has upended traditional journalistic business models and made them all poorer with more stressful lives.

After all, the success or otherwise of a clandestine scheme could be said to be linked to its clandestine nature, which, judging by the number of legislature-led inquiries, reports, arrests and shutting down of Russian networks could lead us to conclude that the Russians are not achieving their aims. Furthermore, it is not clear that Russian activity has changed the course of a democratic event anywhere. As the outgoing head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Alex Younger, said recently:

“I haven’t seen in the UK any occasion where this stuff has made a strategic difference … The Russians did not create the things that divide us — we did that. They are adept, albeit in a rather crass manner, at exacerbating those things.”

(The UK conducts the same sort of cyber activities in Russia too, just as ineffective, and more as a result of the need to be seen doing something rather than doing something.)

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So to a wider point: what are Russian strategic aims in 2020, and are they being reported accurately in the media? This is not a dig at the media per se. It is difficult to report on strategic issues: they are complex, multi-layered, and usually intertwined in a detailed history. Moreover, the public generally has a penchant for controversial articles and a short attention span, particularly for foreign affairs and defence matters. But here is what I think is the real story about Russia.

Russia has two main geostrategic aims. The first — an eternal one for Russia — is to establish a series of allied states in its near abroad. This region stretches from the Baltic states, through eastern Europe and the Caucasus, to the ‘stans. It would love to extend this ring of countries to Mongolia, but that battle has already been lost to China. In short, it is trying to recreate the breathing space that it had in Soviet days, pushing opponents — and their armies, listening stations, and espionage—further away from their border. Russia is so vast that it considers this buffer space geostrategically essential.

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This aim, if you like, is driven by fear and we can clearly see the Russian activities that go some way to achieving this aim: the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, the covert/proxy Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, as well as its current support for the Lukashenko government in Belarus, and towards Armenia in its current dispute against Azerbaijan.

Russia’s second geostrategic aim is to be a global player again. It wants to be listened to; it wants other countries particularly powerful ones to listen to it. It wants to be respected. This isn’t as silly as it sounds, in fact it is incredibly human: lots of countries’ leaders are driven by the perceived status of their country. And for President Putin, who considers the fall of the Soviet Union to be the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century”, this aim is driven by the idea of re-establishing Russian honour.

It is hard to see how Russian online activity achieves those two goals. Is “disrupting” democracy an end in itself, or a means to an end? It is far more likely to cause people worldwide to consider Russia a pariah state. Russia doesn’t want to be a pariah state; it wants to be a great power. The social media stuff feels, at best, like a distraction.

So what is going on?

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Great powers are usually referred to as such because of vast economic, political or military power. Taking them in turn: Russia has a GDP a bit more than half of the UK’s (with approximately twice the population), a 10^th of China’s, or a 14^th of the United States’. Its political alliances with other countries are paltry compared with the US, or even China. Realistically, Russia can only compete on military terms.

Some figures. There are four militaries greater than a million-strong in the world: China, India, the US, and Russia. Russia has a similar sized navy to the US, twice as many main battle tanks, similar numbers of submarines, half as many aircraft … in short, while not at the same level as the US (or China) in terms of technology or global deployability, Russia’s military is at least in the same bracket as other great powers, particularly when that bracket is widened to include France and the UK, the other UN security council members. But there is one area where Russia does have parity with the US, and exceeds the capabilities of all the other great powers: nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are special in many obvious ways, but not least in the fact that they are the only type of weapon (along with their delivery systems, and systems that can defend against those delivery systems) that have been subject to arms control agreements where Russia and the US have specifically agreed to limit, or reduce over time, the numbers of specific types and categories of weapon.

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Both countries understand that by limiting specific short range missiles (the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty), or systems to shoot intercontinental ballistic missile systems out of the sky (the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty), or overall numbers of warheads or delivery systems (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START)), it is possible to reduce uncertainty about what one’s opponent is doing, and remove their ability to launch a successful first strike. If you can achieve these two things, nuclear weapons are much less likely to be used, or so the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction goes.

The problem is that these treaties have been breaking down. In 2002, the US pulled out of the ABM treaty because — they said — they needed missile defence against North Korea and Iran. In 2019, the US pulled out of the INF treaty citing Russian violations. The only nuclear arms control treaty in force is START: it came into force in 2011, and features limits on warheads and delivery systems that are a small fraction of the high numbers held during the cold war, and has robust inspection and verification mechanisms — but the treaty runs out in February next year.

Russia has proposed a five-year extension on the same terms (an option enshrined in the original treaty), but the US is saying that it wants to bring China in as well, as well as to expand the treaty to cover all nuclear weapons, not just those covered by the current treaty. Russia says this is not possible without a discussion about anti-missile defence, which the US says is off the table.

So, as a result of the breakdown of the ABM and INF treaties, Russia began to develop a range of new delivery systems including hypersonic missiles. From its perspective, it had to restore the balance that a more developed US missile defence system would upend. These new weapon systems are both short range (at a range that would have been covered by the INF) and intercontinental. One of the long range missiles has an ability to hit its targets at Mach 27 — yes, 27 times the speed of sound — which completely negates US missile defence.

Unveiling these (and other) weapons in 2018, Putin said “No one has listened to us … You [will] listen to us now.”

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How did we get into this position? Unfortunately, the attitude of the US towards Russia during the pre-Trump decade can be summed up in President Barack Obama’s 2014 statement that Russia was a “regional power”, acting out of weakness rather than strength. It was not a top geopolitical foe, he said. Perhaps, rationally speaking, Obama was right, but he got the psychology so, so wrong. And strategy is profoundly psychological. Russia, and particularly Putin, wants to be a top geopolitical foe. It wants to be seen on equal terms.

Joe Biden has 16 days after his (probable) inauguration to agree to the Russian proposal of a five-year extension to START, the only current nuclear arms control agreement. Of course, the US needs weapons controls agreements with China, but they probably need to focus on AI, rather than nuclear weapons. Fundamentally, Russia wants to play at the top table, and an arms control agreement is a cheap way to allow them to do so: it implicitly acknowledges Russian “strength”, at almost no cost.

Issues such as these are the true strategic currents in the world today, not inconsequential meddlings on Facebook; if only the media would cover them that way.

Whatever one thinks of the so-called special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom, the reality is that it has enabled Britain to maintain a larger global role than it otherwise would have. Falklands campaign? Forget it without American fuel, weapons delivery and satellite intelligence. What about Libya in 2011? Not a chance without American logistical support to the air campaign. (That this support was required even when Libya is approximately 1000 km from our airbase in Cyprus demonstrates how necessary it is).

That is not to say that Great Britain has been a wholly dependent partner. Particularly in the world of signals intelligence, the UK is genuinely world class, and useful to its ally. And in other areas too — the military, for instance — the UK has been able to provide genuinely useful contributions to American foreign policy actions where it counts: at the sharp end.

In the world of diplomacy, the UK had deep and overlapping networks of influence that helped America create political solutions to problems. This, of course, was nowhere more true than between the US and the EU. Yes, the UK was a junior partner, but it was not completely without merit.

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Will China get stuck in the Afghan quagmire?

By Mike Martin

This is also probably not just a Trump blip, such that normal service will be resumed once he leaves office. The US has been trying to rebalance itself away from Europe, and towards Asia, for a decade if not longer. But in terms of the UK-US relationship, this geopolitical shift has been compounded by two further factors.

Firstly, very, very poor British performance in the Iraq and Afghan wars, where US troops had to deploy to both Basra and Helmand — the operational areas the UK was responsible for — in order to bolster British forces. And secondly Brexit, which inevitably weakens the UK’s relationships with European nations, and thus makes the UK less useful to America.

It is against this background that some of the recent actions of the Trump administration have played out: withdrawing from Syria via tweet, and the assassination of General Soleimani. Both actions — done without warning any allies, let alone close ones like the UK — were perceived to have increased the danger to UK troops who are deployed in both theatres, and in many cases co-located with US troops.

Now, it is not completely clear whether Ben Wallace’s worst nightmares will come true but let us, for the sake of argument, say that the British government can no longer assume US military support in the execution of its foreign policy goals. What are the UK’s geopolitical options going forward over, say, the next twenty years?

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Firstly, this means that the UK will not be able to project power globally. Maintaining a full spectrum of capabilities that can be used around the world is horrendously expensive. The US is the only nation able to do this currently, and their defence budget is approximately $700 billion (compared to $53 billion for the UK). Thus, Britain will have to limit itself to a regional role in an area centred on the British Isles.

The next question to ask is what geopolitical threats the UK will face in this core area over the next twenty years or so. Prediction of this sort is a mug’s game, but I think the key threats are four. In no particular order:

1. Climate change, desertification and overpopulation in Africa and the Middle East: the population of Africa is projected to hit 2 billion by 2040 (it is 1.2 billion now). The current wave of African and Middle Eastern migration into Europe, from whatever cause, could be just the beginning. The resulting instability in Europe will be a British problem just as the balance of power, and who is in charge on the continent, has been a British foreign policy concern for a thousand years.

2. Peak demand for hydrocarbons within the next twenty years, due to tumbling prices of renewables (they are currently roughly at parity), and the mainstreaming of new technologies like electric vehicles. This will turn current oil and gas producers — like Russia and the Middle East — into quasi-failed states. Russia, for instance, gets 50% of its government budget from the sale of hydrocarbons. This trend will cause another wave of instability on the periphery of Europe, leading to more pressure on European stability.

3. Cyber defence of telecommunications and other critical infrastructure.

4. Keeping the maritime area around the UK — the north-east Atlantic, the North Sea and the Channel — clear and open for trade. Britain is an archipelago that is totally reliant on trade.

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There should also be a fifth category of threats that includes everything that we cannot currently conceive of due to the pace of technological change, or that we have identified, but are not sure how it will play out. For instance, one of these might be a future competition over rare earths — minerals used in digital, and particularly renewable, technology. Reserves are located in places like China, Australia, South America and the Congo.

This analysis of threat, if only half correct, implies that Britain will need to forge closer military and intelligence links with European nations, or perhaps with the EU, if it develops its own defence capabilities. And European nations seem to be ahead of the UK in this realisation: both Macron and Merkel — the EU’s two most powerful leaders — have both, at different times over the last two years, made the point that Europe cannot rely on the US security guarantee and need to develop their own integrated defence structures.

This, of course, is the EU Army, the concept of which was raised as a spectre repeatedly by Brexiters during the EU Referendum campaign and its aftermath. But Brexit or no Brexit, the reality is that the UK’s geopolitical focus will remain Europe. Britain may be able to leave the EU, but it is unlikely to be able to escape the geopolitical gravity of Europe.

The as-yet-unsigned peace agreement stipulates that America will rapidly reduce its troops in Afghanistan (currently around 14,000) in return for Taliban guarantees that they will not host international terrorist groups that threaten the US or its allies. Additionally, the Americans would release 13,000 — yes, 13,000! — Taliban prisoners over the coming months. Once the US has withdrawn, the Taliban would then hold talks with the Afghan government.

This sounds like fantastic news, and it would be, were it the whole story. The truth, however, as so often in Afghanistan, is much more complex.

Afghanistan is in a parlous state with a worse and deteriorating security situation, over 2.7 million refugees and a recent heavily-marred presidential election, which saw a narrow win for the incumbent, Ashraf Ghani, on a turnout of just 28%.

It is against this backdrop — little changed for the past five years — that President Trump has announced his desire to withdraw American forces from overseas conflicts and commitments. Afghanistan was a prime candidate: the US could see that they had failed to achieve barely any of their objectives (as has been made very clear in the recent Afghan papers published by the Washington Post). The US duly dropped its previous red line that the Afghan government was included in the talks — for the last decade the Taliban had refused to speak to what they call a “US puppet” —  and the talks began in Qatar.

However, it is not clear that the senior US leadership understands why they lost the war in Afghanistan. Quite simply: this is because the US and its allies characterized the Afghan war as one of supporting an Afghan government against Taliban insurgents; whereas in reality it is a 40-year multi-focal civil war with local tribal, narco, and other criminal interests fighting over hyper-local issues, and sucking in outside sponsors. Violence is driven much more by local disputes over land and water than over ideologies like democracy and Islamism. Fighters and commanders change sides all the time, and survival is paramount in decision making.

The difference is important. Political insurgencies, like the US imagines it is facing in Afghanistan, can be solved with a combination of military pressure and negotiations where concessions are made. Multi-focal civil wars only fizzle out when outsiders stop supplying money and weapons to on-the-ground actors, and these same locals engage in local reconciliation efforts. The US has effectively been fighting the wrong type of war in Afghanistan.

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And it seems that this misunderstanding is going to be repeated in the peace deal. If it is signed as currently described, the Taliban leadership guarantee that they will not host transnational terrorists on Afghan soil. But the Taliban leadership is not in control of most of the violence in Afghanistan — that is in the hands of local warlords and drug militias — so they will not be able to enforce their side of the bargain, even if they wanted to.

So what is likely to happen if, as looks highly likely, the peace deal gets signed?

In a crude analysis, western military support has enabled the Afghan government to keep control of the country’s main ring road and its provincial centres. Most, or much of, the rural areas are in the hands of local actors with various temporary allegiances. The absence of this military support will likely cause even more of the country to slip into local hands, disintegrating even further. Levels of violence and numbers of refugees will increase. There is a real possibility of government collapse.

Uneasily watching this is China, with whom Afghanistan shares a border. Arguably, China has greater interests in Afghanistan than the US has had, once it had completed the initial post-9/11 routing of the Taliban government. Broadly, these interest break down into three baskets: economic, counterterrorism and geopolitical.

On the economic side, China has invested in multiple large-scale projects in Afghanistan since 2001, not least a $4.5bn copper mine near Kabul and a $300m petroleum project in the north of the country. These effectively freeload off security that has been underwritten by the US and its allies. Secondly, counterterrorism: from the Chinese perspective the Afghan-bordering Xingjian province is a hotbed of terrorist activity, with links to networks in Afghanistan.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, China views Afghanistan as a key location in its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Not only does the country border the northern route (from China, through the ‘Stans, to Europe), but Beijing is actively considering a so-called “Five Nations Railway” from China, through Afghanistan and Iran, to the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean.

China also announced last year that Afghanistan is going to be linked up to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a $62 billion series of infrastructure projects originally designed to link China to Pakistani seaports, but with eventual plans to join Pakistan to central Asian energy markets.

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The strategic question for China is whether to continue pursuing these interests in Afghanistan: all of these avenues require a level of stability and security in the region above the current levels, let alone if the country disintegrates after the US withdrawal. And if China does decide to continue on its current path, the even more difficult question is how it should set about securing these interests in Afghanistan.

Does it, at one extreme, go down the route taken by the West, and before it Russia, deploying soldiers around the country? After all, it currently has small missions training Afghan troops in Badakhshan province, in areas that border China, so could we see something like this expanding across key places in the country?

Presumably this would involve partnering with the Afghan government and mentoring and training its forces. But would China’s authoritarian, statist, centralising approach work in a land that, as my 93-year-old grandmother observed to me before I first went there, is so full of unrepentant individualists?

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Perhaps China merely funds and arms a faction in Kabul (a government?) in order to keep secure the areas of the country important to it? But would this work, or would the money end up building villas in Dubai for the Afghan warlords most able to take advantage of their largess? Are there other options, involving proxies or other nations? Pakistan, for instance, has previously worked closely with China on Afghanistan.

How does China achieve its aims without getting their hands stuck in the Afghan mangle, like so many have before?

This will be the year of the US withdrawal. It will also be the year that Beijing has to make up is mind on Afghanistan. To those of us in the West who think that China is an unstoppable behemoth, this dilemma is a useful reminder that the world’s soon-to-be largest economy also faces real-world, least-worst, strategic choices — just like the rest of us.

Many are arguing that global warfare is changing; but is it really, or is this part of a much longer cycle?

Small-scale attacks are usually a deliberate strategy by less powerful actors who do not have a choice: rebels and insurgents, global protest groups, and weaker states such as North Korea or Iran. Often, they seek to challenge America and her traditional allies, but to do so in a way that sits below the threshold of overt warfare — by operating in the so-called “grey zone”, as the Chief of the Defence staff, General Sir Nick Carter, outlined his annual address to the Royal United Services Institute. These actors do not want to provoke a response, particularly a military one.

For a minimal outlay, a small player (relatively speaking), can have an outsized impact on an adversary, where it otherwise could not. In warfare this is known as asymmetry. General H.R. McMaster, former US National Security Adviser, once said: “There are two ways to fight the US: asymmetrically and stupid.”

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But, in fact, asymmetry is a key, if not the key, dynamic that all sides try to utilise in warfare. It is the most effective way to have a psychological effect on (or to send a message to) your enemy. This, throughout the ages, has been the whole point of warfare.

There are two types of asymmetry: with overt military power (tanks, infantry, and suchlike), one wants to amass as much force as possible against a weaker enemy force to shatter its cohesion (think of the D-Day amphibious operations in 1944). With covert, or non-traditional military activities, one is trying to generate a large impact, often against a big target, with a small outlay. The best example of this in recent times is, of course, the attacks of 11 September, 2001 in New York, which reportedly cost al-Qaeda $400,000 to carry out (compared with the $6tn cost of the “Global War on Terror”).

The question of which type of asymmetry predominates waxes and wanes through the ages. Critically, it depends upon the types of technology used in warfare and their relative costs (and not necessarily military-specific technology, either), and not just the overwhelming dominance of one actor.

Today you can, for example, buy drones on Amazon, and shut down major international airports, as Extinction Rebellion threatened to do to Heathrow. You can also write malware in your bedroom, and cripple governments, as Ukraine found to its cost in the ‘Petya’ malware attacks of 2017. This is an accelerating trend: malware attacks against states have doubled from 2018 to 2019.

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Eras that have a democratic availability of technology lead to fragmented patterns of violence and warfare where it is hard to distinguish who is attacking, or what the psychological message is that they are trying to deliver.

This hasn’t always been the case. For much of history, the cost of technology, and hence its concentration in the hands of a few, made warfare an elite sport. The cost and complexity of dreadnoughts, huge battleships with extensive firepower, at the turn of the 20th century, meant that only a few states could compete. On land, the perfection of the chariot on the Russian Steppes from around 2000 BCE had a similar effect. The elite nature of warfare meant that who was fighting, and what messages they were sending, were clear. Warfare tended to be clear and concentrated.

But is this of more than passing, academic interest?

It is, because fragmentation in warfare makes it hard to make sense of what’s going on. And if you can’t make sense of what is going on then it is hard to make decisions. And wining in war is a question of wartime leaders making good decisions, in good time, about how to respond to the enemy’s moves.

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It is very hard to make decisions in warfare and international affairs at the moment because we are in an era of ultra cheap and available technology. For the next 20 years or so this trend is likely to accelerate: think of 3D printers churning out weapons systems remotely; nano-drone swarms paralysing automatic air-defence systems; or mega-cheap genome sequencing enabling actors to create organisms that can make a city’s water smell of, say, pear drops, or turn it purple — what better way to create a psychological effect on your enemy?

It will become increasingly hard to pick apart actors and motives, leading to confused decision making and, most likely, strategic errors on the part of large, rich countries. This is already happening: look at American and European paralysis over Syria, or the inability of governments to respond effectively to the multiple protests that are occurring around the globe currently.

But where does this process end? Most probably with the complete reshaping of warfare brought about by artificial intelligence. Advanced proprietary AI — the type that rich governments are investing heavily in, assuming that it will give them the edge in conflict — will help to make sense of the fragmentation in the contemporary strategic environment; it will enable better decisions to be made with clarity; and warfare will become an elite sport once again.

Prevent aims to “confront [the] extremist ideology” at the heart of terrorism. It is based on the idea that “radicalisation is driven by an ideology which sanctions the use of violence” and it explicitly makes a causal link between ideology, extremist thought, and extremist actions. Ipso facto if you solve the problem of extremist ideology, be it jihadi or far-Right, you reduce the levels of terrorist violence.

The Government’s approach relies upon identifying people at risk of being radicalised and countering the narrative of extremism. Those at risk of radicalisation, or who already have been radicalised, are identified through state institutions, like schools and healthcare providers, who have a statutory duty to report those, often minors, who they think display extremist thought. Remember the young child infamously referred to Prevent for talking about eco-terrorism in class, or the four-year-old who was referred for talking about a ‘cucumber’, misheard by the teacher as ‘cooker-bomber’?

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Prevent has long had its critics. Charities – such as Amnesty – were concerned about human rights implications. Muslim groups – such as the Muslim Council of Britain – reported that Muslim communities felt targeted by the scheme. And scholars have questioned the efficacy of the radicalisation narrative: that ideology creates extremist thought which leads to extremist action, meaning people need ‘protecting’ from extremist ideology if they are at risk of being ‘radicalised’.

But there is a deeper, philosophical problem with Prevent. The language of the entire strategy – and the comments by Ben Wallace – reflect the implicit assumption that ideology is like a sickness that infects people and causes them to do wrong. In fact, the initial 2003 Prevent programme drew upon the policy work that the government had done to protect vulnerable young people from paedophiles. These assumptions still pervade the programme, as demonstrated by Wallace’s recent reference to “grooming and exploitation by terrorists”.

This approach sees ‘radicalisation’ as something that comes from without, rather than something that is sought from within.

But can a collection of ideas, an ideology, really cause someone to blow themselves up? The answer to this disarmingly simple question – and the broader question of the role of ideas in all types of violence propagation – lies in cognitive science. Violence, after all, is a behaviour, like any other social behaviour.

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For sometime, psychologists and cognitive scientists have understood that decisions are made by the (faster) subconscious and emotional brain, rather than the (slower) conscious brain. The subconscious brain tends to work on evolutionarily-designed rules of thumb that get to the right answer most of the time (but not all of the time). The role of the conscious brain is to then justify those already-made decisions to other people – often rearranging ‘facts’ around the already-adopted position.

This is not obscure science: the initial ideas in this field led to a Nobel Prize for Daniel Kahneman, the brilliant psychologist who discovered them. And they have since revolutionised other fields such as economics, where they inspired the creation of behavioural economics, leading to other Nobel Prizes, notably for Richard Thaler in 2017. These ideas have also been applied elsewhere in the British government: the Behavioural Insights Team (previously the Nudge Unit) have driven improvements in social challenges ranging from organ donation through taxation to getting people back to work.

Applying this concept to violence, and specifically suicide terrorism, calls in to question the Government’s long-standing approach.

If correct, it means that violence must be caused by a subconscious, emotional decision that is later justified: that is, the ideology merely justifies a drive towards violence that already exists. This flies in the face of government narratives around radicalisation that treat ideology as a cause of violence. And it means that preventative action should be focusing less on the ideology, and more on the sub-conscious, emotional drives of those who might commit group violence.

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This sounds like an impossible task. But an increasing amount of evidence is identifying these emotional drives and highlighting the role of belonging in driving intergroup violence – including terrorism. That is, people are driven to commit these types of violent acts (as opposed to, say, murder or rape) in order to fulfill their evolutionary need to belong to a social group.

This understanding of the role of belonging should be considered alongside the facts that an overwhelming majority of those with extremist thoughts, far more than 99%, do not commit violent actions. What’s more, extremist thought, even were it adequately definable in a society that values free speech, is a very poor predictor of violent action. Defining extremism in this way lumps the supposed thinkers of extremism together with those targeted by the government for their criminal activity – actors of extremism.

This is why Prevent might be making things worse rather than better. By seeking to find and punish those who harbour extremist thought, the actions of the government cause people to question their place in British society, when they might not have done so before. In short, it creates or exacerbates a crisis of belonging, even where one might not have existed.

This is even recognised by senior officials working on the programme, who are privately very critical. A Home Office official working directly on Prevent told me that the best way to reduce terrorism was to fund local sports clubs and community centres – which foster belonging – rather than “criminalising an entire community”.

Terrorism reflects the world that we live in. Globalisation, and particularly immigration, has detached people from the groups they once belonged to: their families, their ethnicities, and their nations. The modern world can be a profoundly lonely place. If individuals feel that they don’t belong, they are more likely to reach out for extreme ideas that will fill that vacuum, offering them a sense of identity. Rather than making digs at Prevent’s critics, the Government should take the opportunity of an independent review to fix this fundamental flaw.

China, like the US, sees itself as the bearer of a universal civilizational concept – an approach to life applicable to all humans on the planet. Unlike the US, however, China has seen itself thus for several thousand years, rather than several hundred. This shared view of their own universality is one reason why the next two decades will be defined by competition between China and the US. But what is China’s strategy? And does the West understand it?

To understand these two questions, we must first look to how both the West (mostly maritime powers) and China (a land power) approach military strategy. Broadly speaking, America, and the wider western world, tends to seek decisive engagements and clear decision points in its politics, strategy and approach to warfare. On the battlefield, the enemy’s strong points and command nodes need to be destroyed conclusively. War, philosophically, is seen as binary – there is peace, or there is war – and linear, with front lines and zones of control.

China, on the other hand, places a much higher emphasis on deception, circumlocution and ambiguity to conceal the eventual goal.

These differing approaches to strategy can be encapsulated in two phrases from the greatest, or at least the most well-known, military thinkers on either side: Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz. Sun Tzu’s statement that “to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill; to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill”, stands in stark contrast to von Clausewitz’s “pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination”.

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These approaches represent completely different ways of utilising military force to achieve political aims. And there is a danger that each side views the other through its own behaviours and paradigms. This projection of one’s own mind-set, values and beliefs onto the actions of an opponent is the greatest sin, and the most common, in the analysis of foreign affairs.

Take China’s ‘near abroad’, particularly the South China Sea, as an example. Arguably, the United States views the disagreements in the South China Sea as a line to be drawn. Maritime law must be respected and protected. And most seriously for their architect, the US, the international rules-based order must be upheld. The South China Sea is a battle that must be won.

But the West would be mistaken in thinking China sees it that way. Yes, the South China Sea, and China’s own view of its historical role there, is extremely important to current Chinese thinking. But is control of the South China Sea an immediate strategic goal for China? I would argue not. As a power that sees its strength as land-based rather than maritime, China’s overall strategic objective is to link Europe to China, and to bring everything in-between into its sphere of influence.

Viewed like this, the South China Sea is a useful distraction: something to tie up American military assets, and, more importantly, her thinking. Strategy ultimately comes down to outthinking your opponent, and here the West’s misunderstanding of China’s aims is a strategic fail.

And as the South China Sea provides the distraction, China is getting on with its ultimate goal – via the One Belt One Road initiative – while still leaving time and space to achieve its strategic aims in its near abroad. This includes the reabsorption of Taiwan into China. But crucially, this will occur when China’s power is undisputed, and America and her allies will not be able to respond. Taiwan will be America’s Suez.

Following this line of thinking: how might China view Russia? Ostensibly, China and Russia share many of the same goals, and characteristics. The two countries often support each other at the United Nations Security Council – usually against the three western powers, and often voting against the ‘universal’ human rights of the post World War Two era.

But China does not view Russia as an ally, rather a source of future resources: Russia’s far east is resource heavy and population light, while China is population heavy, and increasingly becoming resource light. For now, this means that Chinese investment is helping Russia develop its far east. In time, this could mean that Russia becomes a client state of China ­– it could even mean Chinese annexation of Russia’s far east, whether de facto or de jure.

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Russia – which views itself as a European power more than an Asian one – will thus end up being a western ally. In the meantime, encouraging and supporting Russia in its tactically-sensible-yet-strategically-stupid posturing allows China to tie up its real competitor – America – yet further, while soothing Russian fears of forthcoming competition with China.

And China is playing a similarly long game with India. Much is made of the coming geopolitical competition between China and India – as the world’s two most populous states, and right on each others’ doorsteps. But why would China overtly compete with India now? Much better to peel away the surrounding states – Pakistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh – and come back to India when China’s position is unassailable.

The West is dangerously misinterpreting China’s approach to geopolitical strategy. It is also likely that China understands this, and its strategy is to lure the West into the battles that it does not need to fight now – North Korea, or the Spratly Islands, or China’s ally-building among the Island states of the Pacific Ocean.

Looking at it like this, Obama’s Pivot to Asia – specifically rebalancing US forces from the Atlantic and the Middle East to the Pacific and Asia – and the subsequent attention that Trump has paid to the region in contrast to Europe, the US’s traditional security focus, seems utterly misguided: the road to China does not run across the Pacific, but through Eurasia.

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Elon Musk is wrong – we do need to develop AI weaponry

By Mike Martin

When you consider war like this, the recent pledge not to develop lethal artificial intelligence (AI) weapons systems signed by 236 organisations and 3010 individuals, including Elon Musk and the founders of Google DeepMind, seems odd. Or rather, it seems pointless and self-aggrandising. Others — individuals, organisations, and countries — will continue to do so. That these individuals choose not to develop weapons capable of “selecting and engaging targets without human intervention” because they pose serious moral and pragmatic issues does not mean that others won’t.

AI will change warfare to such a degree that war will be unrecognisable from its current (and historical) form. AI will almost certainly be the single most important technological innovation in the field of conflict, altering not just the methods with which we fight, but also the very foundational dynamics of conflict.

Here is what I mean: not only will AI enable a country to develop swarms of interlinked micro-drones—a very useful and relatively cheap method to, for example, defeat an enemy aircraft carrier battle group —but when that AI-controlled swarm faces an opponent that also has an AI-controlled offensive system, we have no idea how one system would defeat the other in combat. The unknowns in the sphere of AI warfare are huge.

These technological uncertainties come as the world experiences an era of increased geopolitical tension: India-China; Russia-Europe; and further out, Russia-China. But it is between the United States and China that these tensions will most obviously play out. And it is in this conflict that AI in warfare will come to fruition, much like nuclear weapons in the second world war, or the tank in the first.

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China knows this, and is preparing accordingly: a July 2017 State Council document makes it official government policy for China to become world dominant in AI by 2030. Of course, policy and outcomes are different things, but as an authoritarian government with technology companies that are closely linked to the state, China is in a good position to make it reality.

All private companies in China, for instance, are obliged to have their own Party Committees, and the three biggest Chinese tech firms — Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent — all have joint R&D labs with the government. The relationship is highly lopsided: the Chinese government recently forced an apology and a crackdown on ‘undesired’ content from a video sharing platform called Toutiao.

Finally, China has the resources — money, people, and data — to make it happen. This is not just state funds being invested in tech firms, but also the tax breaks and other advantages associated with special economic zones like the Xiongan New Area, built to showcase President Xi’s vision of a state-led digital city. It is the thousands of digital engineers trained each year who work ‘996’: 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.

But most importantly, it is data: China is the biggest homogenised data-rich economy in the world. Mobile payments, for instance, are fifty times what they are in the US. All of these transactions generate data, and data is what AI systems ‘train’ on to feed their development. China’s data advantage is huge, and this is only beginning to be understood by Western governments.

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Where does this leave countries like the US with independent tech sectors, barely controlled by the government? Or worse, in some cases, where tech leaders with strong libertarian ideals openly advocate for technologies like block chain to reduce permanently the power that governments have over populations? Where does it leave countries like the UK that have crippled their defence budgets by buying aircraft carriers of dubious military value? And what about countries where the leading lights of AI sign pledges to state that they will not work on military AI?

Perhaps a better way of framing this question is where we want to get to eventually. I would argue that we want to get to a global arms control agreement on the use of AI for military purposes. Indeed, that is what Musk and his fellow pledgers called for, asking governments “to create a future with strong international norms, regulations and laws against lethal autonomous weapons.”

The problem, however, is that a brief look at other arms control agreements – of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, or of missile technology – demonstrates that this is unlikely to work. History tells us that such agreements come about when all sides feel that they have too much to lose by developing or deploying a particular technology. In other words, that all sides are in a potentially mutually hurting stalemate. The quickest way, therefore, to get to a global arms control agreement on the military use of AI would be for the United States and its allies to develop world-class systems – this, more than anything else, will force a global consensus to emerge on their highly destructive use. This idealistic pledge stands in the way of that.

These days, barely a week goes by without some politician pronouncing on cyber warfare, or new space systems, or next generation warplanes – not to mention voicing concerns about Chinese laser systems, or drone swarms, that could make those investments nugatory, for a much lower cost.

This obsession with ‘kit’ almost eclipses the fact that war is a human endeavour. One which involves beating hearts, and blood, and guts. And most important of all, brains. Wars are won when opposition make the decision that they don’t want to fight anymore — they are won when you have a better strategy than your opponent. And strategy, at its core, is and always has been about deception, or chutzpah, advance, or retreat; it is about surprise. But that may be about to change.

How so? At its simplest, strategy is two human brains trying to outcompete each other. How do I (or we, if you are the leader of a group) get him/her/them to do what I want? In warfare, the means of executing this strategy are often violent and lethal. Though not always. Russian information activities around recent plebiscites in the West demonstrate that you can achieve the desired effects non-violently. The key thing, though, is that strategy is about influencing the way an opponent thinking.

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The key thing about strategy is that it scales: the dynamics of the competition are the same, whether it is a bar brawl, two platoons fighting hunter-seeker style, two divisions in clash, or two multi-national coalitions viewing each other across a global ideological divide: all of these levels of conflict have the same dynamics of retreat, advance, bluff, feint, counter, lure, deceive, charge, and of course the goal — surrender.

Strategy is also timeless. The dances on ancient battlefields are studied for strategic insights; military officers go on battlefield tours; and business executives study Sun Tzu. Ancient strategists have something to teach us about the present, and about the future.

Strategy scales across time and space because the competing brains have barely changed in the period of recorded history. The Sapiens brain evolved on the African Savannah between about 250,000 years’ ago. It had a specific evolutionary environment: the brains of other humans in their social group of around thirty hunter-gatherers.

Because our brains have evolved in social competition with other humans, we all have the same emotional responses (more or less). We are all — at times — jealous, angry, proud, and sad. These emotions, and these ways of psychologically relating to others, are the basis for strategy. They form the timeless essence of warfare. We know how our opponent thinks and can play him at his own game. What is a ruse, if it is not playing on the opposing commander’s pride?

The mode in which we fight is less timeless, however. A mode of warfare is the method or tools which we use to fight it. Thus, we have gone from spear chucking, to phalanxes, the legions, to infantry companies, to submarines, to drone swarms. The actual physical fighting has changed beyond wildest dreams, while the dynamics of the fight have remained the same. But, artificial intelligence could be the first technology in the Anthropocene to change that.

Neural networks, a specific aspect of AI, are the closest, virtual equivalent of the human brain. They learn in analogous ways. After being exposed to stimuli, certain pathways degrade, and others reinforce.

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With neural networks this happens in two different ways. Either they are exposed to huge data sets, like NHS patient records, and can spot patterns of, say, cancer occurrence, and help prioritise treatments. Or they are trained on each other, in a very similar way to how the human brain evolved in social competition with other human brains.

One of the leading lights of AI is a company called DeepMind. A British start-up, it was acquired by Google in 2014 for £400m. Among their achievements, they designed the first AI system, called AlphaGo, that beat the world champion at Go — a game of abstract strategy invented in China more than 2,500 years ago. It is fiendishly complex, much more so than chess.

Essentially, DeepMind taught AlphaGo the rules of Go. Then they set it off to  learn from itself. So AlphaGo played itself tens of thousands of times over a period of three days. And then it beat Lee Sedol, the Go World Champion.

The match was then studied by other Go experts and champions. They stated that, retrospectively, they could see how AlphaGo had won, but they would never have worked out its strategy as humans. One, Ke Jie said:

“After humanity spent thousands of years improving our tactics, computers tell us that humans are completely wrong … I would go as far as to say not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of Go.”

The AI system simply thought in a different way.

Human brains that evolved through competition with other human brains create the psychology that underpins strategy, which creates the essence of warfare. But these human brains evolved in order to maximise survival and reproduction: to find food and water, and sexual partners, to form coalitions, and to avoid being killed.

AlphaGo has none of these ultimate goals: and so its strategy has an entirely different essence. That’s why, if applied to the battlefield, AI could change the essence of warfare in a way that is beyond human speculation.

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Of course, my argument relies on AI being in the decision-making loop, and we are unlikely to see this at the strategic level for some time. But at lower levels — like individual and squad — we are already there: advanced militaries are prototyping how AI can power autonomous ‘individual’ weapons (that is, killer robots).

How these robots interact when they fight each other is the preview, if you like, of how the essence of warfare could change in the future. We can’t predict how it will be different, but we can be certain it will change the rules in a way that will leave us us, like the Go grandmasters, scratching our heads.