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>> demographic changes in France - higher relative population growth

I think you have it exactly backwards. France had a significantly slower population growth. To give one example of how this impacted the military caculus: Germany was able to easily expand its army in 1911 and 1913 and still have a large reserve pool of manpower but France had to increase the term of service from 2 to 3 years and expand its conscription to almost the entire adult male population of fighting age; which led to riots and political chaos. At the time of the outbreak the French army had been expanded so rapidly that training had to be cut significantly.

>> However, the types of wars in which the Great Powers of the time were involved - and from which their military planners derived their assumptions about war with modern weaponry - were mainly colonial conflicts against relatively under-armed opponents, eg. the Boer war, which the Great Powers typically "won." The outcome of the Russo-Japanese war (1904-05) was shocking enough to change the calculus for planning the European war, as Russia was now seen as a less able ally for France... and on and on such analysis could go!

I would strongly disagree. Russia lost the Russo-Japanese war mostly due to inept military execution and the difficulty of troop transportation through an incomplete Trans-Siberian railway; hardly relevant to a european total war. You could argue( and some less astute observers at the time did) that Japan's victory through aggressive assaults on static russian positions 'proved' that offensive power would carry the day to a decisive conclusion.

Both China and the USA think that any invasion into their territories will inevitably fail because of the strength of their armies and because of the long supply chains that their enemy would need to maintain to hold a position.

Both sides also believe that the other side will inevitably fail because the other side's political system and ideology is so broken.

But because of the first point they both feel confident that the collapse of the other is going to be containable and controllable.

The technological developments (even if morally wrong) are autonomous fighting vehicles that rain mayhem and destruction; and engineered viruses. A failed state can still cause the other side to lose a war, leaving no winners.

That is a brilliant summary of the US China strategic situation! I normally think of it from the US point of view-- China can't really invade us, a war would be catastrophic for them economically. You made me realize how symmetrical that thinking is. Yikes!

A us China war would be ecconimc suicide to the wrold ecconomy. To the point that countries we think of as poor come out ahead. (Where would Brazil cast their alliance is an interesting question, as one of the few powerful countries that could make a difference that isn't commited already.

Whoever wins will have lost a lot.

Definitely, to mix metaphors 'when the mighty quarrel the meek inherit'.

Are there examples of this?

Look at Europe after either world war. They took a long time to rebuild their ecconomy afterwards.

I’m not sure I’d describe any continental European country as having won World War Two, except perhaps Russia. France could be described as a winner in World War One, but their economy grew slowest before both wars, not after.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_France

That there were no winners is the point.

Switzerland has grown fat on being neutral in both WWs.

You mean you were thinking US might invade China? Yeah, that was never a possibility.

The US might be able to cut off China from a lot of trade by locking its seas and sinking its ships, though. China is still playing catch-up on maritime supremacy.

I suspect, though I hate to say it, that the biggest change autonomous war vehicles will make is that democracies will come to really, really love war; now that it won't cost voters' sons and daughters.

Maybe that means war can become just a national competitive pass-time like video games or e-sports on a much bigger level. It's the carnage and damage to life that is the ugly part of competition or sport or combat - if we can save the lives but still allow nations to challenge themselves in competition with others, so be it. Let's sanction the next version of the Olympics and end the concept of war as it has existed until now.

:fry_cant_tell

You mean hate. The average person on the street doesn't want wars and the inevitable retaliation. Some terrorists are just informal soldiers that felt like they didn't get a fair chance at fighting back. There have also been rumors about terrorists targeting drone pilots.

Another underrated development is cheap, re-useable launch to LEO. If the US can just park a few thousand telephone-sized depleted uranium rods in orbit for cheap, and strap on a guidance system, that's a pretty big strategic advantage.

You have to supply those autonomous fighting vehicles. Worst case scenario, you use a hypersonic nuke to blow the local base up. You don't even need ICBMs.

>Is there any major geopolitical development that is generally assumed to be inevitable, and how might modern technology upset the assumptions of the powers-that-be in their planned response to that event?

PRC reclaiming Taiwan. Probably biggest friction point for hot war between great powers in 5-30 year time scale.

Technologic assumptions is ability to complete / disrupt kill chains of modern anti ship missiles and implications on expensive naval assets to maintain hegemony. My long term assumption is that cost benefit analysis will favour missiles. Interception typically requires multiple equally expensive interception vehicles + limited magazine depth means navies outside of friendly A2AD will be difficult to sustain long term. Right now it's a battle between unverified Chinese ability to complete kill chain which requires a host of external inputs versus US ability to shoot down increasingly sophisticated missiles. I think technology is going to make kill chain increasingly irrelevant, cheap disposable UAVs + machine learning means eventually there's going to be cheap monitoring systems and shortened local kill chain - no need to use satellite or other sensors to track target if processing shifts onboard. I remember someone speculating about kamikaze commercial drones that target airplane intakes autonomously with sufficient training dataset.

My personal assumption is past the missile/interception conundrum is a world where naval force projection is supplanted by system of global UAV networks and mutual air superiority - it's easier to shoot down manned vehicles than unmanned because unmanned doesn't have to limit maneuverability to keep meat bag alive. Basically a status quo where defense becomes impossible. I'm imagining a conventional UAV first strike that wipes out an adversaries ability to make war, but in context of mutual air superiority between large power blocks, this works out to conventional MAD where starting war means immediately losing capability to sustain a war. Flournoy said she wanted Pentagon to develop capability to sink entire Chinese Navy in 72 hours. Imagine that but for assets and industrial base, in a world of UAVs, where more money goes into acquisition costs, I can imagine smaller countries being able to build sufficient arsenal to upset balance and unseat hegemons.

The counter to that is missiles have limited fuel. Those shooting them down have a larger fuel budget because the missile is coming to a known target, and forcing the missile off course is as good as destorying it.

Fuel budget = magazine depth. It takes more missiles to shoot down missiles, does not favor defense. Every missile designed for intercept is one less missile in inventory for attack. Forcing missiles off course is going to become increasingly difficult as kill chain condenses, the more loop shift towards onboard sensors the more difficult to disrupt.

UAVs are potentially just larger missiles with more fuel and ability to out maneuver smaller missiles, made more difficult with addition maneuverability when biologic limitations removed. I imagine scenario converging to large performant UAVs with high performance envelopes trained to dodge anti air-missiles with relative impunity, shifting battle space to mutual air supremacy and race to destroy asset fastest. Essentially the end of hegemony via naval force projection.

Interestingly, the trench war episodes during the Russo-Japanese war (siege of Port Arthur) were a good demo-version of the Western Front ten years later.

The observers from the West were very clear in their warnings towards the General Staff back home that the combination of barbed wire and rapid firepower was massively deadly and led to stalemates. Also, that cavalry was becoming outright obsolete in such conditions.

They were mostly ignored because they were young.

There just wasn't another way in sight. Everyone knew what didn't work. Nobody knew what did. The tech wasn't yet there for tanks - those that were built for WW1 looked impressive but changed little, like bringing elephants to a battle.

Unfortunately the belligerent parties were all too good in propaganda for their own sake.

Even if the war was going nowhere, the civilian population was whipped into such hatred of the other that "old fashioned" peace talks just weren't on the table.

Predicting that some tech will surprise us is easy, predicting which one and how is almost impossible — in part because any obvious consequence will be defended against.

I don’t expect, yet also wouldn’t be surprised if, an Islamic fundamentalist group genetically modifies a pig-specific retrovirus so that any pig which catches it will start internally producing enough capsaicin that nobody will even want to eat pork.

I do expect software based attacks to achieve government goals.

I would be only a little surprised by private nukes or lunar mass drivers.

If mind-uploading becomes a thing, I expect totally novel forms of interrogation in addition to virtual hells (a la Surface Detail by Iain M Banks), and several other legal and political messes outside the scope of this thread.

3D printing, protein engineering, AI controlled mining robots, etc. will lead to synthetic von Neumann machines that radically transform industry, giving small states or mid-sized criminal gangs significant war-fighting capacity.

AI can out-strategise humans. Who trusts it, wins — unless the AI was made wrong, in which case who trusts the AI, loses. Nobody will know if the AI is right or not until too late.

A/B testing propaganda, so perhaps you can fool all of the people all of the time.

Most of these are better as Hollywood plots than as real concerns. Whatever does eventually happen will seem obvious after the event, but will seem like science fiction right up until that point.

The pig thing is absolutely ridiculous.

> A/B testing propaganda, so perhaps you can fool all of the people all of the time.

Dominic Cummings boasted about doing this for Brexit: it was where the "£350m for the NHS" slogan came from.

> The pig thing is absolutely ridiculous.

That was my first thought as well. My second thought was that the parent got it backwards; self spiced pork would sell like sliced bread.

I agree that I would also thoroughly enjoy self-spiced pork (hopefully the retrovirus also mutates pigs' TRPV1 protein to be the bird variant, which is unaffected by capsaicin)... but was it really the commenter who got it backwards? Or is it the hypothetical Islamist fundamentalist group who does, with their lack of understanding of consumer preferences causing them to not realise the paradoxical consequences of their action in this scenario?

Maybe they had it right all along and were engineering a delicious coronary bio-weapon.

It will begin by releasing the locked-in, eliding the server nerve. The justice department will adopt it as an alternative consequence for crimes. The memories of the murdered are extracted and the perpetrator forced to experience the pain, the fear, the twilighting faces of those loved and now lost. It becomes an awakening. By experiencing deprivation we become willing to sacrifice more to reduce the deprivations of others. A post scarcity society is within reach, but becomes fractured. What is the machine for? To impress empathy upon man and sustain an endless modesty? To subdue, to control and assure plenty for your few?

>> Is there any major geopolitical development that is generally assumed to be inevitable, and how might modern technology upset the assumptions of the powers-that-be in their planned response to that event?

My guess: Asymmetric warfare suddenly becoming very weak. I think there's more than one way that could happen; but won't say more lest it cause more things to hit the fan than are hitting now.

I see you've been paying attention to why surveillance states becoming the norm really matters.

The increase in surveillance states is potentially countered by the increased velocity by which ideas can spread and people can communicate with each other.

We don't yet know which way things will tip.

Nah. That doesn't counter it, because that sword cuts both ways. You know the thing I don't want you to know, but I can figure out you know it just as fast.

They can't kick down all the doors. If ideology spreads faster than doors can be kicked down the increased velocity of information is a net win for the offense.

And I would die on the hill of plugging the 2nd Amendment as a damn near sacred and last insurance policy for the average person. That it is attacked when it's the obvious conclusion or tool of choice for the scenario you two are describing in this thread, is just evidence that it must continue to exist.

Your gun won't protect you when Big Brother comes knocking at your door. Even if you can make it too difficult to actually take you by force, which I doubt you realistically can, the state can simply make your life sufficiently difficult (e.g. no way to get employment, no credit lines, no education for your children, no electricity) that the act of actually imprisoning you doesn't matter anymore.

We are talking about a far future outcome where we have no choice left. I want to avoid that future, but if it came to it I’d at least want to have a chance.

with robots they could.

You don't need robots. Just enough face tracking to know where political enemies gather. You can then just let your thugs take care of the rest.

It suffices to kick down a couple of doors to make people afraid to share information.

Interesting. Yes. AI.

I'm reminded of a passage in Neuromancer:

         "Screaming Fist."
         "Famous. Don't  they teach  you  history these days? Great bloody
    postwar  political football, that was. Watergated all to hell and back. Your
    brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in, where was it, McLean? In the bunkers,
    all of that.  . . great scandal. Wasted a fair bit  of patriotic young flesh
    in order  to test some new technology. They  knew  about the Russians'
    defenses,  it came  out later. Knew about the  emps, magnetic pulse weapons.
    Sent  these  fellows in  regardless, just  to see." Deane shrugged.  "Turkey
    shoot for Ivan."

It was quite similar.

Generals like Haig the Incompetent, had very little reliable information what was happening in the major offences on the German side. So when the massive French and British losses piled up, they assumed that this meant that German losses were as bad or worse. (They weren't)

And the consequence of that at the middle army management level was bragging rights about how many of your men you'd managed to get killed. Source: Hochschild, To End all Wars.

The Russo-Japanese war (1904-05) illustrated both the strength of trenches, and how they might be overcome. But the foreign military observers had all gone home before things became really interesting.

The American Civil War demonstrated the horrors of trench warfare back in the 1860s. The penultimate Union campaign in which Grant took Petersburg, Virginia and Richmond, Virginia was primarily a 10 month long series of trench maneuvers costing some 70,000 casualties on both sides. In particular, The Battle of the Crater would play on repeat 50 years laters as a mine opened a hole in the line only for thousands to be slaughtered trying to go through it. A similar scene played out a year prior when Grant assaulted Vicksburg[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Petersburg

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Crater

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Vicksburg#Crater_at_t...

Yes, I've said the same, earlier, here. Smokeless powder created trenches.

The American Civil War in the 1860s didn't feature smokeless powder, which wasn't produced in a stable manner until 1884.

It wasn't the poweder it was the rifle. Before the rifle you could have armies face each other in a sword type formation and shoot, so few bullets would hit that this wasn't that costly in lives. By the civil war a good shooter could always expect to hit where he aimed.

The civil war sometimes had 3 people reloading guns for the marksman. The faster loading guns to come latter just eliminated that.

Even today, the machine gun isnisn't expected to hit. Sharpshooters are one shot one kill and take time to aim. The machine gun is about keeping the enemy undercover while your guys do something. Anyone who dies in machines gun fire it was their own stupid fault.

> It wasn't the poweder it was the rifle. Before the rifle you could have armies face each other in a sword type formation and shoot, so few bullets would hit that this wasn't that costly in lives. By the civil war a good shooter could always expect to hit where he aimed.

While certain rifles were fairly accurate on man-sized targets at 100-150 yards (Springfield 1861 being the most common), being able to visually identify a target at 100+ yards, even at 50 yards didn't matter much after the shooting started. The black powder from a mass of rifles causes a thick fog to form on each side, obscuring individual targets. This leads to a lot of massed volley firing tactics (and most of the rifled muskets used were lethal to 300-400 yards) similar to what were used with smoothbore muskets of the previous 100 years. You can read a lot of stories were officers were picked off behind the lines or when riding between lines, largely because of the accuracy of these for a handful of shots (and a well-trained individual could fire 3-5 shots per minute), but this accuracy simply didn't matter once the literal fog of war set in.

The salient difference in technology between Napoleonic conflicts and the ACS is the rifled barrel both in small arms and in field artillery. The reason this mattered was the Napoleonic tactics were formed with the idea that outside 100 yards is relatively safe. A mass of bodies 400 yards away poses no threat, so you can casually march forward. The most famous example of this backfiring is Picket's Charge on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg. Fifteen thousand men plodded forward for several hundred yards while being mowed down by masking fire from rifled muskets. Picket's subordinates ordered the quickstep and the charge a bit earlier than convention (by 1863, both sides understood the tactics they had learned at military academies to be somewhat outdated and almost succeeded for it). This wasn't done soon enough, and resulted in their attack failing due to lack of manpower. This same masking fire made assaulting trenches nearly impossible. Sappers/miners and siege artillery were required to poke holes in the lines, and in most cases this wasn't enough. The tactics that worked were spreading thin and outflanking the lines.

It's worth noting that there were some engagements that did show the power of rapid firing machine guns and rifles with magazines to offer less reloading time. The Gatling Gun, and a few similar machine guns were designed and first deployed in the ACS. While these were rare (typically purchased privately by commanders or supporters instead of being government issue), they were devastating when in operation. The first repeating rifles were deployed effectively (again, privately purchased) by dismounted calvary at the Battle of Petersburg to offer unprecedented firepower from a small group.

s/ACS/ACW/

ACW being American Civil War. I don't know how I made this mistake multiple times.

> The American Civil War demonstrated the horrors of trench warfare back in the 1860s.

While a number of conflicts (as well as the ACW, the Maori Wars in New Zealand and the Crimean War are among the more frequently cited) involved large scale trench system and some of the other elements that, in combination, characterize “trench warfare”, they didn't involve large scale deployment of machine guns and rapid firing artillery, and some of the other aspects that planners leading into WWI did not fully account for (or even completely misjudged e the direction of effect on successful tactics.)