The Arms of the Future

Reviews / Votes

You can put down your 'future war' novels and read instead the actual study of the deployment of modern weapons and systems from someone who has seen many of them in action, often as a frequent visitor to the battlefields of Ukraine. Jack Watling examines critically and thoughtfully how forces will fight in the mid-decades of the century, exploding the hyperbolae, war-scares, and myths with some very hard truths. For each technology, working from the tactical to the strategic, he focusses on its functional logic and its dependencies. If you want to know how to 'find, fix, and finish' in the battlespace, and you want to know how the technology works in practice, you have just found the book you need. -- Dr Rob Johnson, Director of the Office of Net Assessment and Challenge, Ministry of Defence, UK In the last ten years, Dr Jack Watling, a research fellow at RUSI, has become a leading commentator on military affairs in the UK. In this perceptive, timely and provocative book, Dr Watling lays out his vision of the future of 'informationized' land warfare. In the light of ubiquitous sensors and long-range precision fires, the twentieth century doctrine of manoeuvre and its associated forces structures, so ingrained in contemporary military thinking, may now have become obsolete. In its place, Dr Watling describes a new battlefield geometry in which attacks forces will have to remain dispersed and concealed out of range of enemy strikes, until they have created the opportunity to concentrate for an attack on an objective, which will almost certainly be urban. To prevail on this battlefield, Dr Watling convincingly argues that land forces will need to be re-organised. This book represents a major contribution to current debates in military science and will be of profound interest to military professionals, scholars, and policymakers. -- Anthony King, Warwick University, UK Jack Watling is among the most knowledgeable and perceptive observers of modern war. His studies of the war in Ukraine have set a benchmark for rigour and insight. He has now written a richly detailed account of how technology is changing warfare and what militaries can do about it. Drawing on experiments, exercises and battlefield data from California to Kyiv, it explains why modern sensors make it hard for armies to achieve surprise on an increasingly transparent battlefield. The advantage will lie with the side that can obtain sensor dominance: the ability to see and strike the enemy first. But "Arms of the Future" is also refreshingly honest about the dangers of fixating on equipment over ideas and organisation. Armies that chase new technologies without adapting their logistics, training and other vital enablers will end up with brittle forces that cannot fight for long. Here is a book with much to teach both those who wage war, and those who simply want to understand it. -- Shashank Joshi, Defence Editor, The Economist