The nature of war and its character have come apart. War remains a political instrument, driven by human motives and limited by friction and uncertainty.[1] Clausewitz’s claim that war serves a political objective still requires the strategist to join means to ends.[1] That requirement holds while attention is fixed on new technology.[2] Sun Tzu’s account of deception, intelligence and advantage gained without a direct fight fits competition conducted below open warfare.[3]

The character of conflict is changing.[4] Digital technology is eroding military advantages that depended on conventional forces, intensifying grey zone activity, giving non-state actors more reach, and blurring the line between war and peace.[5] The task is to apply the enduring account of war’s nature to a character of conflict that no longer matches the forces and categories built for the last one.[6]

From Deterrence by Punishment to Deterrence by Resilience?

Cold War stability rested in large part on mutually assured destruction, and that arrangement fits digital competition badly.[7] Nuclear deterrence produced a balance, and a fragile one.[8] Its logic does not transfer to threats that sit outside attributable, proportional retaliation.[7] Cyberspace and information warfare lack the attribution and the proportionate response on which deterrence by punishment depends.[9] Rid argues that credibility and effective retaliation are hard to establish in these domains.[10] Knopf’s account of “Fourth Wave” deterrence sets out how newer threats break the older models.[11]

The problem is no longer only a problem among states. Technology firms, transnational terrorist organisations and ideological groups now hold enough autonomy to complicate deterrence built on state opponents. In Ukraine, SpaceX’s Starlink affected battlefield communications and the information contest, which is a private capability doing work states had treated as their own. Deterrence then has to include denial, resilience, deception and information operations, alongside punishment. Security depends on being able to function inside a contested information environment, as well as on the threat of retaliation.

The Digital Revolution and the Transformation of Conflict Logic

Coker treats the digital change as a “change of consciousness” in warfare, not only as a new inventory of tools. Conflict becomes less bounded by geography and more continuous, psychological and abstract, and the distinction between wartime and peacetime weakens. Cyber operations, AI-supported decisions and disinformation campaigns sit inside the competition, alongside conventional force. China’s “Three Warfares” doctrine joins psychological operations, public-opinion work and legal contestation, and in doing so it shows a state using the information domain for strategic effect.

The same shift puts pressure on older categories. Escalation is difficult to control when a cyber attack cannot be attributed with confidence.[10] Victory is difficult to define when the contest continues outside the physical domain.[12] Ukraine has tested cyber defence, AI-assisted targeting and narrative competition alongside conventional operations.[13] Where conventional advantage erodes, what counts as power has to be reassessed.[14] ISIS showed the other side of the same environment: a non-state actor using digital networks for recruitment, propaganda and coordination.[15]

Systemic Fragility, Strategic Agility, and Redefined Victory

Connecting society through digital systems produces efficiency and a shared vulnerability. A disruption in cyber systems, public health, finance or supply chains can spread faster than a response organised by sector. Resilience, meaning cyber defence that can absorb an intrusion, hardened infrastructure, diversified supply and a public that can function under disruption, becomes part of strategy because the alternative is a cascade the state cannot isolate.

Resilience addresses the shock. It does not address a setting in which the pace of technical and political change is itself the problem. Institutions have to be able to change a plan while it is still the plan. Tuchman’s account of European powers that failed to adapt doctrine to industrial war before 1914 is the warning against keeping a doctrine after its battlefield has changed. Agility of that kind depends on organisations that can learn from a trial, and that can let a subordinate act without waiting for the centre to rewrite the plan.

The same setting forces a reconsideration of victory.[12] War now includes cyber, economic and informational action as well as military action.[16] Success in that wider contest is harder to name.[12] Mandel’s distinction between “war-winning”, a tactical result, and “peace-winning”, a political result that lasts, is the distinction these campaigns require.[12] Long campaigns, several actors and incompatible aims reward political objectives that can be revised, rather than a single military decision.[12]

Adapting Strategy for an Unfolding Future

Some argue that state-centred classical accounts of war are obsolete. Dropping Clausewitz and Sun Tzu would drop the part of the problem that has not changed. Freedman argues that war remains a matter of human choice and political motive, whatever the technology. The task is to apply those accounts to the present environment.

Technical foresight, AI-supported analysis and cyber capability are required, and they do not settle the contest. The factor this argument identifies is institutional: whether the state can learn and change a plan as the interaction develops. Strategy has to use diplomatic, informational, military and economic instruments in one design, and that design has to keep both the political nature of war and the changed character of its tools. The advantage lies with the state that can hold those two requirements together while the campaign is under way.

Bibliography

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