The main development in the future of warfare will be the removal of human beings from the battlefield. Which is certainly a good thing. Instead, computers will be the new guns and computer hackers the new squaddies. These will be complemented by armies of autonomous drones.
Drones
To a certain extent this development has already taken place, with the United States in particular using a drone program in the tribal regions of Pakistan to target suspected militants. Drones have two huge advantages over manned aircraft:
- They can patrol a target area for a far longer time.
- If they get shot down, nobody gets hurt!
The increasing usage of drones in combat has also raised some moral questions, especially about the aforementioned American strikes in Pakistan. Drones strike with impunity, and usually with little evidence against militants operating in a foreign country. These people are killed without any trial, or before they are put before any judge.
Drone strikes are also responsible for huge swathes of civilian casualties, hence why these strikes are so unpopular within Pakistan. People in these regions live in fear of a fully-armed circling robot which could kill them at any moment, being piloted by someone sitting at a desk thousands of miles away in the US.
