Imagine a future war, not too far in the future. Say, 10 years from today. Now, take a step back and imagine the ongoing wars. You might find that the future is now.
The worst that our nightmares have been able to cook up for decades involves nuclear-burst clouds, radiation burns impossible to recover from, vaporisation en masse, buildings standing stripped of the living.
But what we already have are missiles that can inflict nuclear-level catastrophe—without being nuclear. Russia slung one at Ukraine in the fourth week of November, causing significant devastation and flabbergasting NATO. The Oreshnik—meaning ‘hazel tree’ in Russian, a reference to its many branches sharpened to killing points with six warheads, each with six payloads—is a ‘conventional’ intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) that travels at over 14,000 kmph; it’s unstoppable by any extant antimissile technology. Its 36 warheads can be individually directed to strike different targets.
The Oreshnik stunned military strategists across the world because, at Mach 11, it beat the Mach 9.6 scramjet NASA X-43, the fastest jet-powered aircraft on record. The Russian IRBM has the range to hit all the European capitals in less than 15 minutes (but not the US, although reports suggest an intercontinental version is on the cards by 2025).
If this is the stuff of nightmares, there are petits cauchemars or little nightmares in the making, too: dragon drones. A deadly new weapon in the Russo-Ukrainian war, they spray a molten metal heated to 2,427°C—a rain of fire. Dragon drones carry thermite, a mixture of metal powder often made of aluminium and powdered everyday rust.
Thermite is not explosive, but it burns through almost all material—the heaviest clothing, the stoutest trees, military vehicles, concrete. It is undousable and keeps burning underwater. It burns flesh down to the bones. The Ukrainian startup Steel Hornets, a private manufacturer of unmanned weapons systems says that its thermite can burn through 4 mm of metal in less than 10 seconds.
These dragon drones are being celebrated in the Western media, although thermite’s consequences are worse than other incendiary substances like white phosphorus and napalm, both banned for non-military targets under international law. The US has for decades been excoriated for using napalm during the US-Vietnam war. Israel has been roundly criticised for using white phosphorus against civilians in Gaza and Lebanon.
Incendiary weapons are not new in war. They were dropped from German zeppelins in the first world war, and both the Axis and the Allies powers used them freely in the second world war, causing incalculable civilian death in both. But they have gained new currency with drones as carriers: literally, flying flamethrowers. Videos of Ukrainian dragon drones leave little but horror to the imagination, as do videos of white phosphorus streaming down on Gaza, an apocalyptic rain.
Israel has, meanwhile, been accused of using cutting-edge banned weapons in Gaza. A Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor report in April 2024 stated that Israel’s new weaponry possibly included “thermobaric bombs, which operate by first using small conventional explosives to create a cloud of highly flammable particles. A second explosive device then ignites the cloud of combustible materials, producing extremely high temperatures of up to 2,500°C”.
We haven’t even got to discussing China’s speciality: AI-driven drone swarms that can be armed to strafe combatants on the ground. Or single drones coded to identify individual faces by drone software makers such as the Seattle-based RealNetworks, which has been contracted by the US Department of Defence. In March this year, China claimed to have developed a six-bladed hexacopter that can split into six separate single-bladed drones based on the lay of maple seeds, with each subdrone tasked differently or with distinct targets.
China’s lead in drone tech, bolstered by more than 2,000 companies working in the sector, is considered unbeatable. It is no wonder then that within days of China’s statement on its new drone, the US Army asked for $2.4 billion for unmanned aircraft systems and $400 million for counter-drone technology in its 2024-25 budget.
Both Ukraine and Gaza have been the testing grounds of the intelligence-military-industrial-complex (IMIC) active among all the parties at play, but the two conflicts are winding down. The IMIC needs wars to further itself. The new battlefield, Syria, is so far a relatively low-tech conflict. But two of Turkey’s many drones have already been infused with low-grade, self-upgrading AI. Therefore, it would not be a stretch to imagine the Syrian conflict to, at some point in time, escalate into a high-tech one, driven by the fact that both Russia and Turkey (and the US and Israel) have much skin in the game.
By goosing Ukraine into using NATO missiles to bomb inside Russia, the US managed to provoke Vladimir Putin into revealing his Oreshnik hand. After Russia reacted badly, the US—not wanting to ignite a world-levelling nuclear opera, for that would be self-defeating regarding the IMIC’s ambitions—stepped back, with the job of nettling and intelligence-gathering done. The US might employ the same successful tactic to get China to disclose its deep AI drone capabilities, perhaps by enkindling a conflict in Beijing’s bugbear, Taiwan.
In some ways, the future wars are already here.
Kajal Basu
Veteran journalist
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)