Ukraine can call on a highly motivated citizenry to fight a prolonged insurgency against occupying forces.
Ancient military innovations – like the bit and bridle that enabled mounted horseback riding – changed the course of history.
Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin/British Museum via WikimediaCommons
Did ancient technological advancements drive social innovation, or vice versa? Studying cause and effect in the ancient world may seem like a fool’s errand, but researchers built a database to do just that.
Besides the misalignment of its resources, design, equipment and its additional roles, the military has also been hobbled by misappropriation of funds.
The U.S.-China rivalry extends to digital weapons.
Khanh Tran
Science fiction has made us vigilant of ‘killer robots’ in our midst, but they’re far closer than many of us realise.
American troops drive French Renault FT tanks to the battle line in the Forest of Argonne, France, September 26, 1918.
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
Armed forces around the world are exploring technological and biological enhancements to their soldiers. But this raises a number of serious ethical concerns, before, during and after conflict.
A discipline neither good nor evil.
Saturday Evening Post/Harris A. Ewing
Maybe you think neuroscience has a peaceable history of benign efforts to improve lives and enhance human capacities. But its origins and development tell a different story – with ethical implications.
DARPA is developing an autonomous anti-submarine warfare vessel, ACTUV.
DARPA
We need to ban lethal autonomous weapons, or “killer robots”, as we have done with biological weapons, land mines and blinding lasers, and Australia should take a leading role in making that happen.
Crewed submarines like the HMAS Rankin might become a thing of the past.
United States Navy, Photographer's Mate 1st Class David A. Levy
Autonomous submarines might do for naval warfare what drones are doing for air warfare. So should Australia consider autonomous subs as a replacement for the Collins class?
An eye in the sky from the movie of the same name – the reality of drone warfare.
Entertainment One
The moral and ethical dilemmas of future warfare are depicted in this tight British thriller. But what will happen when humans become more removed from the weapons of war?
A submarine missile-launching capacity brings the threat closer to the shores of the target country.
Flickr/Marion Doss
North Korea does not yet have the capacity to launch a nuclear missile from a submarine. Its recent test, however, suggests it is making progress to a game-changing second-strike capability.
The UK’s air assault on Islamic State (IS) began with two RAF Tornado GR4 bombers attacking targets in Iraq: one using a Paveway IV precision-guided munition (PGM) to destroy an IS heavy weapon position…
A MQ-9 Reaper Drone has an operational cost one-fifth of the F35 Joint Strike Fighter. So should drones replace soldiers in military warfare?
US Air Force
Cost is largely absent in the key debates around the use of unmanned drones in war, even though drones are a cost-effective way of achieving national security objectives. Many of the common objections…
It’s not a game: RAF pilots controlling a UAV at Kandahar Airport.
Defence Images
The Reaper drone pilot and sensor operator stared intently at the bank of screens in front of them, their concentration fixed on one individual. Their target had been identified by more than one intelligence…
Floating nuclear power station under construction.
Rosenergoatom
Though Russia is one of the world’s largest producers of oil and gas, it is embarking on an ambitious and somewhat imaginative programme of building floating nuclear power stations. These are part of Russia’s…
Professor, School for the Future of Innovation in Society & School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University