>then we will turn on ourselves and our "leaders"

I don't think in such case normal people would be able to reach "leaders" in their bunkers or whatever they prepare.

There are various tiers of leaders, each of which gets their own subset of authority. Perhaps the President and Congress gets their own bunkers, but I sincerely doubt mayor X in Y town in Ohio is getting flown out to a mountainside retreat.

Coincidentally with the increase in military equipment being sold to local police departments these days, said mayors will have some firepower to work with if they ever do decide to convince their townspeople to go rogue and play for keeps.

>There are various tiers of leaders, each of which gets their own subset of authority. Perhaps the President and Congress gets their own bunkers, but I sincerely doubt mayor X in Y town in Ohio is getting flown out to a mountainside retreat.

So people will do what, attach the mayor?

Not really responsible for the mess, and not really such a big shot to be worth it...

Oh, I wasn't thinking people would attack the mayors, I was more so referring to mayors using their power to attack the people in the bunkers.

>I honestly think the enemy will take out our power stations via malicious code that may already be sitting there waiting to go off right now.

Not so sure. There have been all kind of wars in the past 10-15 years, and they were pretty much conventional. Bombs, armies, attacks, and so on.

No high tech wizardry needed...

Not to mention, why even have things like power stations and other infrastructure reachable over the internet in the first place?

I wrote on the subject of cyber warfare and the vulnerability of our nation's utilities first in 2015. At that point, a single malicious actor had gained access to a water treatment plant in Chicago that had no air-gap. They were able to cripple a system by turning a key portion on and off until it burnt out. In 2016, a water treatment plant was targeted in an attack which released high levels of treatment chemicals into the water supply. There is an exceptionally high risk of damage.

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/water-treatment-p...

From the glimmers of info we do have about these things, most situations that involve them we either don't know about or involve brinksmanship. See here for reference: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/massive-us-plann...

It's quite a scary one, drone swarms that outmatch humans by a huge degree might cause the losing side to surrender before a human life is lost, but they could also massacre the losing sides, satellites and communications of all sides are also likely go, then of course there's still nuclear armageddon

I'm not convinced that nuclear weapons will be fired en-mass in anger as it means total annihilation for everyone whether involved directly or not.

Imagine China fired all her nukes at the US and the US retaliated while the Chinese ones were in the air... there would be nothing left of either country within a couple of hours (or however long it takes to reach across the globe).

Anything left would be uninhabitable forever.

I dunno... nukes are messy.

E-warfare is "clean" and costs practically nothing to do.

1: MAD doesn't really work anymore because of the advent of hypersonic cruise missiles and the likes of russia's Burevestnik/Skyfall. There's probably not going to be a 1980s scenario of two sides launching all out against each other and having a few minutes to contemplate the end.

2: Tactical (not strategic) nuclear weapons are very likely to be used on the battlefield in the next major conflict involving the superpowers. The most plausible pathway to a nuclear armageddon is if the number and yield of these tactical weapons keeps escalating until one side finally has enough and launches a strategic strike.

>MAD doesn't really work anymore because of the advent of hypersonic cruise missiles and the likes of russia's Burevestnik/Skyfall.

I'm not sure that's entirely true. Even if DC gets nuked before it can react, I'm pretty sure there are dead man switch-type systems in place and stuff like submarines equipped with nukes away from home so that even if they whole country was glassed there would be some retaliation. These scenarios probably don't reflect the whole arsenal, so the retaliation wouldn't hit every square inch of the enemy's land, but I would still think that threat is enough to make you not want to start anything.

Let me see if I got this: Tactics is using the Queen to take out the opponent's pieces, while strategy is throwing the whole chess board to the floor in a tantrum?

Check.

The scariest part about drone warfare is that people are going to not be important anymore.

There's a pretty good argument that democracy is possible because of the existence of guns. In medieval time, a peasant with a pitchfork stood no chance against a knight who'd been training his whole life and had all the tools of warfare.

These days, an angry mob of people with guns can do quite a bit of damage. The US military couldn't even beat the Viet Kong, despite how woefully inept they were at the start of the war, because they were determined not to surrender.

However, if future combat is all automated, we're back to the feudal days where all it takes to win a war is having more money than the next guy. A future Jeff Bezos could buy his own drone army and exert as much power as many national governments.

Drone swarms are casually countered with directed energy weapons of the variety that navy army and airforce are starting to field today.

Sure, but the future (unless we somehow stop it) is all the weapons of war becoming completely autonomous. Maybe little plastic drones won't help, but autonomous tanks, ships, missile launchers... you name it, and at some point they will be far more effective at killing than a machine with a human in it.

Of course, that's already the case now for a lot of weapons. It doesn't fundamentally change the equation of war though. It's always been about machinery and the logistics to support it. There are very few exceptions, such as fighter pilots, where the actual humans are meaningfully expensive.

Now instead of having humans inside machines fighting other humans inside machines, it'll mostly be machines fighting machines. And yes, they'll be devastatingly effective against just humans but that's already the case with non-autonomous machines.

Autonomous weapons are a step on the existing tech advancement = force multiplier curve, I don't think they're fundamentally doctrine-changing. Like someone else commented here before, the actual game changer weapons will probably be biological. Unlike autonomous drones/tanks/whatever, advanced biological weapons will soon become available to just about any two bit state actor. Very little thought has been given towards defending against such attacks.

The car thing is another big one. Almost every car, truck, or SUV made in the past few years has a cellular connection, either for tracking purposes or infotainment. A determined attacker could probably just shut down 10-20% of cars in the country, a number which is increasing every year.

Yes, the power will go out and in a matter of just a few days we will be overthrowing our leadership. Lol.

Haha, now that I read it back it looks like we'll be marching on Parliament after a few days :)

I meant that we'll turn to them to get things back up and running and they won't be able to. It will only be a matter of time before people start turning on them... not necessarily shooting them but in terms of trust etc.

I still believe we'll be killing each other long before that though: Once the food starts to run out then neighbours will turn on each other to feed their kids.

Maybe I've read too many comic books and sci-fi as a kid :)

The next great war will likely be a long drawn out low intensity conflict (think proxy war with a lot of direct cyber war on the side) that manages to stay under the threshold for opening a can of nuclear whoop-ass. Big powers aren't gonna get in an over the table shooting war if they can avoid it for fear of the other opening that can. I dunno if that kind of situation meets your definition of "great" though.

Edit: The comment I'm replying to changed substantially since I replied.