While impressive I don’t think StarCraft and Diplomacy can be compared to an actual war.
Diplomacy especially has at most three actions that can be taken per turn (move, support, hold) maybe five if you include convoy and retreat. Generally each country does have pretty limited paths to win.
The impressive thing is the natural language processing of the AI and from what I read from one top diplomacy player the fact that the AI doesn’t try and take revenge when betrayed, doesn’t develop trust with any players or let any sort of subconscious feelings get in the way of its goal.
I don’t see a world where, as the article suggests, all war is automated.
I see a world where AI helps us be even more prepared for the last war, and equally unprepared for new wars.
The defense budget is hundreds of billions of dollars
Reinforcement learning models are already crushing humans at strategy games from StarCraft to Diplomacy