Audience Participation: The Future of Conflict

I don’t have a cable package; I’ve not streamed a network news channel on TV or even turned on a television since Russia invaded Ukraine.??And yet I’m following along with the rest of the world on where the fighting is occurring, how each side appears to be faring, and what the implications are internationally for nations and organizations surrounding the situation. As a recent Apple Insider article points out, civilian technology corporations and tech, led by Google and Apple, are emerging as major players in modern warfare. But that is not all. What we are seeing today is not simply an advancement in information content communication but the most logical step in a hyper-connected digitally globalized world: tech-enabled individual audience participation.??

The opening scene for Bethesda's post-apocalyptic dystopian video game series Fallout always begins with the narrative, “War never changes.” The ideological underpinning of warfare is the source of all conflict.?In these games, several factions are fighting to achieve various aims and the individual actions of one person (the protagonist, as it happens) determine the game's outcome.??While only a video game, the premise of individual actions having a decisive impact is increasingly likely in the advancing world. In fact, if there is one major takeaway from the Russian invasion of Ukraine it is that audience participation is only going to increase.

Since war’s beginning, technology has shifted from an individual with a hand-held weapon to increasingly larger and more disciplined formations.??The shift toward bigger and stronger fighters crested with the invention of small arms, and then followed a sinewave shift between big formations and guerilla warfare. Conflict using increasingly larger armies determined the most powerful nations until wars like the American Revolution demonstrated the effectiveness of guerilla warfare.??Global conflict in WWI and WWII saw size match technological advancements, but the nuclear bomb took destructive power and technology to a new level, often believed to be the reason major global conflict on the scale of a world war has not re-occurred in the last 76 years.??

Another major advancement in warfare has been the growth and speed of information to non-combatants from the frontlines.??This technology has come from runners and word-of-mouth, to smoke signals, carrier pigeons, newsprint, telegrams, telephones, radio, television, embedded journalists, and smartphones.??Today, live-streaming over social media provides individuals from all over the world the opportunity to watch as the action unfolds.??Individualized and disaggregated technologies give unrelated individuals the ability to track aircraft, identify road closures, observe emerging tactics, send funds, coordinate action, and protest politically.??This major shift in conflict puts formerly national-level capabilities into the hands of guerillas, non-government organizations, and civilian non-combatants.??It also provides opportunities for those who may wish to help either side in their individual efforts, which I believe will be the defining feature of future conflict.?

Technology consistently creates new norms, even as it destroys long-standing traditions. Film cameras gave way to the digital camera, which has lost ground to the smartphone camera, with increasingly-miniaturized capability.??Even so, digital cameras are incorporated into drones - first, only affordable for national actors, but now a part of every off-the-shelf drone. These can fly and stream at an incredibly cheap pixel-to-dollar ratio. This is sure to be the same for military and military-use hardware.

In Libya’s ongoing civil war, fighting has taken place between many nations, often through hired third parties such as the Russian Wagner Group and Turkish-funded Syrian fighters.??Sean McFate’s “The New Rules of War,” documents the growth of private security firms acting as mercenaries and predicts these guns for hire are the wave of the future.??Even the hacker group Anonymous has declared war on Russia– a non-state actor with no central structure taking overt actions normally reserved for a nation.??Cities across the globe are demonstrating against Putin's military invasion, and social media is turning into national policy and action. Public groups and private citizens are taking action across all aspects of national powers, formerly the purview of conventional militaries and international powers.?

So too will military hardware be miniaturized and commercially available in the future.??Flying a drone through an internet-connected device is a fairly established consumer capability; how easily could a normal drone be armed???How difficult could hired mercenaries blend with non-combatants to become a participatory audience? Flying drones, firing weapons from a distance, and creating a mesh of individual supply lines like the physical manifestation of the tor computer network.??I'm convinced the next era of conflict - and certainly the next world war - will involve non-state actors coming together through a series of off-the-shelf capabilities.??So, while social media watches Ukrainians repel Russian conventional forces on smart devices today, take note that this is a turning point in technology.??It is likely one of the last conflicts in the age of uninvolved audience members.

-Luke Revell

Luke Revell is a leader in the military intelligence field and a student in American Military University's Doctor of Strategic Intelligence program. The opinions expressed in this publication are his alone and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of his affiliated organizations or their members.?