By John Robb

The winner of the next big conflict will be the side with the best understanding of how to use bots in warfare. Bots aren’t just an iterative improvement in warfare, like stealth or PGMs, it’s a revolution in the making. The US military, to its credit, is working on this. So far, the US military has identified three (out of nearly a dozen) of the foundational ideas needed to successfully employ bots in warfare:

  • Teaming
  • Autonomy
  • Swarming

Learning from Nitro Zeus

However, these early ideas are a long way from the operational thinking required to win wars using bots. That type of thinking requires a synthesis of the foundational ideas into new operational concepts. Here’s a good example operational concept I’m calling zero day warfare. It builds off the thinking already demonstrated in recent US cyber operations.

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