Arms of the Future

Jack Watling is Senior Research Fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute in London where he works extensively with the British and allied militaries on force development and operational analysis. Jack has also worked in Ukraine during Russia’s invasion, in Iraq during the campaign to defeat Daesh, in Mali, Rwanda and further afield. He is co-author, alongside Nick Reynolds, of War by Others Means: Delivering Effective Partner Force Capacity Building (2021).

You can put down your ‘future war’ novels and read instead the actual study of the deployment of modern weapons and systems from someone who has seen many of them in action, often as a frequent visitor to the battlefields of Ukraine. Jack Watling examines critically and thoughtfully how forces will fight in the mid-decades of the century, exploding the hyperbolae, war-scares, and myths with some very hard truths. For each technology, working from the tactical to the strategic, he focusses on its functional logic and its dependencies. If you want to know how to ‘find, fix, and finish’ in the battlespace, and you want to know how the technology works in practice, you have just found the book you need.

• IntroductionPart One: From Mechanised to Informatized WarfareChapter One: Navigating the Transparent BattlefieldChapter Two: Contesting the SpectrumChapter Three: When Protection is an Illusion Chapter Four: When the Tail Needs TeethChapter Five: Blood in the StreetsPart Two: The Arms of the FutureChapter Six: The Geometry of the Future BattlefieldChapter Seven: The Manoeuvre SystemChapter Eight: The Fires SystemChapter Nine: The Assault SystemChapter Ten: The Support SystemPart Three: The Continuation of PolicyChapter Eleven: Divergent DomainsChapter Twelve: Priorities in TransformationChapter Thirteen: An Instrument of PowerConclusion