At a time when debates about national security tend to be polarized along partisan and ideological lines, there is one thing analysts and policymakers across the political spectrum seem to agree on: the future of warfare will be determined by technology. Hypersonic missiles, quantum computing, drone swarms, and artificial intelligence have all been hailed as transformative technologies that will shape battlefields, remake strategies, and upend established military doctrines.

Without question, these technologies are already having a tremendous impact. In Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, Ukraine, and elsewhere, every party with the capacity to employ artificial intelligence and autonomous systems has done so—in the air, on land, and at sea, and at times in massive numbers. And there is also no question that in order to maintain its status as the world’s preeminent fighting force, the U.S. military must ensure that it has the most sophisticated and cutting-edge capabilities available. To continue developing and operationalizing these technologies, defense planners should prioritize scaling and integrating them and developing innovative operational concepts to employ them. The risk of being overtaken by rivals such as China is real.

But an equally significant risk exists: call it “the technology trap,” in which policymakers develop a misplaced sense of certainty about how innovations will change war and what warfare will look like in the future, while not paying enough attention to the unchanging fundamentals of war. An excessive focus on the role of technology would be shortsighted and lead militaries in dangerous directions, especially if planners are highly confident about how new capabilities will develop and make decisions in line with that confidence—which will almost certainly be misplaced.

For war planners, faith in technological answers can obscure the most fundamental questions: Who kills, who dies, and who decides? In the post–Cold War era, this myopia has contributed to dreadful outcomes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and Gaza. In the decade to come, as U.S.-Chinese tensions persist, the fog of tech could help pave the way for a disastrous great-power war. Policymakers should worry less about getting the right technology at the right time and more about how fixating on technology might make them lose sight of the essential elements of war and find comfort in false certainty.

THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

More than 50 years ago, the military historian Michael Howard famously cautioned that future wars are unknowable. “I am tempted indeed to declare dogmatically that whatever doctrine the Armed Forces are working on now, they have got it wrong,” he wrote. “I am also tempted to declare that it does not matter that they have got it wrong. What does matter is their capacity to get it right quickly when the moment arrives.”

But Howard may have been a bit too sanguine about the costs of getting it wrong. For Americans, the paradigmatic example from recent history is how the U.S. military’s technological prowess in the 1990–91 Gulf War seemed to herald a new, high-tech American way of war that would guarantee victory in the post–Cold War era. Instead, Washington slowly and painfully learned that the technological advantages that beat Saddam Hussein’s regime could not defeat insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq during the post-9/11 wars.

Predicting the role of technology in future wars has become even harder today thanks to the speed, scale, and complexity of contemporary technological progress. In the past, transformative innovations tended to be expensive at their outset—in resources or personnel—or required specialized knowledge and skills accessible to only a few. Think of the combined power of the rifle, the railroad, and the telegraph in the nineteenth century, or fighter jets and nuclear weapons in the twentieth century. By contrast, many of today’s technologies have low barriers to entry: they are cheap to produce, and access to the knowledge necessary to make them has been democratized and globalized. Enemies today often face each other on more equal battlefields, making it trickier for war planners to understand when and for how long new tools will confer an outsize advantage.

In Ukraine, fishermen’s nets are one of the most effective antidrone defenses.

Focusing too much on procuring the shiniest equipment also obscures the ways that high-end technology works in tandem with more basic tools. In the 2010s, defense planners failed to account for this dynamic when predicting future battlefields, which they believed would be dominated by sophisticated platforms. In 2017, a senior Pentagon official declared that the F-35 stealth fighter would be “a war winner.” The 2018 National Defense Strategy, drafted under the direction of Elbridge Colby, who now serves as undersecretary of defense, anticipated that a few primarily high-end capabilities—including advanced computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, hypersonics, and biotechnology—would “ensure we will be able to fight and win the wars of the future.”

Instead, what emerged were conflicts such as the war in Ukraine, which can be described as World War I meets World War III. Sophisticated Russian ballistic missiles wreak havoc on Ukrainian cities, as do precision-guided glide bombs delivered by fighter aircraft out of the range of air defenses.........

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