AI is ushering in a new era of warfare defined by chip power, making warfare more lethal, faster and rapidly scalable. In the past the neophytes in warfare studies have been using the terms like nature, grammar and character of warfare rather loosely and most of the time interchangeably. Nothing however could be farther from the truth. All three terms have distinct meaning. The nature of war is defined by Clausewitz as the use of violence to attain a political purpose and is influenced by the interplay of politics, emotion and chance. Till the time any one element of the trinity does not get changed, the nature doesn't change.

Since antiquity many changes in tactics and technology have occurred but none has so far altered the nature of war. The character of war means conduct of warfare within certain ethical and human defined boundaries e.g. total war, limited war and asymmetric wars. The grammar of war refers to the use of technology that influenced tactics and techniques of warfare. The grammar and character of war have been changed several times but the nature remained the same despite revolutions in technology

The advent of AI for the first time in human history is altering all three i.e. the grammar, character and the nature of war. The grammar of war is being altered as the AI introduces new autonomous weapon systems taking independent decisions while the character is being changed as the boundaries between different forms of warfare get blurred due to AI enabled non-human agency. Finally, the nature of war is being changed due to absence of human agency and element of chance which is being minimised by algorithm driven autonomous weapon and........

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