The Asymmetric Battlefield

Two decades of doctrine were written for adversaries who needed time. Time to mass forces, time to move materiel, time to be observed doing both. Every warning architecture built since then rests on that interval.

The shift

What changes with autonomous systems is not the destructiveness of an attack but its tempo. An operation that once required a chain of human approvals now requires a policy file. The attacker's cost curve bends downward while the defender's remains flat, because defence still terminates in institutions.

The side that removes humans from the loop first does not become stronger. It becomes faster than the other side's ability to be sure.

Decision windows

A decision window is the distance between detection and irreversible commitment. Compress it far enough and the distinction between a probe and an attack stops being decidable in time to matter.

What follows

Sovereign capacity in compute, in sensing and in the people who read the open record is not a prestige project. It is the only instrument that restores an interval.