War & Security

I. Where we start

Today, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have already shown the century: cheap drones, commercial satellites, trenches, sanctions, contested shipping lanes, artillery ammunition, propaganda on Telegram. The United States still spends more than the next several combined, with a defence industry rusty on volume. Europe and Asia are raising military budgets, China rearms, and nuclear arsenals are being modernised while arms control thins. Organised crime rivals the state in pieces of Latin America.

II. The decade in between

Industry. The United States tries to relearn how to produce ammunition in volume. Europe signs long contracts and treats defence capacity as industrial policy, not a temporary supplement. Korea, Turkey, Iran, Israel, and China export systems. Brazil stops being a consumer of someone else's kit and becomes a serious exporter — Embraer's autonomous cargoliner is the regional default; the Brazilian defence industry grows into the third pole's procurement backbone and the supplier of choice for a southern hemisphere that wants non-aligned kit. The $500 drone changes what a poor country can do to a rich one. That is one of the real equalisations of the decade — and one of its instabilities. Defence against drones is the engineering problem of the decade, as the tank was of other decades.

III. Ten years from now

Ten years from now the dominant form of combat between equals and near-equals is a swarm fighting another swarm at a speed no staff college trained for: reconnaissance, drones, electronic war, cheap munitions, and models that nominate the next ten targets before a colonel finishes a sentence. The human remains on the nuclear key. On the tactical loop the human is often a veto that arrives late, or a legal fiction in the after-action report. The infantry soldier does not disappear. He walks under a sky that hunts, beside a cargo robot, inside goggles that tell him what the swarm already decided.

Nuclear. Still the ceiling. Not used in this scenario. The arsenals get newer before they get smaller, arms-control machinery erodes, and proliferation pressure builds. "Tactical weapon" doctrine frightens. The taboo holds — not because the world became ethical, but because the cost of breaking it is civilisational.

Cyber and information remain a permanent theatre. Standardised neighbourhoods create concentrated attack surfaces: a compromised controller can interrupt water, lifts, or cooling across thousands of homes. Segmented systems, manual operation, repair stocks, and independent recovery drills become civil-defence requirements. The lower-cost district must keep functioning when its cloud or foreign supplier is unavailable. Countering influence operations still requires people with access to the underlying evidence, not only a filter at the enclave door.

Terrorism and militias. Civilian drones and targeting AI make the spectacle attack cheap. States respond with more cameras, more biometrics, more border. The rich city of ten years from now is more surveilled than today's. The poor city is more informally armed.

Crime. Factions, the Comando Vermelho, cartels, piracy, synthetic fraud. In parts of Latin America, everyday security has long been the number-one political problem, ahead of AI. Prison, militia, and tacit agreement coexist. A world portrait that only talks about great powers forgets that many people fear the armed moto-taxi driver on the corner more than they fear Beijing. The shift this decade: the Brazilian bloc's right turn came with a serious security offer, and a generation of joint operations, extradition arrangements, and Brazilian-led peacekeeping gradually re-anchored the southern hemisphere. The Comando Vermelho and the Tren de Aragua are not extinct; the ordinary person in Caracas, Lima, or Rio can cross a street without bargaining for it, which used to be the test of a state's seriousness.

Civilian life. Factory-built homes speed reconstruction after attacks and disasters once land is safe and water, power, and legal tenure are restored. They cannot clear mines, settle ownership, or substitute for peace. In the Brazilian bloc, safer neighbourhoods require accountable local policing and courts as well as joint operations; housing contracts create new extortion targets. Airports remain slower, events more guarded, and conscription a live issue in several countries. Brazil retains military service obligations while professional forces carry the regional deployments.

IV. Uncertainties

What does not happen in this scenario: a nuclear third world war; Kantian peace; a declared legal norm of fully autonomous killing (the human remains in the loop on paper); a Brazilian-led South America that pacifies the favela and the barrio on its own. What does happen: the loop is shorter than the paper; war is imaginable again in Europe and the Pacific; swarms are already routine in several peripheries; the southern hemisphere runs a serious joint force under a Brazilian pole; and a young conscript's first enemy may not have a face.