The future of war
A conversation with Peter Warren Singer, strategist and senior fellow at New America. Interviewer: Vazha Tavberidze
February 22, 2026 -
Peter Warren Singer
Vazha Tavberidze
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InterviewsIssue 1-2 2026Magazine
VAZHA TAVBERIDZE: “No humans crossed the battle line – yet the enemy trench was taken.” Writing about the Battle of Lyptsi in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region in May last year, this is how you describe what may have been the first fully robotic assault in modern warfare. Where does it rank among the battles in history that have changed the way of warfare?
I may not go as far back as Alexander the Great, but I will go a couple of generations back. I think there are strong parallels between the Spanish Civil War and the war in Ukraine. There are the obvious larger ideological parallels – what it means to stand up to rising authoritarian forces, and the consequences of letting them get away with it. But if we look at military doctrine and technology, the parallels lie in how a series of technologies that already existed were brought together in powerful new ways. That not only changed how battles were fought and won, but also raised new questions for the military and for politics – not just about what was possible, but what was proper. So, if you go back to the 1930s, you had technologies like the tank, the airplane, and the radio, all of which had been used in the First World War. By the 1930s they had advanced, but in the Spanish Civil War they were brought together in a way that became known as a Blitzkrieg, or combined arms. That was a game-changer. It introduced a new way of fighting that forced armies to reorganize, and it raised profound questions of law and politics. Aerial bombing and the story of Guernica are a perfect example, they didn’t just spark debates about the rules of war, but also gave rise to entirely new forms of art. We’re seeing the same thing now with drones, robotics, AI, and networks. All of these have been used before in wars, but today they are being combined in powerful new ways. The data show that roughly 80 per cent of casualties, maybe more, right now are caused by these new technologies. That is why I think the closest parallel is the Spanish Civil War. That may be how we’ll look back on this moment.
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Artificial intelligence, Russia, technology, Ukraine, warfare 
