Domains of warfare seem to be proliferating rapidly these days. In Thucydides’ time, battles were fought on land and at sea—two domains. The combination of the two multiplied the complexity and confusion: at Syracuse (415–413 BC), for example, it led to the defeat of the foremost sea power of the day.

The use of airspace was apparent in its nascent form during the American Civil War (1861–1865), when balloons were used for overhead reconnaissance. But it was with the Wright brothers and the aeroplane that the atmosphere became something humanity could really use for transport, logistics and warfare. Air came into its own during World War I as a contestable operational domain.

And so there were three. More complexity and confusion.

Then, pushing boundaries, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik on 4 October 1957, and space became the new environment of human conquest. But while competition was high, space is a hard domain for humans to operate in. It remains an environment better suited to machines, and even those can prove fragile, susceptible to the growing density of space junk and the ravages of radiation. Still, the importance of space for military and civilian applications—the use of satellites for imagery and communications, for example—and not only for national prestige or scientific purposes, has led to its being acknowledged as a fourth domain.

In 2010, The Economist declared that ‘warfare has entered the fifth domain: cyberspace’. In 2011, the US Defense Department officially incorporated the new domain into its planning, doctrine, resourcing and operations; NATO acknowledged cyberspace as an operational domain in 2016. And perhaps because funding is seen to follow domain recognition, there has been some talk in the years since of a sixth domain, whether the electromagnetic spectrum itself or, more scarily, the human mind.

But of the five domains now generally accepted as arenas of military operations, one is not like the others.

Each of the first four domains lies in the natural world. They are material and outside our control—we adapt to them—in a way that’s not true of cyberspace.

Fundamentally, cyberspace is a human-built domain. It has tenuous links back to the physical world: cables, data centres, the hardware of transistors and physical interfaces. But those, too, have been designed and built by humans. Its complexity differs.

And it means that rather than continuing to talk about simply operating in the fifth domain, we should be thinking about shaping it, and shaping it to our interests.

So far, articulating the nature of and doctrine for operations in the cyber domain has been hard. That’s not least because much of the underlying physical—and logical—elements are currently, and increasingly, conceived, funded and built by technology companies, not governments, and in foreign nations, reflecting commercial, not national, interests.

Despite having been drivers of the creation of the internet and facilitators of its use, Western governments have since exited this race. Now, to some degree, formulating cyberspace as an operational domain is an effort to reclaim lost ground. And not recognising the difference intrinsic to this fifth domain inherently limits our ability to understand and manage cyber issues, including in terms of strategic contests.

So let’s think through what a human-created domain means. We—humans—don’t simply operate in it; we shape it. That has immense implications for how we—the West—think about it in strategic terms. What shape bests suits our interests, and why? Conversely, what shape least suits our interests? And what does war look like in a human-constructed domain?

In the West, empowering individuals is intrinsic to our culture, politics and economics. We believe that, in the long run, the arc of history moves towards the light. (In the short run, even empowered individuals may need a helping hand.) So Australia broadly favours an internet that is open, inclusive and centred on individuals and rejects one that is closed, exclusive and centred on the state.

Notwithstanding what President Donald Trump is seeking to do on the US southern border, Western societies don’t believe in ‘walls’.

Other cultures do. For example, in cyberspace, China has built its Great Firewall as a means of keeping external influence out and of controlling its own population. Just as the Great Wall of China proved irrelevant to modern technology, the Maginot Line was circumvented, and the Berlin Wall fell, so the Great Firewall has also weaknesses and will eventually fail. It is, like other walls, an artefact of human construction. But unlike other walls, it exists in a domain that is itself ‘constructed’.

Analogies from ‘real world’ domains immediately leap to mind. Remember, for example, the Dam Busters in World War II, which applied a carefully devised and targeted strategy for destroying walls. Or the leaky dykes in the Netherlands, where walls are weakened at multiple stress points and so increasingly susceptible to internal pressures.

In a number of respects, those are the sort of failures that concern us in the West, and quite rightly so. But we do not present the same target set: we haven’t constructed walls around our own societies to suppress and control our own populations. Our weaknesses may lie in treating foreign technology companies as being like foreign coalminers, though the government’s 5G decision suggests it’s not being drawn fully down that line.

Since the fifth domain is a human construction, we should work to redefine (and redesign) it in terms that we are most comfortable with. To borrow from the film Inception, we should aim to be like Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team—who are creators, architects, builders and shapers as well as operators in cyberspace—rather than accepting a reality imposed by others.

What might warfare in space look like and what should the Australian Defence Force be doing to prepare? That’s the subject of my new ASPI strategy paper, which examines how the ADF uses space, explores emerging counterspace threats, and considers what the ADF’s options are for responding to those threats.

Current ADF joint doctrine notes that space is a critical centre of gravity in information-based operations. Simply put, the ADF can’t use military power quickly, precisely and decisively without it. Space enables our forces to exploit an information edge to constrain the risks of high casualties in a prolonged conflict, while maximising our tactical edge and avoiding operational surprise. It is our ability to access and exploit space capabilities that minimises the likelihood of strategic defeat.

Space gives the ADF global access and perspective for long-range situational awareness and intelligence collection. It also enables precision-delivery of weapons, as well as long-range communications and space-enabled positioning and timing for networked command and control. Space support ensures better force integration across multi-domain operations, both within the ADF and as part of a coalition.

Our heavy dependence on space capability allows us to punch well above our weight, but it’s also a potential weakness. If we lose access to space, our military won’t be able to undertake modern information operations. Our reliance on space could be an Achilles’ heel in a conflict, and our adversaries could try to exploit that vulnerability.

The paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the counterspace capabilities that are emerging in the militaries of potential adversaries like China and Russia. These include both kinetic (‘hard kill’) antisatellite (ASAT) weapons that physically destroy a target satellite, and non-kinetic (‘soft kill’) systems that can generate scalable or even reversible effects to disable, damage or disrupt a satellite’s systems without physically destroying it. The clouds of space debris generated by kinetic ASATs can be self-defeating, denying access to space for all states, potentially for decades. That makes soft-kill methods more attractive for counterspace operations.

China has operationally deployed direct-ascent kinetic ASATs since 2010, and China and Russia are testing some satellite-related technologies that could be applied towards co-orbital ASATs as well. The challenge of dual-role technologies is clear. They can be employed in legitimate commercial roles such as orbital repair and refueling, but could quickly be repurposed as co-orbital ASATs. This raises the risk of a ‘grey zone’ threat in orbit.

Equally as challenging are ground-based non-kinetic counterspace capabilities, including systems for jamming satellite uplinks and downlinks, spoofing satellites to provide false information, laser-dazzling spy satellites in low-earth orbit, and conducting cyberattacks against satellites. Ground-based capabilities may extend the ability of an adversary to interfere with our satellites without being detected. They can also be developed cheaply and relatively quickly and may proliferate more easily from state to non-state actors.

The emergence of ‘Space 2.0’ technologies such as small satellites, CubeSats and reusable rockets adds more complexity to the space operational domain. Space 2.0 not only reduces the cost of accessing space, thus opening it up to new actors, but also offers new ways of developing counterspace capability. As satellite technology gets smaller and cheaper, military space operations could become more sophisticated, including exploiting dual-use commercial systems and the potential of ‘mega-constellations’.

The paper concludes by analysing Australia’s options for responding to a contested high frontier. We already benefit from strong cooperation among the Five Eyes partners on space surveillance and coordination of space operations. Information-sharing also occurs through the Combined Space Operations Initiative, which includes the US, Australia, Canada and the UK. Expanding space surveillance cooperation and exploiting Australia’s advantageous geography should be a priority because understanding activities in orbit is the first step to preventing attacks.

We also need to think about how the Defence organisation should be configured for the space mission. The US is currently debating the merits of establishing an independent US space force after the recent decision to re-establish US Space Command within the air force. The Royal Air Force is formalising and enhancing the role of space as part of its new ‘Strategic Command’. France is establishing its own defensive counterspace capabilities, as is NATO, and Japan is moving towards elevating attention on space security. Australia should follow a clear trend by reorganising Defence’s structure with space in mind. That should involve elevating the importance of space across the organisation and providing a coherent structure staffed by a skilled space cadre.

This would then support establishing a formal space strategy within Defence that—like the Australian Space Agency’s civil space strategy—provides clear guidance on future directions. The document would need to establish goals and objectives for the ADF not only in using space, but also in meeting the evolving counterspace challenge.

The most urgent task must be to strengthen the resilience of ADF and allied space capability in the face of an increasing adversary counterspace threat. Australia is well placed to exploit Space 2.0 and its own rapidly growing commercial space sector to develop an ADF operationally responsive space capability. This would see Australia, for the first time, developing the means to launch its own satellites on Australian launch vehicles from Australian launch sites. Such a capability would allow Australia to burden-share in orbit with the US and other partners, by augmenting, or reconstituting, allied space capability in a way that increases the challenges for any state seeking to launch an attack on our space systems.

Australia also has the option to strengthen such a space deterrence posture with its own ground-based counterspace capability. It could be built around soft-kill techniques such as electronic warfare and laser-dazzling. The purpose of such a capability would be to back up space resilience with the implicit threat of retaliation to strengthen deterrence. That would further add to our ability to burden-share in orbit alongside the US and other key partners.

The armistice that ended World War I was signed at around 5 am on 11 November 1918 but didn’t come into force until 11 am. In those six hours, when both sides knew that the war was over, there were another 10,944 casualties; 2,738 died. During that war some 40 million people were killed, but beginning a mere 21 years later World War II took at least another 60 million lives. The rate at which soldiers lost their lives in these industrial-era wars wasn’t unusual—throughout all of ancient and medieval history, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of soldiers would die in single battles over the course of a single afternoon.

Major war is generally outside the collective recollection of Western societies—and of their militaries—because we haven’t fought one in living memory. This means we’ve forgotten the absurd and terrible cost to soldiers of war. That cost is disproportionately borne by combat soldiers who— and this may be verified by asking any infantryman in human history—complete repetitive and tedious tasks under tremendous physical and psychological stress in circumstances of extreme physical and moral danger. Those who enjoy soldiering enjoy it in spite of what most of soldiering is: for the rare snatches of power, excitement and adventure.

As our society’s proximity to war has decreased, we have become more and more reliant on the arts to inform us of its nature. Movies, films, video games and even books written by soldiers tend to glamorise soldiering and glaze over its complexities, hardships and tedium because it makes for more accessible, interesting and engaging art. This has granted the armed forces, particularly combat arms, a mystique and prestige that mask a simple and obvious fact. No occupation as painful, tedious and dangerous as soldiering should be done by humans if there is a reasonable alternative.

Until recently there was no prospect of removing humans from battle. Until very recently we had absolutely no way to automate any aspect of human decision-making and so we could not develop autonomous weapons that could meet the entirely reasonable requirements that the laws of armed conflict set out for the use of military force—proportionality, distinction and military necessity. But we are now on the precipice of being able to produce artificial minds that not just meet those requirements to the level that a human soldier or officer may but exceed them in accuracy and consistency—because humans are very, very bad at acting ethically in wars.

In World War II, it was not AI but humans that committed war crimes and massacres in Le Paradis, Wormhoudt, d’Ardenne, Malmedy, Gardelegen, Marzabotto, Sant’Anna di Stazzema, Kefalonia, Oradour-sur-Glane, Lidice, Kalavryta, Distomo, Kragujevac, Warsaw, Vinkt, Heusden, Nanking, Hong Kong, Banka Island, Bataan, Parit Sulong, Laha, Palawan, Changjiao, Manila, Wake Island, Sandakan, Katyn, Nemmersdorf, Treuenbrietzen, Przyszowice, Biscari, Salina, Friesoythe and almost certainly numerous other locations that history did not record, perpetrated by forces we’d rather not have to finger.

It is not AI but humans which, with regularity bordering on routine, make errors of judgement in wars that kill allies and innocents in quantities that have often exceeded enemy combatant deaths.

Not only are we near the point of developing artificial minds that will act more ethically than humans, we are on the cusp of creating artificial minds that will almost certainly make and execute better tactical decisions more quickly and with fewer errors than any human could possibly rival.

One day soon it will be as suicidal to send human riflemen to fight drone riflemen as it was for horse-mounted Polish cavalry to charge German panzer divisions in 1939, or as pointless as pitting our best human grandmasters against our best chess engines today. Eliminating human combatants in the air and sea domains will probably be possible sooner than in the cluttered land domain, but all three will almost certainly be possible within the lifetime of every person reading this, and probably sooner than most of us think.

It is fashionable to call for international treaties to regulate the use of AI for military purposes to mitigate potentially existential risks. If this is to be the case, it must be done in ways that recognise the nearly absolute moral and practical imperatives to remove frail and suffering humans, their slow and flawed decisions, and their terrible ethical record from future battlefields. Our efforts to regulate autonomous weapons must be aimed at ensuring that their artificial minds are more ethical and less capable of atrocity than the humans they will replace, not to prevent them from replacing humans.

War is an inherently human activity, but there’s no good reason for combat to remain so indefinitely. After all, we’re only human.

The overwhelming speed of technological development means armed forces must change their approach to everything from who they recruit and train to how targets are attacked and how a nation defends itself.

The warning was delivered in a speech to ASPI by Dr P.W. Singer, an American specialist in 21st-century warfare and a global relations scholar.

A strategist with US think tank New America, Singer warned that as more and more items were linked to the internet of things, the opportunities for nations and societies to be attacked became much broader. Internet attacks would have physical impacts and cost lives.

‘All of this technology does not mean that we will see humans eliminated from war anytime soon’, Singer said. ‘Rather, just like with the steam engine and the plane and the computer, we will see changes in the human skills that are most needed and less needed.

‘This movement of people skills can and should change everything from our recruiting and training to our doctrine and organisational structures.’

Singer is co-author of Ghost fleet, a novel on the future of war, and he’ll shortly publish LikeWar on the weaponisation of social media.

He said defence forces needed to recruit people with a broader range of skills. ‘We need to do more to think about not just the “what” of the technology or the “how” of the attack—the “who” of the defender is also changing.’

Trends now underway were amazing and overwhelming, Singer said, and there were no simple answers to any of them.

The key lesson was that to stand still was to choose to lose. In a time of rapid change, nations, companies and individuals that weren’t changing would fall behind. Being innovative and adaptive was the key to success or failure.

Singer showed a photograph of the battleship USS Arizona before World War II with two float planes aboard it. That reflected the navy’s concession to concerns that battleships would be vulnerable in the era of modern bombers. ‘They did just enough to avoid changing.’

Then the Arizona was sunk by Japanese aircraft at Pearl Harbor.

The focus shouldn’t be on evolutionary improvements, such as a slightly faster missile or jet, but on the technologies that truly changed the game, Singer said. ‘These go by various catchphrases: “revolutionary”, “disruptive” or “killer apps”. Think of these next technologies as akin to the steam engine in the 1820s or the airplane in the 1920s or the computer in the 1980s. They are real, not science fiction. They will change the world, but they haven’t yet.

‘The important warning is that what makes them revolutionary is not that they solve your problems. It’s the opposite. What defines them is that they’re technologies that present new questions which we don’t have the answers to.’

One question was, what would be possible that wasn’t possible before. ‘And they raise new issues of right and wrong that we weren’t wrestling with before. What is proper? These may be proper ways to recruit, organise or train, or issues of law and ethics that were recently the stuff of science fiction, but now have to be resolved by government and military officers.’

In this future there’d be not just smartphones but smart driverless trucks carrying freight—and smart military bases.

The biggest software shift might be in artificial intelligence, with machines able to not just mimic human decisions but make superior ones.

Studies showed several categories of such technologies, Singer said, including breakthroughs in hardware, specifically more autonomous robotics.

The first of these were large and centralised, mimicking the human roles that would be replaced.

The second category was small, networked, swarmed intelligence—tiny robots akin to insects. Each individual robot wasn’t that smart, but together could do highly complex tasks.

‘Our network of networks is evolving from being about communications between human beings to running the systems of our increasingly digital world. Roughly nine billion “things” are online now. In the next five years this will at least double, and likely triple or more. Most of these new things will shift from being computers on our desks and smartphones in our pockets to objects like cars, thermostats and power plants.’

This massive growth in the internet economy would dramatically increase the ‘attack surface’, the potential points of vulnerability that cyber threats would go after.

‘However, it’ll also be a bit like travelling back in time, in that the new growth in the internet replicates all the old cybersecurity problems. With responsibilities for security unclear, and almost no regulation or even basic liability, all too often these devices lack even basic security features, while customers are largely unaware of what they can and should do. Up to 70% of internet devices have known vulnerabilities, and they’ve already become a key part of botnets.’

The world had to prepare for cyberattacks which caused physical damage, Singer said. The pioneering of Stuxnet-style attacks that sabotaged industrial control systems and more and more ‘things’ which rely on these systems was a dangerous combination. ‘Internet attacks will cost not just money, but lives.’

These fundamentally different consequences would cause fundamentally different ripple effects. ‘The internet of things won’t just change the internet as we know it, but the very politics of cybersecurity. As opposed to opaque attacks with unclear consequences, attacks will be easy for the broader public and policymakers to see and understand. They’ll lead to far quicker and louder calls for action in response, from lawsuits to new laws.’

New technology raised huge questions for the future of robots and war itself, but also for the future of work, Singer said. This would be incredibly disruptive, akin to a new industrial revolution. There were 3.5 million truck drivers in the US and theirs was the most popular job in 29 of the 50 US states. The evolution of driverless vehicles would threaten their livelihoods.

An Oxford University study found that 47% of total US employment was at risk of replacement or reduction within our lifetime, Singer noted.

In 10 years, most of the world’s data would move through, or be stored in, the cloud and this was expected to result in more sophisticated attacks on cloud infrastructures.

New technology was often open and accessible to everyone, Singer said. The key to victory would be how it was all glued together.

Social media had become a battlefield, generating new rules for politics and war. Singer said that when a country such as Russia launched a campaign of misinformation in the US, the US should counter that by identifying the attack and pushing back.

If Facebook had changed its algorithms before the US election, America would have had a different president, he said.

It should be made illegal for anyone to allow a service they owned to be used by a malevolent foreign power to undermine a nation’s institutions and values. ‘When someone is spreading a foreign government’s misinformation, they are aiding and abetting the enemy’, Singer said.

‘It’s absurd that we let people get away with it.’

The US government had provided aid to Ukraine to educate its young people about how to identify fake news. ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be great if they did that in the US?’

The era of the multi-domain battle was already here, Singer said. Everyone from terrorist groups to Chicago gangs was now on the internet. During the fighting to liberate the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State terror group, IS fighters launched more than 300 attacks on Iraqi and coalition forces using commercially acquired drones.

Nations must consider what it could mean for them to have critical infrastructure controlled by adversary states. The advent on a significant scale of cyberattacks that physically damaged their targets would fundamentally shift the politics of cybersecurity, Singer said. That could involve making cars’ brakes fail, showers pump out scalding water or power grids go down.

Another shift was in how conflicts were begun and fought. Russia launched its digital blockade of Ukraine before it attacked its neighbour. Ukraine lost the cyber war before the actual fighting began with Moscow’s infiltration of its special forces in disguise, the so-called ‘little green men’.

In the case of a student who launched a gun-control campaign after a mass shooting at her school, fake images were created purporting to show her tearing up the constitution. That lie spread much faster than the truth debunking it.

Another issue, he said, was to ensure the right balance of quality and quantity so that fighters didn’t find themselves ‘sipping from the fire hose’ as they were flooded with ‘TMI’, or too much information.

The time when secrecy was assured was past. ‘There are no more secrets. The truth may be there but covered in a sea of lies.’