The Digital in War: From Innovation to Participation

Introduction

This is part of a series on “The Digital in War: From Innovation to Participation,” co-produced by Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program and Swedish Defense University.

The world is living through a period of extraordinary technological disruption in warfare. The war in Ukraine has become one of the most consequential laboratories of conflict in the twenty-first century, and its effects are reverberating far beyond Europe. It is a war not only fought with tanks, artillery, and soldiers, but also with codes, networks, drones, smartphones, and the ingenuity of ordinary people.¹ This fusion of state power, citizen participation, and rapid technological innovation is transforming how society thinks about war, strategy, and even sovereignty itself.

The Ukraine war has imparted a series of vital lessons that have unsettled the default assumptions of military strategists across the globe. For much of the modern era, size and resources defined military power. Large, well-funded militaries—those that could amass sophisticated fleets, long-range missiles, and heavy ground forces—were assumed to hold overwhelming advantages against weaker opponents. Yet Ukraine has repeatedly shown that nimbleness and adaptation can offset brute force. The defeat of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet using domestically built sea drones is emblematic of this shift. Ukrainians leveraged local innovation, cheap materials, and agile thinking to neutralize a cornerstone of Russian naval power.

This dynamic represents a new paradigm: the emergence of “good enough” systems that are cheap, attritive, and lethal. Unlike the exquisite, high-cost weapons platforms of the past—such as jet fighters, guided missile destroyers, and armored divisions—these systems do not aspire to perfection. They are built to be expendable, to swarm, to overwhelm, and to adapt faster than traditional procurement cycles can respond. A drone that costs a few thousand dollars but can disable a million-dollar tank represents a radical rebalancing of military economics. Attritability has become an asset rather than a liability.

Perhaps most unsettling for traditional strategists is the blurring of the line between citizens and combatants. Driven by innovations like smartphones and encrypted messaging apps, war has become increasingly networked and participatory. Civilians with coding skills, 3D printers, or access to consumer drones can make meaningful contributions to the battlefield. Soldiers use smartphones for reconnaissance, targeting, and real-time communication; volunteers map enemy positions using open-source intelligence; and diaspora communities crowdfund equipment and technology for the front. The neat boundaries of “front line” and “rear area,” “soldier” and “civilian,” have eroded.

The consequences extend far beyond Ukraine’s borders. Other conflicts are now seeing the rapid importation of these practices, altering battlefield behavior and reshaping the character of war. Consider Myanmar, where the ongoing struggle between the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force (KNDF) and the military junta demonstrates the global diffusion of wartime innovation.²

When fighting erupted, the KNDF faced staggering resource disadvantages compared to the government military. Yet, rather than succumb, the rebels turned to the technologies at hand. They assembled a drone force from 3D-printed frames, old agricultural drones from China, and scavenged components from unrelated devices. The drone operators were not trained pilots but young, tech-savvy volunteers who had honed their skills on Discord, Telegram, and YouTube. Over time, they incorporated imported commercial quadcopters and first-person view drones, but their force remained a patchwork of improvisation.

Despite these constraints, the rebel drone units inflicted significant damage on government forces, demonstrating again that innovation and agility could offset raw firepower. Yet the cycle of adaptation did not stop there. The junta responded by building its own drone capacity, leaning on Chinese and Russian imports as a backbone. Unlike the rebels’ cobbled-together systems, the government produced higher-capacity devices, imported specialized surveillance and attack drones, developed customized bombs, and formally integrated drone training into its military structure—preserving air superiority.³ Today, four years into the conflict, drones have become “a ubiquitous presence.” Myanmar now ranks third globally for drone events, behind only Ukraine and Russia.⁴

This case highlights not only the diffusion of battlefield technologies but also the accelerating tempo of military adaptation. What emerges in one conflict is quickly studied, copied, and modified in another. No innovation remains the exclusive property of one side for long. Myanmar’s rebels and junta are locked into the same cycle of experimentation, escalation, and counter-innovation that defines the Ukrainian battlefield.

These dynamics underscore a broader transformation: War is no longer bounded by geography or by the monopoly of states. The smartphone has become one of the most consequential weapons of the modern era. It allows soldiers to live stream combat, civilians to track troop movements, and diasporas to coordinate fundraising campaigns. Social media platforms transform battles into global spectacles, shaping international perceptions in real time. Apps like Telegram blur the line between operational communication and propaganda dissemination. A war fought on smartphones is both a military contest and a battle of narratives.

This introduction to our collection of articles situates Ukraine as the pacesetter in this new age of networked, technologically disrupted warfare—but it also insists on a wider view. The patterns emerging in Ukraine are neither isolated nor anomalous, with impacts ranging from the forests of Myanmar to the deserts of the Middle East and from the South China Sea to cyberspace. They are part of a global shift in the conduct of war.

The articles in this collection probe this disruption from multiple angles. Some focus on the battlefield, examining the technologies and tactics that have emerged from Ukraine and spread elsewhere. Others step back to analyze the social, political, and ethical implications of a world in which civilians become combatants, smartphones become weapons, and attrition becomes a design principle. Still others place these innovations in historical perspective, asking how this moment compares to earlier technological revolutions in warfare—such as the machine gun, the tank, and the nuclear bomb.

Together, these articles chart a world in flux. They show how the improvisational creativity of Ukrainian engineers, Burmese rebels, and other countless civilians has reshaped the terrain of conflict. They explore the consequences for great powers who find their expensive platforms vulnerable to cheap, swarming adversaries. They examine the implications for international law and expose a deeper failure: The laws of war have not kept pace with new developments. International humanitarian law was designed to protect civilians, regulate combatants, and constrain violence, but the emergence of drones, AI-enabled systems, and participatory conflict strains its applicability. When civilians operate drones, provide targeting data, or engage in cyber operations, are they lawful combatants or illegitimate participants? Who bears responsibility for lethal outcomes in a world of semiautonomous systems? The growing gap between innovation and regulation leaves both militaries and societies in uncertain legal terrain.

We open this collection with an article about Ukraine because it has crystallized the dynamics of this new era. But the journey does not end there. By tracing the diffusion of innovation to other regions and locales and by examining the interplay of technology, society, and strategy across regions, we aim to illuminate the contours of a truly global transformation.

The Digital in War

These articles grew out of conversations about changes originating on the battlefield. We organized a workshop in January 2024 where we debated these questions and analyzed their impacts. Stemming out of these discussions, we assembled a collection of pieces to provide essential insights about the evolving nature of modern war.

Rupert Barrett-Taylor and Gavin Wilde kick off our series with their article, “A Digitized, Efficient Model of War.”⁵ In their piece, they critique an “overly reductive model of war,” one that is techno-centric and built upon optimization and efficiency but arguably risks undermining pragmatism and impact. They examine whether it is possible for modern militaries to resist the temptation to fit warfighting into machinery rather than to use machinery to reflect actual conditions on the ground and on the battlefield.

Nate Allen’s article, “Digital Technology, Strategic Adaptation, and the Outcomes of Twenty-First Century Armed Conflict,”⁶ poses a thorny question: If digital technology is bringing battlefield transformation, why are these innovations not leading to decisive victories? He argues that today’s military innovations are rooted in an open technological ecosystem spurred by private companies and characterized by rapid cycles of innovation, adaptation, and readaptation. Allen looks at conflicts in Ukraine and Nigeria and observes how innovation-adaptation cycles explain why these conflicts appear stalemated “despite digital technology’s ubiquity and proliferation.”

Aurel Sari turns his focus to how digital technologies are reshaping the legal landscape in “War and Law in a Digital World.”⁷ Sari argues that as technological innovation alters battlefield realities, the lack of consensus about how existing rules apply risks turning legal arguments into extensions of conflicts. He acknowledges that the “increased reach, tempo, destructiveness, and availability of conventional force is now married to the ubiquity, speed, scale, and impact of measures short of war, including in the digital and information spheres.” However, he rejects the contention that these developments have fully collapsed the combatant-civilian divide.

Jethro Norman offers an ethnographic perspective to modern war in “Foreign Fighters 2.0: The Interplay of Technology and Lived Experience in the Russia-Ukraine War.”⁸ He investigates how digital technologies are reshaping foreign fighter participation in contemporary warfare and attracting individuals with technical expertise rather than conventional combat backgrounds. He argues that these emergent participants “embody a convergence of civilian technical expertise and military operations, potentially redefining conventional boundaries between combatants and civilians.”

In “Digital Connectivity and Digital Informants in War,”⁹ Jack McDonald describes how smartphones and associated technologies permit any civilian to potentially pass targeting data to local and distant forces almost instantaneously. As a result, analysts must rethink how “intangible contributions to armed conflict” may expose civilians to targeting or heighten the risk that military forces violate international humanitarian law in response to digital informants.

Kristin Ljungkvist examines Sweden’s Cold War–era strategy of total defense, which its government is in the process of reestablishing. She cautions in her article, “Participatory War and Its Challenges for Total Defense,”¹⁰ that the ubiquity of digital networks and smart devices in today’s environment poses unique challenges to this concept, raising questions about “civilian protection, trust in public institutions, and the upholding of democratic principles.” Ljungkvist argues that as governments promote these precepts, they must reckon with difficult issues, such as the potential diminishment of civil liberties and the unpredictability of digitally mobilized populations.

In her article, “Digital Communication as a Weapon: The Case of Mali,”¹¹ Mirjam de Bruijn explores the role of digital communication networks in contributing to cultural violence in the ongoing war in Mali. Incorporating results from several research projects she has carried out in Mali and across the Sahel, de Bruijn looks at the digital dimensions of conflict, from social media platforms to cross-regional and transnational digital networks, internet and social media shutdowns, and digital propaganda.

Finally, Emily Bienvenue et al. analyze “Private Tech Companies, the State and the New Character of War.”¹² In their article, the authors explore how private technology firms are renegotiating the state’s sovereign control over military power. Unlike traditional defense contractors that supplied discrete hardware, contemporary tech companies such as Palantir, SpaceX, and commercial data platforms now manage the digital infrastructures, analytics, and AI systems upon which command and control depend. This is blurring the boundary between state and market authority. This new dependency signals a shift in the character of armed conflict, as states must navigate a global “war ecology” in which civilian technologies, venture capital imperatives, and transnational data networks increasingly coproduce both the means and meaning of war.

The age of technological disruption in warfare is here. It is not coming in the future; it is not confined to laboratories or think tanks. It is unfolding before our very eyes across battlefields. This collection is an invitation to grapple with that reality: to analyze it, to understand it, and to consider what it means for the wars yet to come.