by Doug Casey, Casey Research:

Justin note: Yesterday, Doug and I discussed how future wars will be fought differently than they are today.

Today, in part two, Doug explains what a possible shooting war between the U.S. and China would look like… how artificial intelligence could be used in future wars… and what he believes will be “the single biggest technology that’s going to change the nature of warfare.”

Justin: What about a possible shooting war between the United States and China? You said there was a high probability of that happening recently.

Doug: Well, it seems like all these horrible people Trump has surrounded himself with—like that fellow with the bushy mustache—are banking on one, a conventional war. They seem to figure US aircraft carrier groups will allow them to bring the war to the enemy, but avoid going nuclear.

Unfortunately, the carrier is equivalent to the battleship in World War II. It has many sophisticated defense mechanisms, but there is no defense against the hypersonic weapons that the Russians, Chinese, and soon everybody else, are developing.

The carrier group’s Aegis systems, phalanx guns, and anti-aircraft missiles are useless against hypersonic attack.

Even nuclear weapons are becoming dinosaurs. In our last interview, I mentioned the space weapon, the “Rod from God.” Now, this won’t be deployed anytime soon. That’s because—and this is speculation—each rod would be 20 feet long, a foot in diameter, and made out of tungsten, which has an extremely high specific gravity, about 19, the same as metallic uranium. Even lead is only 11. Each rod might weigh 10 or 15 tons.

There are major technical hurdles of getting just one of those into high orbit. Then, there’s the challenge of building a launch platform for a battery of them in space. Then keeping the satellite, the battle station, safe from a preemptive strike.

The basic idea is sound from a number of standpoints, however. I first encountered it in Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, a really great sci-fi book he wrote in the ’60s. The idea was that the colony on the moon revolts against Earth, and simply launches big rocks down the gravity well to win the war. Something like that will undoubtedly happen in the future.

Justin: Yeah, I read somewhere that it would cost $230 million just to get each one of those rods into orbit.

Doug: Expensive, plus billions more for the launch platform needed to deploy it. But considering the cost of a B-2 bomber, maybe $500 million, they might go for it. I’ll wager the future of warfare is going to be decapitating enemy leadership cadres. And it would be much more precise and useful than a nuke.

My guess is that the first decapitation of a major state’s leadership will be done by a nongovernmental organization with an agenda.

ISIS and Al Qaeda are excellent examples. They use open source warfare. Instead of having a very expensive think tank planning out ultra expensive, high-tech weaponry, these people deal with off-the-shelf products, ultra cheap. Somebody does something. They learn from them. They make a mistake. They incorporate what’s learned from that mistake.

When you’ve got hundreds of thousands or millions of young males that can be deployed at near zero cost, they’re much more effective than spending a million dollars training a special ops soldier. Or three million for a cruise missile. Quantity has a quality of its own.

A Muslim teenager with a bomb pack strapped around him can do almost as much damage as a cruise missile. But he’s a lot cheaper and there are a lot more of them. So that’s where things are headed.

If these guys were smart, they’d start attacking individual government officials. They’re backward types, generally ignorant, saturated with medieval theology—but they certainly all know about Hassan-i Sabbah, who originated the term assassin during the Crusades. He was quite effective against the invaders.

Then what would happen if they stopped attacking innocent civilians, and went strictly for government officials? Where are the nomenklatura going to hide? Is the government going to have to encase itself in concrete? How will these individuals protect themselves and their families? The answer is: They can’t. Just protecting the President alone, even now, is almost impossible and hugely expensive.

That’s the way it’s going to evolve because conventional warfare is too expensive, too destructive, and highly ineffective.

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