The Next 100 Years

a n ew k i n d o f wa r
World War II was the last major war of the European Age. In that age there
were two kinds of wars, which sometimes occurred simultaneously. One was

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global war, in which the world as a whole was the battlefield. Europeans 
waged wars on that scale as far back as the sixteenth century. The other was 
total war, in which entire societies were mobilized. In World War II, a na­
tion’s entire society was mobilized to field armies and to supply them. The 
distinction between soldiers and civilians, always tenuous, completely col­
lapsed in the global and total wars of the twentieth century. War became an 
extraordinary display of carnage, unlike anything yet seen—both global and 
total. 
The roots of total war are to be found in the nature of warfare since the 
emergence of ballistic weapons—weapons that delivered bullets, artillery 
shells, and bombs. A ballistic weapon is simply one that, once fired or re­
leased, can’t change its course. That makes these weapons inherently inaccu­
rate. A bullet fired from a rifle, or a bomb released by a bombardier, depends 
on the hand–eye coordination of a soldier or airman trying to concentrate 
while others try to kill him. In World War II, the probability of any one 
projectile hitting its target was startlingly low. 
When accuracy is low, the only solution is to saturate the battlefield with 
bullets and shells and bombs. That means that there have to be masses of 
weapons, and that in turn requires masses of soldiers. Masses of soldiers re­
quire vast quantities of supplies, from food to munitions. That requires vast 
numbers of men to deliver supplies, and masses of workers to produce 
them. In World War II, gasoline was essential for virtually all weapons sys­
tems. Consider that the effort to drill oil, refine it, and deliver it to the 
battlefield—and to the factories that supplied the battlefield—was by itself 
an undertaking far larger than the total effort that went into warfare in pre­
vious centuries. 
By the twentieth century, the outcome of wars required such a level of 
effort that nothing short of the total mobilization of society could achieve 
victory. War consisted of one society hurling itself against another. Victory 
depended on shattering the enemy’s society, damaging its population and 
infrastructure so completely that it could no longer produce the masses of 
weapons or field the massive armies required. 
But bombing a city with a thousand bombers is a vast and costly under­
taking. Imagine if you could achieve the same outcome with a single plane 

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and a single bomb. It would achieve the goal of total war at a fraction of the 
cost and danger to one’s own nation. That was the logic behind the atomic 
bomb. It was designed to destroy an enemy society so quickly and efficiently 
that the enemy would capitulate rather than face the bomb. Technically the 
atomic bomb was radically new. Militarily, it was simply a continuation of a 
culture of war that had been developing in Europe for centuries. 
The brute nature of nuclear weapons generated a technological revolu­
tion in warfare. Nuclear weapons were the reductio ad absurdum of global 
and total war. In order to fight nuclear wars, nations—the United States and 
the Soviet Union—had to be able to see globally. The only way to do that 
efficiently was to fly over enemy territory, and the safest and most effective 
way to do that was in space. While manned space projects were the public 
side of space programs, the primary motive—and funding—was driven by 
the need to know precisely where the other side had located its nuclear mis­
siles. Spy satellites evolved into real- time systems that could pinpoint enemy 
launchers within meters, allowing them to be targeted precisely. And that 
created the need for weapons that could hit those targets.