STRATEGIC

Is the World Falling Apart (And How Would We Know)? 37
time promoting the dissemination of appropriate ones—along with
education and public policy guidance—to advance development and
improve global health. But this will require staying one step ahead of
the many “tornados” hitting the developing world.
Technological change is also transforming how we think about
and prepare for warfare. As Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz
observed, “war’s nature doesn’t change, only its character.” 5 The nature
of war has always been and remains violent and political. But the character
of war—its conduct—is profoundly and visibly influenced by
technology.
Powerful capabilities that were once the exclusive preserve of
states are increasingly available to individuals, raising new questions
about what kind of nonproliferation regimes are feasible. In an era
when anyone can build a drone from a hobby kit and fly it with a smart
phone, it is no longer clear what “counterproliferation” or “arms control”
will mean. These issues are unlikely to get easier as the humanplus-machine
model of warfare develops.
Future administrations will almost certainly find themselves
struggling to keep up with (let alone regulate) new information technologies,
bio- and nanotechnology, powerful gene-editing tools such
as clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR),
advances in hacking and encryption, drones, robotics, 3-D printing
of weapons, artificial intelligence, and other game-changing developments
that could reshape the international economy, politics, and the
military balance of power, as they have done throughout history. Preserving
overwhelming U.S. military superiority—should the country
choose to do so—will be neither cheap nor easy.
5 Clausewitz quoted in Christopher Mewett, “Understanding War’s Enduring Nature
Alongside Its Changing Character,” War on the Rocks, blog, January 21, 2014. Lynn E. Davis,
Michael J. McNerney, and Daniel Byman, “Armed Drone Myth 1: They Will Transform
How War is Waged Globally,” The RAND Blog, February 17, 2015.