By Alina Vey
17 September 2026 · Geopolitics & International Affairs

For much of modern history, war had a recognisable form.

Armies crossed borders. Aircraft entered airspace. Ships confronted one another at sea. Infrastructure was destroyed, territory was occupied and governments formally acknowledged that a state of war existed.

Today, that distinction is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.

Conflict no longer necessarily begins with a declaration of war, nor does it always remain confined to a conventional battlefield. A drone entering another country’s airspace, a cyberattack against critical infrastructure, sabotage of a defence facility, disruption to global shipping, manipulation of information or the use of artificial intelligence in military decision-making can all form part of a wider strategic confrontation.

The question facing nations is therefore changing.

It is no longer simply what happens when war begins?

It is increasingly what happens when confrontation becomes so extensive that it becomes difficult to determine where competition ends and conflict begins?

The battlefield has expanded

The war in Ukraine has provided perhaps the clearest demonstration of how modern conflict can extend far beyond traditional military formations.

Drones have transformed the battlefield, while cyber operations, attacks on infrastructure, intelligence gathering and information warfare have become part of the wider strategic environment.

The consequences are not confined to Ukraine.

Drone incidents and concerns about sabotage have increasingly affected European security discussions, prompting calls within the European Union for stronger mechanisms to respond collectively to hybrid threats.

This matters because a traditional military attack presents a relatively clear question: who attacked whom?

Hybrid activity can be considerably more ambiguous.

A damaged communications network may be the result of a technical failure, criminal activity or deliberate interference. A drone crossing a border may be accidental, surveillance-related or part of a wider operation. Sabotage may be carried out by individuals whose connection to a state is difficult to establish publicly.

The uncertainty itself becomes strategically significant.

The space between peace and war

There is a growing strategic space between what we traditionally understand as peace and what we traditionally understand as war.

Within that space, states can compete aggressively without necessarily crossing the threshold of open military confrontation.

Economic restrictions can target strategic industries.

Technology controls can restrict access to advanced semiconductors.

Cyber operations can disrupt infrastructure.

Proxy forces can exert pressure without regular armed forces being directly involved.

Maritime disruption can affect energy supplies and international trade.

Intelligence operations can target technological and military capabilities.

None of these necessarily looks like conventional war when considered individually.

Together, however, they can produce many of the pressures associated with a major conflict.

This creates a problem for governments because the traditional language of war is based upon identifiable acts and identifiable thresholds.

Modern strategic competition is becoming considerably less tidy.

Geography still matters

Technology may have changed warfare, but geography has not disappeared.

The importance of the Red Sea, the Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz demonstrates this clearly.

A conflict in one region can affect shipping, energy markets and supply chains far beyond the immediate battlefield.

The strategic importance of these waterways means that disruption does not have to destroy an economy to create pressure. Even the threat of disruption can alter commercial behaviour, insurance costs, shipping routes and national security calculations.

This is one of the defining characteristics of modern interconnected conflict.

A nation does not have to be attacked directly to experience the consequences of war.

Technology is becoming a strategic asset

The same transformation is taking place in technology.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly moving from being primarily an economic and technological issue into the sphere of national security.

That development is already forcing governments and security specialists to consider questions that would have seemed largely theoretical only a few years ago.

How much authority should an autonomous system have?

Where must human control remain?

What happens if an AI system misinterprets an action by another state?

And perhaps most importantly: what happens when increasingly autonomous systems operate within an environment in which the consequences of a mistake could be catastrophic?

This is no longer simply a question for technology companies.

US and Chinese security experts have now proposed safeguards for military AI modelled in part on the thinking surrounding nuclear risks. Their proposals include keeping AI away from nuclear decision-making, maintaining meaningful human control over major cyber operations and establishing communication mechanisms for incidents involving autonomous systems.

The significance lies not simply in the technology itself, but in the recognition that technological competition between major powers can create new forms of strategic instability.

The danger of miscalculation

Perhaps the greatest danger in this changing environment is not necessarily that one nation deliberately decides to begin a major war.

It is that a sequence of smaller actions gradually produces a situation in which escalation becomes difficult to control.

A drone incident is followed by a military response.

A cyberattack leads to retaliation.

A maritime confrontation results in further deployments.

An AI system misinterprets an action.

A government responds before the circumstances are fully understood.

Each individual decision may appear limited.

The cumulative effect can be very different.

History has repeatedly demonstrated that wars do not always develop according to the intentions of those who begin them. Miscalculation, misunderstanding, alliances and domestic pressures can turn limited confrontations into much larger crises.

The difference today is that the speed of communication and the speed of technology may reduce the time available to prevent such escalation.

Diplomacy becomes more important, not less

It may seem that as military technology becomes more sophisticated, diplomacy becomes less important.

The opposite may be true.

When the boundary between peace and war becomes less clearly defined, communication becomes increasingly valuable.

States need channels through which incidents can be investigated before assumptions become conclusions.

They need mechanisms through which military encounters can be de-escalated.

They need agreements governing technologies whose consequences may extend beyond the intentions of their creators.

And they need political leaders capable of distinguishing between what must be resisted and what can still be negotiated.

Diplomacy does not mean weakness.

Nor does deterrence necessarily mean a desire for conflict.

The difficult task of strategy is often to maintain sufficient strength to prevent coercion while retaining sufficient communication to prevent confrontation from becoming irreversible.

A changing definition of war

The world may therefore be entering an era in which war does not always announce itself.

It may arrive gradually.

It may begin with an intrusion into cyberspace rather than across a border.

It may involve drones rather than conventional aircraft.

It may target infrastructure rather than cities.

It may be conducted through proxies rather than regular forces.

It may involve economic pressure, technological restrictions and information operations alongside conventional military power.

And increasingly, it may involve artificial intelligence whose speed of decision-making exceeds the speed at which human beings can fully understand what is happening.

This does not mean that conventional war has disappeared.

Far from it.

The wars being fought today demonstrate that armies, missiles, aircraft and territorial control remain brutally important.

But alongside conventional warfare, another form of strategic confrontation is developing.

The boundary between peace and war is becoming harder to define.

And when that boundary becomes unclear, the responsibility of governments becomes greater — not simply to prepare for conflict, but to recognise the moment when confrontation can still be prevented from becoming something larger.

The most dangerous war may not necessarily be the one that begins with a declaration.

It may be the one that develops gradually, through a series of actions that each appear manageable until, collectively, they are no longer manageable at all.

— Alina Vey