Contractors or robots? Future warfare between privatization and automation

Contemporary warfare is increasingly shaped by the complex relationship between the privatization of security and technologically driven automation. On the one hand, there is a growing tendency to employ private military and security companies for a range of military support tasks. On the other hand, the growing automation of security technologies is bound to make war less manpower intensive. Combat systems will have much more autonomy and humans will be working more closely with machines than they do today. The article provides an original analysis on the interplay between the privatization of security tasks and technologically driven automation and investigates their impact on the defence industry and the armed forces. These two sets of actors are arguably among the most impacted by the multi-faceted relations between privatization and automation. Technological progress creates the need for contractors to maintain and operate platforms that militaries do not have expertise to run. However, technologically driven automation - often developed in value chains far removed from the military-industrial pipeline - might also replace private contractors in non-core security tasks. The possibility to employ automated and autonomous systems will hence impact on the already delicate balance between private contractors and publicly-funded armed forces.