Firstly the will of a significant portion of EU leaders, and some of EU society, is declining. The EU has become, in Robert Inglehart’s terms, a ‘soft postmodern society.’ As Christopher Coker has emphasised, such societies are averse to suffering and sacrifice, both averse to experiencing it themselves but also towards inflicting it on others. If this trend continues it is questionable whether the EU will retain the will to maintain and use highintensity military violence by 2020. And without that, the military will not mean very much. A proviso here is that will is contextual. A perception of an acute threat among EU leaders and societies can resuscitate a stronger will to act. This would, however, only arise after the problem has emerged, which is not the most healthy strategy.

The second major change is technology. In the coming decades three breakthrough technologies are likely to transform both our environment and our military tools. Advances in nanotechnology, data processing and sensor systems, and especially their fusion, will have at least two major consequences. Firstly, a vastly increased sensor grid. The world around us, and we ourselves, will increasingly become seeded with vast amounts of diffuse and networked miniature sensors. We will live in a sea of sensors and it will be increasingly difficult for individuals to unplug themselves from this information grid. Initially in the most advanced societies, but gradually spreading across the world. In addition, we will have the capability to seed uncovered parts of the world with sensors at short notice. Under these conditions the sphere of privacy will shrink enormously. This raises enormous ethical and political issues, but in this world decisive power will rest with those who control the sensor grid and the resulting datamaps.

The second major consequence of the nano-data-sensor fusion is that the tools of military force will be transformed, becoming smaller, more autonomous, more intelligent and very closely integrated. Today’s individual big centralised manned weapons systems are likely to be increasingly replaced by dispersed miniaturised swarms of robots. Clusters of minute subcomponents, each with different specific qualities (sensors, communications, damaging agents) and integrated into networks will become capable of acting coherently and of morphing in various configurations to perform a wide variety of tasks. This lies beyond 2020, but the trend will be there, with more and more unmanned vehicles, robotics and miniaturisation. It may also offer us a technological means to compensate for declining will.