The Small and the Many

As silicon becomes cheaper, lighter, and faster, more data is collected, processed, and transmitted, and war is altered through several stages. Pop-up warfare describes the battlefield in which the means of war are quiet or hidden until they rise and engage. The growing and (for the time being) unchallenged ability of U.S. forces to lay a Mesh over the battlefield permits the tracking and targeting of increasingly small, quick, stealthy, and transient objects. The logical consequence of this capability’s spread is Fire-ant warfare, a battlefield dominated by scads of sensors, emitters, and microprojectiles.