Dr. Tina P. Srivastava.

Dr. Tina P. Srivistava is a former chief engineer of electronic warfare programs at Raytheon Co. She is a lecturer at MIT in the areas of aerodynamics, aviation, complex systems, and technology roadmapping and selection. She is also an FAA certified pilot and the author of Innovating in a Secret World: The Future of National Security and Global Leadership.

What will be the nature of warfare in 20 years? We're already getting a glimpse today. My sense is that the very changes that have unfolded already in our still new century will extend into the future and, indeed, become more pronounced. All of them have implications for technology and the innovation that creates it.

The first of these is the increasingly asymmetric nature of warfare. For instance, as the United States continues to devote billions of dollars to developing increasingly sophisticated military technologies, enemies will fight more and more with inexpensive weapons and techniques such as improvised explosive devices. As we move forward over the next 20 years, asymmetric warfare will be less and less about who we are fighting than about managing this cost through technology innovation.

The era of potential widespread damage, perhaps even mass destruction, from a cheap "dirty bomb" is already upon us. Conflicts between nations, on the other hand, are becoming increasingly non-kinetic, with attacks easier than ever to deny. In this case, I see a near future of combatants fighting us with information, specifically false information.

There is a focus today on sensor fusion--combining multiple sources of data to make inferences. If adversaries improve their ability to disguise false information and inject it into our systems, our inferences will not be reliable. It will be far less difficult and expensive for them to generate that false information than it will be for us to ensure the correctness of information flowing through networks.

Fighting with false information reflects a broader shift to non-kinetic warfare. While we will see changes to existing weapons platforms, it will be nothing like the tectonic shift brought about by the creation of the atomic bomb. Our past focus on destroying our enemies' physical, kinetic capabilities to fight by killing warfighters will increasingly become a focus on degrading the enemy's capability to wage warfare by disabling and destroying our technology and infrastructure.

Reducing costs, in terms of both dollars and lives, will be an...