The science of modern warfare
PodcastsThe Naked ScientistsThe science of modern warfareThe shifting front lines, and where warfare might go next. . . 29 July 2025In this edition of The Naked Scientists, how is science helping to shape the. . .
PodcastsThe Naked ScientistsThe science of modern warfareThe shifting front lines, and where warfare might go next. . . 29 July 2025In this edition of The Naked Scientists, how is science helping to shape the future of warfare?What modern warfare is likeAliona HlivcoFrom Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan to Myanmar, war is not something that happens elsewhere. It is present and it shapes economies, borders, families, and futures. But modern warfare doesn’t just happen with boots on the ground. It’s deeply entangled with science and technology - from surveillance satellites and missile guidance to drones, cyberweapons, and battlefield algorithms. In this episode, we explore how science is transforming the nature of war, and what that means for the people living through it. We begin with Ukraine, where a war that started with tanks and artillery has become a testing ground for modern military science. Here, drone footage is analysed by AI. Soldiers carry smartphones as often as weapons. And behind each trench line is a network of digital systems shaping what comes next. Aliona Hlivco is a Ukrainian political analyst and defence strategist. For her, war isn’t just a story on the news. It involves her family, and her brother in particular…Aliona - Yeah, he's been on the front line for exactly three years already. He volunteered in March 2022, probably not anticipating that it would last this long, but he's part of a reconnaissance unit. That's just about as much as I can share, meaning he's always on the front line or sometimes even too close to the action, which always keeps us worried and on our toes, shall I say. Chris - Given your knowledge of how this is all playing out and what you do professionally, what does this actually mean to you? How have you experienced what's happening to your old country, and given the family connection with all this?Aliona - Well, it's been a very interesting experience because on one hand, acknowledging that there's a full-scale war in your country definitely puts you in a state of shock for at least six months. And having spoken to some Ukrainian friends, they've gone through a similar process, but also at the same time, I was living in a peaceful UK, in London specifically. So I needed to still stay sane, stay on top of my day-to-day job, my bills. So it was very much a dual existence for me, almost like a parallel reality where you need to coexist between work and war back home. Chris - This presumably though, and I don't mean this in a rude way, but it must have been good for business because this is your business. Aliona - That was the upside, yes. And I do fully agree with the statement that every challenge provides an opportunity and it of course takes resilience and sobriety, I guess, and a will to take whatever you have to face and turn it into something productive. So it 100% accelerated my career unwillingly, because at the time of the invasion I was just working in a think tank, and then I went on to run it, to become a managing director here in Westminster, and eventually even launched my own consultancy, focusing on exactly all of the things that the war in Ukraine is producing at the moment in the world, if that's the right way to say, because it is creating a new stage of modern warfare as we speak. Chris - What is dominating that? We hear about drones; they're probably the biggest thing that has really risen to prominence, but what is different about this conflict in Ukraine that has moved warfare on to a new level?Aliona - I think drones and autonomous systems are definitely grabbing the headlines the most because it's a novelty, but what's talked about less is the multi-dimensional approach to war these days. So modern warfare now exists in multiple domains. We see the trench warfare with engagement of infantry and artillery and heavy weapons being used as much, if not even more than the First World War or Second World War level. At the same time, we're seeing a new digital dimension of this war, the development of modern technology, operating drones through artificial intelligence and deployment of that. Electronic warfare is spiralling and booming, and I think that's going to be the biggest challenge for the Western nations to tackle when it comes to facing adversaries, but also other domains like economic warfare, the geostrategic struggle of trying to form new alliances and build new partnerships at the time of geopolitical fragmentation. Cyberspace is a really big one and the one where Russia, for example, and China with their surveillance capabilities are getting more and more effective every day. So all of those domains exist simultaneously. And when you're fighting this war, you need to sustain all of those fronts at the same time. Chris - We've spoken to a number of military and defence specialists on a range of topics in recent years here on the programme, including about the war in Ukraine. And the one thing that they're saying is that while Western countries are arming Ukraine, they're also quite keen to do so because they're seeing how a lot of these modern generations of weapons and tactics actually play out in a real-world circumstance where they wouldn't normally be able to test them like that until it was the real thing for them. So I suppose in that respect, they're quite keen to collaborate with Ukraine up to a point because they actually get to test things. Aliona - Yes, Ukraine has definitely become a very effective testing ground for modern weapons. And it goes to everything from long-range missiles to tanks and armoured vehicles to potentially very soon fighter jets as more F-16s are coming into Ukraine and being used in Ukrainian skies. But it's also about the drone technology that you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation and all the modern developments. Whichever Western countries or even companies have access to Ukraine's battlefield, they can create something, deploy it on the battlefield and get live feedback of what to improve or how it can be improved. But it's also about learning from Ukrainian producers. The key to Ukraine's ingenuity is the lack of resources and the willingness to survive. And that combination creates a very quick and agile innovation cycle of about two weeks. So Ukrainians can create their drones in the garage with basic elements and parts, and then they would deploy it to the front line, they would learn the lessons, they would see how Russia is reacting to them. And by adjusting that to the electronic warfare signalling and jamming and basically the ability to destroy the drone and its ability to perform whatever tasks it was created to perform, the companies and the countries are learning very fast the innovation that they need. What is stealth warfare?Ramsey Faragher, Queens' College CambridgeModern conflict is very much a game of cat and mouse where combatants try to stay hidden. Stealth warfare - as it is called - is not just a tactical advantage, but a field of applied science. It draws on physics, signal processing, materials engineering and mathematics - all designed to outpace the systems built to detect and destroy. To understand how stealth works, I met Ramsey Faragher - CEO of the Royal Institute of Navigation - at Queens’ College, Cambridge. I began by asking him how submarines attempt to avoid detection…Ramsey - The primary thing they try to do is stay incredibly quiet. They move very, very slowly, typically at just walking pace when they're trying to be quiet underwater. From the very beginning of the vessel’s design, silence has been carefully considered. So there are padded floors to reduce vibration from people moving around inside the submarine, and no big clunky, whirring, banging equipment on board. Another trick they employ is to hide among other sources of noise. If it's raining heavily, submarines can hide beneath the sound of the raindrops on the water. And even at certain times of the year, in certain parts of the world, they can hide behind the sound of plankton mating. Chris - My goodness, what does that sound like?Ramsey - Lots of loud chittering in the ocean. Chris - How do they know where they are, though? Because when they're underwater, they don't have windows. You can't look out and search for landmarks. So how does a submarine actually navigate?Ramsey - That is an excellent and very, very expensive question. They have the world's most expensive accelerometers and gyroscopes on board that monitor every change in speed and orientation, accumulating those changes in acceleration and rotation. That's called inertial navigation. Over time, the uncertainty about where they are increases, so they still need some kind of positional fix. If they're confident they can raise a periscope, they'll do so with a GPS antenna and get a quick GPS fix. Then they might not need to come up again for an entire day, relying on the gyroscopes and accelerometers. Submarines also have favourite particular places where they'll take depth readings. They'll go to known features, ping once, and measure the depth against an undersea mountain or similar structure to get periodic position fixes. Chris - When we want to see where things are, we often use radar. In World War II it was a game-changer, wasn't it? Being able to see through mist and fog and detect things before they even knew you were there. How does radar do what it does?Ramsey - Radar is a radio signal that is transmitted very, very loudly from a big transmitter with a very specific pattern. The radar then listens for that pattern to reflect off objects and come back. As you said, radar was invented just before World War II, but it's still the predominant way we detect aircraft at long range today. The vast majority of stealth technologies are about hiding from those pings. Chris - When you want to hide something from radar, though, how effective is that? Is it really possible to hide from radar, and how does that work?Ramsey - One method is to coat an aircraft or ship with radar-absorbent materials, usually advanced versions of iron filings in rubber or paint. Various tricks are used to absorb the radio signal. The second method is to design the shape of the vessel or aircraft so that radar pulses bounce away from the source rather than straight back. A classic example is the corner reflector: any L-shape or 90-degree angle, such as a traditional aircraft tail with its vertical fin and horizontal stabilisers, acts as a perfect corner reflector. A radar pulse will bounce straight back to the source, making the plane light up like a fighter-jet Christmas tree. Stealth aircraft avoid these right angles in their main structure. Chris - Retroreflectors, aren't they? Isn't that how cat's eyes work in the road to reflect light from any angle? You see the cat's eyes illuminate the road ahead. It's the same principle. Ramsey - Exactly. Bicycle reflectors work the same way, reflecting visible light. Large metal structures a few feet long are excellent for reflecting radar. There is also a third, rare and expensive trick called active suppression. The aircraft quickly captures the radar pulse, makes a copy, and sends it back out of phase to cancel the incoming signal. Chris - Wouldn't that make a gap, though? If you've got an astute radar operator, they'd see an area darker than it should be, corresponding to a patch of sky. In fact, you'd be looking for the absence of something that tells you, “Whoa, something is trying to hide there. ”Ramsey - In terms of the direct radar return, it would look as though nothing is there, which is what you'd expect. But you're right that with bi-static or multi-static radars—where the pulse is emitted from a different location than the receiver—you can detect things that have absorbed energy. For example, if you usually see radar pulses bouncing off a mountain range and then notice a gap in that return, it could mean a stealth aircraft absorbed the energy that normally reflects back from that spot. All of these sorts of tricks are used both above and below the water. Chris - Warfare has really shifted with the current conflict, for instance in Ukraine, towards much smaller aircraft. It's not dominated by huge jets and bombers above the skies of Ukraine and Russia. This is being fought by drones. This is really the first time we've seen this on a major scale, isn't it?Ramsey - Yes, and stealth is quite different in this case and sometimes not needed at all. If you can launch thousands of incredibly cheap drones, they don't need to be stealthy. They can simply overwhelm the defences of the target. And because they're very small and often made of plastic or composite materials, they're often quite invisible to radar too. So you get a double advantage: they’re hard to detect, and there are so many of them. Chris - The interesting development I've seen more recently is that they're now being flown via fibre optic cables because of jamming. Drones appear, people jam the radio signals controlling them, and now they're making fibre-optic remote-controlled drones. Ramsey - Yes, exactly. It's the constant evolution of the weapon, the countermeasure, and then the counter-countermeasure. The original weapon was drones flown via radio using GPS. The countermeasure was jamming those signals. The counter-countermeasure was to attach 15 kilometres of fibre-optic cable to each drone and fly them via fibre. This shows just how complicated and rapidly evolving that theatre of war is.