The debates around conflict transformation and the impact of technology are as old as the art of war. It is true, however, that recent technological developments have raised questions about an augmented soldier whose capabilities should help him or her to better understand a complex environment. This article proposes to educate about complexity rather than relying on technological criteria alone.

In 1956, in an article on the soldier of the future, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert B. Rigg described the future Army soldier as a warrior between Captain America and Superman, "living, moving and fighting in an environment of machines and astonishing machines and weapons, flown by nuclear-powered helicopters, flying tanks and artillery, missiles, drones and mechanical spies" .¹. Informed by balloon-sized capsules launched behind enemy lines, retrieving the necessary information about the weather and the enemy's devices, this soldier could communicate at the phenomenal speed of 17 words per minute - in Morse code. And after defeating, he would have celebrated his victory by pulling a packet of cigarettes from a dedicated pocket. Of course, this prototype fighter, expected in 1974, never saw the light of day as the USArmy experimented with the harsh reality of Vietnam's rice fields and jungle. This trend between a technological progress whose achievements would be almost fantastic and the pitfall of reality reflects very largely the way the West imagines, conceives, predicts the future in general, and conflicts in particular. This exercise is based on a twofold project: an ethical and philosophical framework that forms the profession of arms, and a belief in technology as a source of power. At the end of the 19th century, this gave rise to the emergence of a futuristic trend, of which Jules Verne's works are an example, but to which the military also contributed: who remembers that the future lieutenant-colonel and MP Driant wrote under a pseudonym books, one of whose quadrilogies was entitled La Guerre de Demain (Tomorrow's War)?² ? This literature accompanies the multitude of doctrinal works - and one thinks of Foch - but with another colouring revolving around the same questions: what will tomorrow's battle be?

Unsurprisingly, the Belle Époque authors are convinced that new weapons and the introduction of new technologies on the battlefield will reduce the hypothesis of long, heavy and deadly conflicts. How can we think otherwise, when industrial warfare kills more, as the lessons of the Civil War, the War of 1870 and the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1905 underline? Yet some authors take issue with the prevailing doxa and consider, on the contrary, that technology leads to a kind of pact between future belligerents. Jean de Bloch, in 1901, draws from the observation of the new equipment (repeating rifles, smokeless powder, rapid fire artillery, etc.) and the new technology of the war.) the idea that because they are more effective and deadlier, these weapons lead to the risk of indecisive operations and a war of position; he dethe view that the solution lies less in investing in lethal technologies than in the need to teach the art of diplomacy and the search for political solutions to exit a conflict³.

Bloch's intuitions are still relevant today. The emphasis placed on technology cannot be dissociated from the social, political, economic and cultural environments in which it will be used. The insertion of a technological novelty responds to the Scrabble theory, according to the rule that an insertion into an already existing ecosystem only takes on its full dimension by connecting to things that already exist. The best example of this is the tank whose beginnings in 1916 were catastrophic but which managed, a year later, to become part of the general manoeuvre, ensuring the breakthrough of the front⁴. The dream that a technology reverses the course of a war - with the very particular exception of nuclear fire - has also lived on, especially since the reThe dream that technology reverses the course of war - with the very particular exception of nuclear fire - has also lived on, all the more so as current discussions on the future operational environment underline the importance of levelling and dual technologies, which can only encourage Western armies to avoid becoming locked into a race for all-technology.⁵.

The debates on the augmented soldier, on the fighter of the future must therefore respond to what the former Chief of Staff of the European Union defined as a prerequisite: a soldier "well protected to survive, light to move, adequately equipped to carry out his mission and sufficiently autonomous to free himself from a logistics chain that would no longer be assured .⁶. At the same time, these material requirements cannot be abstracted from know-how and knowledge, which Anglo-Saxons call "skills". In fact, the debate is as much about how to equip the soldier of the future as how to train him and train him intellectually and cognitively for his future environment. This last point is all the more critical as the battlefield of the future will be demanding. It will put devices, organizations and bodies to the test, it will be extended and compartmentalized in a space that may be both saturated by populations and information, or deserted and hostile. Recent feedback gives an impression of what will be needed: quality intelligence and real-time knowledge of the operational situation, the ability to separate/distinguish civilians, militiamen, guerrillas and regular combatants, a superiority in maneuvering in all fields of confrontation - real and immaterial -, resilient communications and most of all, the reversibility and plasticity of postures to respond proportionally to any form of aggression.

The stakes revolve in fact around the dispersion and concentration of forces. The future battlefield will weigh on the cohesion of military organizations and their structures: under Napoleon, 5,000 soldiers held and fought on a square kilometre, compared to the 25 combatants of the Yom Kippur War - and probably even less today.⁷. Paradoxically, seizing and controlling a city requires more and more forces and means: for Fallujah in 2004, the Marine Corps lined up more than 50,000 men to seize a 5 x 5 km quadrilateral where the enemy may have 5,000 combatants.⁸. In this compartmentalized and fragmented space, soldiers will have to fight a "connected and disconnected" battle, which goes beyond the simple problem of communications capable of operating in an environment where physical obstacles (buildings, waste areas, underground, etc.) are not the only ones to be overcome.) will be coupled with human interference (jamming, electromagnetic interception, etc.).⁹.

The question of equipment becomes crucial here: How can we ensure that each combatant will be connected to the others - within a device - while at the same time being able to guarantee control of very large or, on the contrary, very congested areas where one can sometimes be (very) far away from one's comrades? How, in this case, can one not give in to psychological and psychic stress? It will thus be a question of acting on the physical performances - muscular in particular - as well as on the psychic and cognitive competences in order to guarantee a strong individual resilience.¹⁰.

One way to take the heat out of the debate is not to focus solely on the technological aspects, but on what these contributions mean in terms of additional capabilities: without denying the ethical, but also the social and cultural issues, the problem lies above all in the new skills that will be required of soldiers. Here again, the debate is not new - one need only reread Krulak and his "strategic corporal".¹¹. An effort on education as much as on training leads to making the soldier a complete man, capable at his level of implementing principles of reasoning and strategic thinking. More than on the technological tutor, it is a question of positioning the cursor on the way that each one would have to grasp a complex problem in order to bring the least bad solution; faced with these "wicked problems", there is in fact no ready-made answer but aptitudes and reflexes to be taken.¹². The pursuit of ephemeral and always elusive technological superiority also obscures the importance of asking the right questions in order to come closer to an answer and a solution: investment in technological additions may give a jump start and tactical advantage, but will never replace strategic thinking and political leadership. In other words, debates about the augmented soldier or the man-machine partnership leave aside what will long remain an essential aspect of warfare: the reasons why we fight and why we are willing to die. And these are certainly not a series of zeroes and ones.

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1 Robert B. RIGG: "Soldier of the Futurarmy", Army Magazine, November 1956, https://www. ausa.org/publications/soldier-futurarmy.

2 Captain DANRIT: La Guerre de Demain (La Guerre des Forts, La Guerre en rase campagne, La Guerre en ballon, Le journal de guerre du lieutenant von Piefke), Paris, Fayard and Flammarion, 1889-1896, https://www.danrit.fr/guerre-de-demain.

3 Thérèse DELPECH: La " Guerre impossible " according to Ivan Bloch, Politiqueétrangère n° 66/3 2001, p. 705-712.

4 On these questions, see Michel GOYA: L'invention de la guerre moderne. Du pantalon rouge au char d'assaut, 1871-1918, Paris, Taillandier, 2019.

5 Centre de Réflexion Terre, Les principes de la guerre en 2035, proceedings of the June 2019 international forum, Paris, CDEC, 2019.

6 Speech by the Chief of Staff of the European Union at the Future Soldier Systems Conference, 20 October 2016 .

7 Figures on unit dispersion can be found at http://www.dupuyinstitute. org/blog/tag/dispersion/ and in Christopher A. Lawrence: War by numbers. Understanding Conventional Combat, Lincoln, Potomac Books, 2017.

8 Michel GOYA: The Furious Ghosts of Fallujah. Opération Al Fajr / Phantom Fury (July-November 2004), Paris, CDEF, Cahiers du RETEX, CDEF-DREX, 2006.

9 Conrad CRANE: The Future Soldier: Alone in a Crowd, War On the Rocks, 19 January 2017, https://warontherocks.com/2017/01/the-future-soldier-alone-in-a-crowd/.

10 US National Research Council, Board on Army Science and Technology, Making the Soldier Decisive on Future Battlefields, Washington DC: The National Academies Press, May 2013, p. 2.

11 Charles KRULAK: The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block Wars, Marines Magazine, January 1999.

12 Anna SACKETT et al: Enhancing the Strategic Capability of the Army: An Investigation of Strategic Thinking Tasks, Skills, and Development, Army Research Inst for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, Fort Belvoir, 2015.