Ahead of the IET’s annual International Satcoms Conference in June, we look at how technology can help deal with the battlefield’s biggest imponderable: friction.
In May 2025, the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced £1bn of investment in technology to speed up battlefield decision-making. Technology, military planners hope, will help overcome battlefield friction, a phrase coined by 19th-century German philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz to describe unforeseen circumstances and challenges that occur on the battlefield to disrupt or delay operations.
In Clausewitz’s seminal work On War, he surmised that friction could be caused by logistical and supply issues, equipment malfunction, environmental factors such as weather and terrain, communication breakdowns, or unexpected actions taken by enemy commanders or combatants. “A quarter of the factors on which action [in war] is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty,” Clausewitz wrote.
But, although the battlefields...