The trigger for Asia’s next war, privatised

In locations like the South China Sea, where tensions are already running high, military strategists have assumed that the only way that a war could start would be one country would make either a strategic decision or a catastrophic error that would lead to war.

But that failed to imagine that a Chinese vessel might be confronted by a private company out to set up the next pitch deck to a venture capital firm.

It is easy to imagine a scenario in which the Chinese warship assumed that such a drone – inching closer to a billion-dollar warship – had explosive capacity and then chose to interpret that as a deadly threat instigated by the governments of the Philippines or, more dangerously, the United States.

In response to this incident, Beijing already warned (Opens in new window) that close approaches to its navy would risk an escalation at sea.

Every existing framework, including laws and doctrines, assumes that conflicts will be between entirely states or at least organisations trying to act in some way like states. None of it anticipates a private company meandering in, one that now has the military capacity of a traditional state but the accountability of a Silicon Valley startup.

This incident is the third time that just this one company has had a piece of equipment in place that could destabilise an already tense part of the world. There is no reason for this to be the last such time, and every reason for this pattern to continue and proliferate. The funding cycles and need for investor attention that drive this new industry of defence tech demand more and more of these moments, each moving closer to the edge.

Maritime drones in particular pose an ambiguous challenge if they appear in these places. Seasats has a larger vessel (Opens in new window) in testing that can carry air drones and eventually munitions. This time, the drone in question only carried a camera.

But a car-sized hull barrelling toward a warship will look the same regardless of its payload. It will not matter that no government authorised its presence or that the founders of the company did not intend for it to spark a conflict. It will only matter that it did.