AI and the next South Asian crisis

IT is remarkable that humans, who once fought with bows, arrows, and swords, may eventually be supplanted by machines in warfare. That imagination began turning into reality once artificial intelligence arrived. In conflicts like Russia–Ukraine, and in the 2025 Israel–Iran war that drew in American firepower, AI has already proven a crucial and defining element. The dynamics of warfare are changing. One of the more somber chapters in the 2021 book The Age of AI: And Our Human Future — by Henry Kissinger, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and MIT computer scientist Daniel Huttenlocher — addresses that shift. The argument was designed for great-power rivalry, yet it feels more suited to South Asia. Nations are rapidly developing and deploying AI, which experts warn is becoming a new category of strategic power akin to nuclear and cyber weapons — and one less understood than the military technologies before it. Their primary concern is not science fiction’s killer robots. It is something more subtle, which they call incalculability. Strategy has always reckoned with human opponents, who carry predictable psychological traits and can be moved by bluffing, deterrence, fatigue, and doubt. An algorithm is bound only to its programmed directives and goals. It has no morale and shows no hesitation. Its decision-making, often imperceptible to an opponent, is resistant to the old deceptions and signals. Pit two such systems against one another and neither side can foresee the outcome of the clash or its unintended consequences. Even the creators of the weapon may not fully grasp how it will behave. The danger sharpens against the South Asian map. India and Pakistan have some of the world’s shortest missile flight times; their conventional and nuclear forces are interlinked; and their crises escalate fast when time is short. Into this, both are now folding AI. Analysts describe the result as a state of “no war, no peace” — a nebulous zone of ongoing, deniable hostilities carried