Dr Matthew Ford is an associate professor at the Swedish Defence University’s Department of War Studies. His research focuses on data, technology and innovation’s impacts on warfare in contemporary and historical contexts. Matthew is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an Associate at the Imperial War Museum Institute, an Honorary Historical Consultant to the Royal Armouries, a former West Point Fellow and the founding Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal for Military History. His latest book ‘War in the Smartphone Age’, published in 2025, looks at the impacts that smartphones and a digitally connected world have on warfare. In this interview we discussed In this interview we discussed how smartphone technologies are reshaping the logic of global politics, security and war.
What are the broader implications of the blurring of civilian and military capabilities for international relations in the smartphone age?
The technologies we’re talking about are expensive and often unevenly distributed, requiring a lot of infrastructure to support them, like satellites and radio masts. On the one hand, these technologies play a huge part in moving goods and services around the world, but they have also enabled the emergence of individual smart devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) which effectively introduces extremely sensitive sensors and trackers into people’s daily lives. This is good for the user who gets access to those abilities, but it’s also useful for companies and governments to get information from users. This means that the state can monitor almost any individual and can analyse that data on a large scale.
This has changed the face of capitalism and how our lives are lived as everything has increasingly moved online. What I have focused on most is how it has changed how wars are fought. I’m not suggesting the smartphone is a game changing war technology, but it has become the substrate of how life is carried out. So when a war affects an area or community, the highly connected nature of that area will affect that war. It affects not only how we see and understand war but also how war is fought. It’s not that the device is just about media or commerce; it’s also about fighting. I think it’s really important that we understand the impact these devices have on the political economy of our everyday lives and then think about that in relation to warfare.
Are we seeing the securitisation of smartphones and related technologies by governments today?
My argument is that smartphones have reshaped the pattern of engagement with war. So now anyone anywhere can participate in war, any time and anywhere in the world. War is being broadcast all around the world via smartphones, which can be amplified by individual users or be participated in by users by gathering information or even controlling a remote weapons system. So these technologies can be used for direct military application. For example, you could take a picture of a Russian column advancing down a street in Ukraine and then send it to military personnel who use it to attack that column remotely. The Ukrainians have built apps for citizens to gather data themselves and send them back to intelligence cells. Interestingly though, they were built by an independent organisation, the Come Back Alive Foundation, that crowdsourced a lot of the development.
Ukraine is a situation where war has come to an already digitised society, but there are wars around the world that have been going on for decades, where digitisation came to the war instead. In those wars, the role of digitisation is much less noticed by analysts because it creeps in, and people fail to ask how it fundamentally affects war.
In Ukraine, we have seen a securitisation of smartphone technology as the government looks to mobilise its population in support of the war. In other contexts it’s unsure if there is the same level of securitisation because so few people are studying it. We’re also not paying enough attention to the long history and global differentiation of these technologies in war, which means things which we could have understood are surprising us. We need to be paying much more attention to how these dynamics develop, which can have enormous impacts on how war functions.
Do you have any thoughts on China’s approach to regulating smartphone technologies in this context?
China is a unique actor in this space, and it invested heavily in infrastructural power across the board. Having so much ownership over these technologies means you can shape how they are used, and in China’s case, if you make them cheaper than anywhere else, then you can use these technologies for global influence. On the other hand, if you can control these infrastructures, then you can limit access to them, such as the Great Firewall of China. These controls are very important because they allow China to tightly control the media and information space within its country, which has profound implications for how it would affect warfare. This is a very different model to the ones in the US or Europe, and at first glance at least, it looks to be a much more stable system, although it is built on authoritarianism.
How should we understand social media companies as actors in the context of ‘war in the smartphone age’?
Social media platforms are mostly in the US and are regulated by the US government. In the Communications Decency Act from 1996 Section 230, it says that online sites aren’t publishers but are platforms and that individual users are responsible for the content put out. This has led to a system whereby there isn’t much moderation, and these platforms’ algorithms promote content that gets the most engagement, which tends to be sensationalist or shocking. And it still requires an army of people to moderate this content despite the limited controls. Even on a platform like Instagram, it doesn’t take many clicks to get to something nasty. The only way to reform that probably is to change Section 230 and make these platforms publishers so they are forced to moderate properly. That would cut out a lot of the crap you see online, but it would also destroy the business models of these platforms too. But this will never be reformed because populist politicians have used these platforms and their algorithms to gain power. These platforms are now shaping world politics, and owners like Elon Musk can push narratives with these platforms with no way for countries like the UK to stop him. We can see this really playing out in the Trump administration.
How should smaller countries like the UK approach dealing with these companies or try to position themselves in the global digital landscape for geopolitical reasons?
The US has created the conditions where it has its own global infrastructural power. For example, all financial trades at some point have to pass through the US network infrastructure. Similarly, the internet mostly gets routed through the US whether we like it or not. This means the US has the capacity to place chokeholds on what countries do. Yesterday I saw an example where Iraq’s oil sales are being routed through a US-based clearing house before going back to the Iraqi government. On paper Iraq has control over its revenue, but in theory the US could squeeze them. The US monitors all of the money passing through it, which was a system set up due to the global war on terror and the US government wanting to track terror finance networks.
This infrastructure is now being used against European states. When European countries were fighting alongside the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, they never imagined that these technological dependencies would be used against them. It’s weaponised interdependence. These chokeholds can be used to shape states’ behaviors but also people’s perspectives, which can be just as potent. What’s interesting is that unlike Putin, who tries to keep his enemies divided, Trump likes to keep his friends divided and to leverage them for personal gain. It’s quite impressive actually what they’re doing, because they’re dominating so much of international relations. And this, unlike China, is all in the open, and European states can see exactly what the US is doing to them. It puts European states in a very difficult position now because they’re being threatened not just from the east but from the west too.
What will be the impact of the rise of AI as an agent itself in these digital infrastructures on warfare?
That’s a huge question. So AI is built out of the same digital infrastructures we have been talking about, and it actually needs smartphones to build that data pool. These AIs can therefore have access to so much of the data that we generate in our daily lives, not just military data, and they can employ this mundane daily data with lethality in a military context. If we look at the example of Iran, these technologies have allowed the US to track the leaders of Iran on a daily basis and guess where they will be at any one time, even if those leaders themselves aren’t carrying a smartphone.
AI can also be used to predict and pre-plan things and to calculate percentage chances of how actions will result in war, which will reduce uncertainty. It could also be used to aggregate and analyse large amounts of data, so you can quickly build a target list or a plan for a war. Usually this would take an army of analysts to do manually, looking at communications, footage and metadata, but AI would make it almost instant. We’ve already seen how it has increased the number of targets the US can pursue. In Kosovo it was 180 a day; now it’s 500 or even 1000. This speed of operations can be devastating and is being actively pursued by the Pentagon. The problem with this, though, is that smartphones have sped everything up, making it harder to clearly communicate during wars to allies, to justify wars and to relate ends and means in general.
How are the legacies of the UK’s experiences in recent wars in the middle east informing its current approach in the region?
When I wrote my article about the UK’s experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, I thought our power was at a low point, but now after fifteen years of cuts and austerity it has been greatly further reduced. This has meant that the military has reduced in size and capability in those years, which has been further perpetuated by some of the decisions the UK has made, which have harmed growth. The UK today claims to have global interests but has lost the means to pursue those global interests. The only way to reverse this is by cutting welfare, which nobody is going to vote for. So what is left now is for the British political establishment to get over this and focus its capabilities and its global interests. We’re now in a situation where Trump is openly humiliating Britain because of its lack of military capability, yet we’ve still not come to terms with this reality.
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