The concept of World War III as a repeat of WWII is outdated. The current global conflict is already underway, fought not with grand armies but through cyber attacks, economic leverage, proxy wars, and utility grid attacks—cheaper, more resilient forms of warfare.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict demonstrates that the first move in modern warfare is often a cyberattack to disable critical systems like logistics and communication. This is a low-cost, high-impact method to immobilize an adversary before physical engagement.

Warfare has evolved to a "sixth domain" where cyber becomes physical. Mass drone swarms act like a distributed software attack, requiring one-to-many defense systems analogous to antivirus software, rather than traditional one-missile-per-target defenses which cannot scale.

The next escalation in the Russia-NATO conflict won't be conventional warfare but an expansion of the current "shadow war." This involves asymmetric tactics like cyberattacks, destroying undersea cables, using drones in allied airspace, and funding vandalism of critical infrastructure to divide and destabilize European allies from within.

The most significant near-term AI cyber threat isn't a sudden apocalypse, but nation-states using advanced models to quietly find and hoard zero-day vulnerabilities. This creates a dangerous, unseen strategic imbalance, increasing the risk of miscalculation and escalation during geopolitical crises like a potential Taiwan invasion.

The successful drone attack on Amazon data centers highlights a critical vulnerability where cheap physical weapons can disable core digital infrastructure. This scenario, blurring the line between physical and cyber warfare, is not in most corporate threat models.

Cloudflare's CEO observes that powerful nations like Russia avoid direct cyberwar with the US due to a "mutually assured destruction" vulnerability. Instead, they use other global conflicts, such as Israel-Hamas, as cover to launch attacks while disguising their origin, making attribution difficult.

Adversaries increasingly use cyberspace to attack the foundations of society, government, and the economy. This creates a state of perpetual, low-level conflict—a 'gray zone' between war and peace. These actions test confidence in core systems and undermine international order without triggering a traditional military response.

The recent war with Iran demonstrates the collapse of the traditional 'continuum of conflict.' It showed that future wars will not be exclusively low-end or high-end. Instead, they will feature a diverse array of capabilities used in parallel, from soft-target drone attacks and cyber operations to conventional F-35 strikes and the deployment of carrier strike groups.