If this trend toward substituting machines for human labor on the battlefield continues, the source of coercive capacity and the vector of political upheaval will correspondingly continue to shift away from labor and toward capital. Once the sovereign can rule the citizenry without needing to co-opt their coercive capacity, relying instead on corporate persons, the old social contract breaks.
In turn, the competitive pressures of the international system may end up rewarding those states that organize around a new social contract—one more representative of the source of the sovereign’s coercive power. Today, private firms are increasingly becoming the source of this power, with fractious public-private partnerships providing early evidence of this fact. Countries like Ukraine are especially vulnerable to this new social contract, and it will take the continued development of domestic high-skilled labor and industry to prevent them from being beholden to the interests of foreign capital.
— Read on letter.palladiummag.com/p/war-by-other-means
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