Gone are the days when militaries used to fire canon balls and drop bombs onto ships and targets. Modern-day wars are all about gadgets and intelligence.

But the human cost remains the same, but the number is substantially less in modern warfare. Around 85 million people died in the Second World War (World War II), and modern warfare statistics is 300,000. In fact, civilians – whether on land or at sea – continue to be directly targeted.

However, it cannot be denied that warfare has transformed – far beyond the waves and land. Operations go into space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Navies can strike across vast distances with stealth and long-range weapons, where sea, air, land, cyber, and space converge.

The threats are real and varied: unmanned maritime systems, aerial drones, precision missiles, swarming fast-attack craft, seabed warfare and still, the danger of naval mines. Naval warfare has become multi-domain – more faster, more complex, and far more dangerous.

International Committee of the Red Cross Legal Adviser Abby Zeith says the oceans are a shared global commons. Even in war, they do not cease to be shared – by belligerents and neutrals alike. And today, more than ever, its importance to all of us cannot be overstated.

Conflict at sea touches far more than the belligerents. Its impact is felt by states and other actors not participating in the conflict. It affects trade, food, energy, communications, migration, leisure – even the air we breathe.

Modern maritime operations in armed conflict are highly complex. Commanding dispersed forces across vast oceans is a formidable challenge. Distance reduces situational awareness, often forcing commanders to make critical decisions with incomplete information.

Merchant shipping today looks nothing like it did at the end of the last world war. Approximately 80 percent of the world trade moves by sea. Global trade is now faster, deeply interconnected, and essential to everyday life in ways the traditional law of naval warfare simply never imagined.

Never-Ending Wars

Since 2020, there has been an increase in international conflicts – doubling from four in 2024, to eight in 2025. This is a very concerning trend. According to the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), several latent border conflicts which have become violent, reflecting the current growing global tensions.

While state-based violence increased, non-state conflicts decreased slightly compared to previous years. In 2025, 75 non-state conflicts were recorded, resulting in approximately 14,500 battle-related deaths. Africa is still the continent with the highest levels of non-state violence.

The level of one-sided violence against civilians increased dramatically from 14,200 in 2024 to 76,500 in 2025. This increase can be attributed to the conflict in Sudan. In 2025, 65 conflicts were recorded in 35 countries – an increase from 2024 in both the number of state-based conflicts and the number of countries experiencing them. Notably, the gap between the number of conflicts and the number of conflict countries has increased over the past decade, indicating a rise in countries hosting multiple simultaneous conflicts, such as Myanmar with five civil conflicts, and Israel with two civil conflicts and three international conflicts.

In addition, a number of countries host more than three conflicts, such as Afghanistan, Cameroon, Mali, Nigeria and Pakistan. Only 16 out of the 35 conflict countries have only one conflict. This trend points to a growing complexity in conflict dynamics with more actors involved, which has important implications for how we analyse and respond to conflict.

There is also an increase in the number of conflicts in the Middle East from 10 in 2024 to 13 in 2025. This is the highest recorded number of conflicts in the region since 1946.

Internationalisation of Conflicts

This is the latest trend.

While civil conflict has been the most common conflict type since the 1960s, in the past years we have seen an increase in the number of interstate conflicts (conflicts between countries). PRIO stated that the UCDP recorded four international conflicts in 2024. This is the highest number since 1983. However, this number increased to eight in 2025, the highest recorded in the post–World War II period. This trend reflects an increasing tension in the world, where protectionism and aggression are becoming more and more common.

This can split the international conflicts broadly into three categories: border conflicts, regional escalatory conflicts and invasions. The first category includes conflicts over disputed borders or border territory. For example, the longstanding Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan flared up in 2025 for the first time since 2020. In addition, enduring tensions along the Afghan and Pakistani border, as well as between Thailand and Cambodia, also escalated to conflict levels in 2025.

While all of these conflicts are separate, they represent increased tension on the global scene, and countries’ inclination to protect themselves. The second group – regional escalatory conflicts – relates specifically to the conflict in the Middle East, and the increasing hostility between the Arab countries in the region, Israel and the USA, and to some extent the Western sphere.

These are tensions we see growing in 2026, which could potentially escalate to a larger regional war. In the third category, we have two conflicts that can be classified as invasions – the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Israel’s invasion of Syria in the wake of the fall of the Assad regime.

Israel attacked several Syrian military infrastructures, arguing that this was to protect their short border with Syria. This conflict could also be argued to be part of the regional escalatory category, as tensions between Israel and Syria are often related to the conflict between Israel and Iran.

And now the U.S.- driven war against Iran.

Covert Hi-Tech Warfare

In December 1938, the battleship USS New York was the first to be equipped with the latest in radar, which could identify aircraft nearly 50 miles away. Radar had finally come into its own, and it went on to become a major factor in many naval victories during World War II, including in the battles of Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal. 

Modern-day warfare is about autonomous systems, spyware and artificial intelligence. Future warfare, defined by Multi-Domain Operations (MDOs), ensures that all platforms (organisations/forces, even individual soldiers) are networked. Networked platforms will remain combat-effective, while non-networked platforms (or even organisations/forces) will face adverse effects. And networks are meaningless unless there are applications on these networks that coordinate the combat and operational functions of forces, weapons systems, and equipment connected to them. A net-centric approach, therefore, does not just refer to networks, computers and data centres.

Also Read: Top 5 Alternative Fuel: Shipping Decarbonization

Future of Combat

Technology has made warfare more complex and alarming.

Beijing warns that the latest weapons in international espionage might literally be swimming in the deep blue sea. China’s Ministry of State Security claims that foreign intelligence agencies are deploying sensor-equipped marine animals, specifically dubbing them spy turtles and spy fish, to map out vulnerabilities in Chinese waters.

And these relatively large sea creatures are being fitted with covert tracking devices for gathering real-time ocean data. This data is then beamed overseas through satellite to map China’s coastline and track its submarine movements. The state warns that these biological spies collect critical metrics like water temperature, salinity, and seabed details.

It extends to automated surveillance equipment, including meteorological buoys and wave gliders designed to monitor the acoustic signatures of Chinese naval vessels. In response to this invisible secret war, Beijing is urging fishermen and researchers to report any unusual maritime equipment. To incentivize the public, the government is offering massive cash rewards reaching up to hundreds of thousands of yuan for any successful capture.

What do you think?