The Next Cyberwar May Begin Before Anyone Calls It War

At the Billington CyberSecurity Summit, experts warned that future conflict will exploit the systems modern society depends on — and AI could accelerate both attack and defense.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The future of warfare may not begin with missiles, soldiers or even a declaration of war. It may begin quietly, somewhere in the digital infrastructure that keeps ordinary life functioning.

That was one of the more unsettling themes to emerge from discussions at the Billington CyberSecurity Summit in Washington: cyber is no longer simply a technical component of warfare. It is becoming a strategic instrument in its own right.

Modern societies depend on deeply interconnected systems — electricity, water, communications, transportation, financial networks and digital infrastructure. That interdependence creates extraordinary efficiency, but it also creates vulnerability. An attack against one system can produce consequences far beyond its intended target.

Ukraine has already provided glimpses of this problem. Cyberattacks aimed at Ukrainian infrastructure have demonstrated how digital operations can accompany conventional warfare and how disruption can spread beyond the systems originally targeted.

The battlefield is also moving closer to everyday life. A future conflict could begin in what one speaker described as someone's "backyard": disrupting power, water or communications before the public fully understands that a larger confrontation is underway.

This makes resilience as important as defense.

Organizations cannot assume every attack can be blocked. They must also ask what happens when an attacker succeeds. Can essential systems continue operating? Can communications survive? Is there a Plan B when digital systems disappear?

That requires a different mentality — one focused not only on preventing intrusion, but on damage control, redundancy and the ability to fight through disruption.

AI further complicates the equation.

The discussion repeatedly returned to the growing combination of human and machine capabilities. The future is unlikely to be simply "human versus AI." Instead, both attackers and defenders will increasingly pair human judgment with autonomous or semi-autonomous systems.

AI could allow defenders to conduct continuous, agentic threat hunting across enormous networks. But adversaries can use similar technology to find weaknesses, automate attacks and operate at speeds human defenders cannot match.

The result is an emerging contest of asymmetry: finding the vulnerable point inside an increasingly complicated network — essentially, finding a needle in a stack of needles.

Perhaps the most important asset in that environment will not be a particular piece of software at all.

It will be confidence.

Cyber operations that undermine public trust, create uncertainty about what is functioning or make people question whether information and institutions can be trusted may achieve strategic effects without destroying anything physically.

The future cyberwar, then, may be less about knocking everything offline than making societies unsure of what still works.

And that makes resilience — technological, institutional and psychological — part of national defense.

AI Transparency Disclosure: This article was developed from the author's original reporting and notes taken while attending the 2026 Billington CyberSecurity Summit in Washington, D.C. Generative AI was used to assist with organization, drafting and editing. The reporting observations and source material originated with the author.