What do you think air and naval warfare is going to look like in the next few decades? What new technologies be central? What new tactics will become practically feasible?
How will littoral areas be handled?
If it goes the way of networked warfare and distributed lethality, what’s that going to look like?
I’ll go first then:
In the last few years, lasers and railguns have been in the news. Yet lasers seem bound to be limited to a few kilometers of range because of atmospheric attenuation. Railguns appear to have low lifetimes and pose the problem of mounting guidance electronics on small projectiles which accelerate at tens of thousands of Gs with high heat and strong electromagnetic fields. Lasers and railguns may still be useful but mainly as CIWS.
I wonder if we’ll see a blending of platforms and munitions. By that I mean that some of the more recent munitions have the ability to loiter. On the other hand, some drones carry a warhead as payload. Thus we may see refuelable reconnaissance drones/cruise missile hybrids which are more expendable than manned aircraft, are intended to come back from most missions yet can kamikaze themselves if they spot a particularly high-value target.
In the same way, submarines might use tethered drones which can use active sonar without giving away the sub’s location and can turn into a torpedo if need be.
Positioning might become quite important against stealth since forward scattering radar* can be effective against stealth at long range and it requires the target to pass between the transmitter and receiver.
MASINT will likely become even more important although I’m not quite sure through what means.