The Geopolitics of Cyberspace, 2025–2035: The Current State and Future of the “Invisible Battlefield”

The central argument of this book is that, in the geopolitics of the twenty-first century, the “fixed conditions” constraining states have shifted from the traditional domains of territory, oceans, and natural resources to digital infrastructure.
The author identifies three layers that constitute the new geopolitical foundations of modern society. The first consists of the routes through which data travels, including the internet, telecommunications networks, and submarine cables. The second consists of the places where computing takes place, namely the cloud and data centers. The third consists of the resources that support computing, such as semiconductors and electricity. These are not merely issues at the national level. Everyday business activities—including corporate servers, VPNs, and cloud services—are themselves built on these three layers. If the cloud goes down, a country grinds to a halt; if the supply of semiconductors is disrupted, both the military and industry come to a standstill; and if the power supply becomes unstable, AI itself ceases to function. The author views the geopolitics of the future as a struggle over decision-making—over “who chooses what, and how” (p. 17).
This idea is clarified further through a comparison between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In twentieth-century geopolitics, the main points of contention were maritime routes, resource deposits, and national borders. In the twenty-first century, however, the contested issues are the routes of submarine cables, the countries in which cloud infrastructure is located, semiconductor supply chains, and the electricity required to power AI. The battlefield has moved beyond the map to the other side of the screens we log into every morning (p. 21).
Another concept emphasized in this book is adaptability. In the age of cyber and intelligence warfare, the organizations that survive will not be those with the strongest defensive walls, but those capable of continually transforming themselves in response to evolving attacks. In other words, what matters is not the ability to “prevent every intrusion,” but the capacity to remain operational even when attacks are assumed to be inevitable (p. 30).
This idea also has implications for Japan’s institutional framework. The author discusses the enactment of legislation establishing active cyber defense in Japan in May 2025, which is scheduled to take effect in October 2026. Corporate cybersecurity is thus positioned not merely as an issue for individual companies, but as an integral part of national security (p. 40).
On the technological front, the author also warns of advances in quantum computing. The security of current encryption technologies rests on the fact that factoring extremely large numbers requires an enormous amount of time. Quantum computers and new algorithms, however, could invalidate this assumption. According to the author, the most aggressive forecasts suggest that a major turning point could occur in the early 2030s (p. 51).
Another important point is that more than 99 percent of Japan’s international communications pass through submarine cables. Although invisible, these cables are the “arteries” that sustain Japanese society and could become geopolitical targets (p. 52).
The scope of security is also expanding. The traditional domains of land, sea, and air have been joined by space, cyberspace, the electromagnetic spectrum, and the cognitive domain, bringing the number of contemporary warfare domains to seven. Warfare in which these domains interact in complex ways is known as “multi-domain warfare” (p. 63). In the war in Ukraine, it has become commonplace for drones costing only tens of thousands of yen to destroy tanks and naval vessels worth hundreds of millions of yen. What matters here is not the performance of each individual weapon, but whether a country can domestically produce inexpensive weapons on a massive scale (p. 73).
The author identifies AI, cloud computing, and robotics as the three factors that will determine sovereignty in the future (p. 75). The decade from 2025 to 2035 is regarded as particularly significant because the speed of attack and defense will surpass the limits of human capability. The author points out that military operations have already entered an era in which enormous numbers of targets must be processed within short periods of time (p. 76). As a result, society will inevitably have to transition from a model in which “humans respond” to one in which “AI autonomously brings situations under control.” Humans will cease to be frontline players and instead assume responsibility for designing rules, preventing systems from running out of control, and making final decisions (p. 80).
In cyberspace, the principle that determines victory or defeat is simple: understand the situation more accurately than the enemy and act more quickly (p. 92). The ultimate objective of cyber and intelligence warfare is not to defeat the enemy, but to render the conflict itself ineffective (p. 96).
For this reason, the author places particular emphasis on degraded-mode operations. Decisions about what to protect, what to abandon, how much deterioration in functionality to tolerate, and when to restore normal operations must be planned in peacetime. Rather than aiming to remain completely unscathed, the new condition for victory is the ability to keep society functioning even when intrusions or disruptions occur (pp. 109, 128).
On future battlefields, ground robots, drones, unmanned vessels, satellite constellations, AI agents, and generative AI will reach the front lines before humans do. Humans will remain behind the lines, designing guidelines for autonomous action, enabling AI to derive optimal solutions, and assuming responsibility for final decisions (p. 249).
The nature of alliances is also changing. Twentieth-century alliances were founded on military treaties and bases. In the twenty-first century, however, they cannot function effectively in actual combat without the real-time sharing of threat intelligence, common standards for AI training data, and interoperable systems. The author argues that the Japan–U.S. alliance must likewise evolve from an alliance centered on bases and treaties into one built around the integration of systems and data (p. 276).
The author also highlights Japan’s gaming industry as a source of distinctive national strengths. Technologies developed by Japanese companies—such as compelling user-interface design, low-latency communications, and fraud detection—can also be applied in the age of AI. The author believes that the countries capable of integrating the three layers of AI sovereignty, alliance sovereignty, and operating-system/interface sovereignty will take the lead in the 2030s (p. 277).
Finally, cyberattacks do not present a binary choice between “use” and “non-use,” as nuclear weapons do. They exist on a spectrum ranging from information theft and temporary operational disruption to physical destruction and loss of life, making it difficult to determine the point at which they constitute an act of war. This gray-zone nature of cyber conflict makes deterrence in the twenty-first century especially difficult (p. 286).
What this book depicts is a transition from a geopolitics concerned with seizing territory to one centered on communications, computing, electricity, AI, and cognition. Ultimately, the question is not whether a society can build impregnable walls, but whether it can adapt to change and continue functioning even when attempts are made to bring it to a halt.