The war of the future will be a "war without bullets." That means the physical front line will disappear and digital infrastructure will become the front line. In a cyber siege where power plants halt and transportation is paralyzed, the enemy will force a surrender with little physical force.
On the 9th (local time), at a keynote address at "Cyber Week 2025" held at Tel Aviv University in Israel, Yossi Karadi, Director General of the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD), offered this outlook on the future shape of war.
Now in its 15th year, Cyber Week is a global cyber security conference that draws thousands of cyber security experts and political and business figures from around the world each year. This year's event was originally scheduled for June, but as the battlefield intensified, including Hamas rocket attacks threatening Tel Aviv, it was postponed once before opening.
At this event, Israel's former and current security chiefs said the world is moving beyond a phase where physical strikes and cyberattacks are combined to an era in which the outcome of war is decided by cyberattacks alone. As a solution, they agreed that a "national integrated defense network" must be built beyond individual agencies' responses.
The INCD is currently pushing the AI-based "Cyber Dome" project, a platform that integrates real-time defense of national infrastructure. It directly applies to cyberspace the concept of the "Iron Dome," the air defense system that intercepts incoming missiles.
◇ Fourth-generation "cyber-based war"… "Cut power and water and stoke fear with fake information"
That day, Director General Karadi divided the evolution of cyber warfare into four generations and said the fourth generation, the "cyber-based war (CBW)," will arrive soon.
According to the INCD's classification, first-generation cyber warfare was a period when the physical and cyber battlefields were completely separate and proceeded in parallel without interfering with each other. Starting in the second generation, the two battlefields began to interact, with cyberattacks disrupting physical functions such as weapon systems or production lines and physical attacks beginning to target digital infrastructure such as servers and routers. The third generation is the ongoing "hybrid war" phase, in which strikes on physical facilities and cyberattacks occur simultaneously.
Director General Karadi said, "The fourth-generation CBW is a war that starts in cyberspace and ends with cyberattacks," adding, "The enemy can paralyze the power grid, water, and communications and effectively disable national functions without firing missiles."
He cited a case in which Iran impersonated Israel's Home Front Command and sent a large number of fake emergency alerts, warning that when such psychological warfare is combined with disruptions to critical infrastructure, it becomes difficult for a state to function normally.
◇ "We must build a data dome that detects and blocks AI contamination in real time"
Security experts unanimously pointed to artificial intelligence (AI) as the fuse amplifying the threat of fourth-generation war. Former Israel Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said AI technology is exponentially expanding asymmetric threats and proposed building a "data dome." The data dome goes a step beyond the INCD's Cyber Dome, serving as an integrated shield that prevents contamination of AI models and detects and blocks fake news in real time.
Bennett said, "If past cyberattacks were at the level of mortars simply flying in and exploding, attacks in the AI era are like infiltrating special agents that think and adapt on their own." In other words, instead of humans writing code for each attack, autonomous AI agents find and penetrate system vulnerabilities on their own.
He warned, "A 'perfect storm'—with 100 million AI hackers infiltrating at once to attack infrastructure and manipulating public opinion with sophisticated disinformation—could come." He added, "Defense by individual corporations or institutions has its limits, so a national-level integrated shield that also covers AI must be built."
◇ "Damage from Hamas' Oct. 7 attack was a matter of human judgment… operating capability is the last line of defense"
At the event, speakers also offered self-criticism that advanced technology can only play its role when backed by human judgment. On Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas used thousands of rockets and paragliders to infiltrate southern Israel in a surprise attack, about 1,200 people in Israel were killed and about 250 were kidnapped.
Isaac Ben, a Tel Aviv University professor (head of the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center) known as the "godfather of Israel's cyber security," said, "Even before Hamas' Oct. 7 attack, some signs were detected by cyber and technical systems starting the night before, but the military command and national leadership did not accept them as signals of a full-scale war, so the alert posture was not raised." He explained that while technical signs were detected, the command's failure of judgment worsened the initial damage.
By contrast, in the process of intercepting missiles and kamikaze UAVs (drones) launched by Iran, Israel's electronic warfare and cyber capabilities combined with physical interception systems to block most threats outside the border. On this, Professor Ben said, "Just as good cars and fuel are useless if the driver makes mistakes, how advanced technology is operated ultimately depends on command judgment and a clear situational picture."