Seems likely that any conflict will be very much a robot war ... fought over supply chain routes.

Apart from air & sea drones, you've probably seen China's robot dogs. It's not hard to imagine driverless subs delivering platoons of robot dogs to do the bulk of front-line fighting.

The other thing about robots is that it also expands the grey-zone. If you sink a manned-ship or shoot down a plane then that would cause a 'normal' war, but if you shoot up some drones, it probably won't. It provides more of that 'gradual escalation space' that we talked about before. Like cyber-war, there are no defined rules of engagement.