the battlefield is certainly likely to change for major power militaries, but in lower tech theaters the old rules will still apply.
air superiority and control of the skies will allow ground strikes on armored troops/support vehicles/air defense units, which will make infantry a sitting duck.
directed energy weapons on ground and air vehicles will likely change the opening script for any war.
if you can defeat missiles fast enough the economics become unfeasable. it currently takes 2 or 3 SAMs to take down a high altitude jet. but if that jet can use a laser to burn out the missile tail control surfaces or seeker head electronics, then you will need to launch 6 to 9 SAMs to overwhelm that laser so that at least one missile gets through. [i posted on this a couple of years ago]
to some degree human pilot dogfighting ended a while ago.
IR missiles like the sidewinder can now pull way more g-load than any human pilot. radar missiles have so much range the type of maneuvers to counter them stops being about what the pilot cant do and what the fly by wire system can do.
active radar and hybird seekers make modern aerial engagement more like a submarine war. the advantage going to the one who finds the other first and gets a track solution that lets them waypoint a missile to their blindspot just before the seeker goes active.
in the thread asking if the f-35 is necessary, everyone assumes a status quo of missiles and cannons with gen4 maneuverability always being viable and necessary. but with the upcoming air portable laser defense systems seemingly yielding an actual product in 5 to 10 years, air to air missiles could be rendered ineffective.(you could probably overwhelm the laser with numbers by launching in clusters. but instead of the now standard 2 or 3 aam dump per target, you might need to fire 10 or 12 to bring down one. assumming you could get close enough. no air force can wage an air defense depleting their missle stores at that rate).
eventually air superiority will come in the form of a largish stealthy cruiser plane the size of a B-1 equipped with a laser and ferrying a bunch of uavs with a sub-muntition load of missiles and bombs.
the onboard laser forces anyone using gen4.5 planes and weapons to commit to a full interception engagement since the cruiser can still deploy the uavs to bomb/agm range while itself never enters sam range. if any foe doesnt have the ability to deal with the uav with jamming or detection info relayed to sam batteries, then they lose control of their skies.
the only thing preventing this sort of paradigm shift is communications and jamming of the instructions to the uav. assuming the ai gets good enough at recognizing friendlies by optical/ir then radio waves are irrelevant.
the cost of shooting that many expensive missiles to take down so few targets isnt something many nations can afford. which brings up the real issue with manned vehicles.
a few air launched anti-ship missiles costing say $4M each can take down a catobar carrier costing billions. an agm/manpat costing $500k can kill a tank costing $20M, and so on. as long as the cheap weapon can eliminate the expensive vehicle(and crew) the cost benefit works out . in iraq afghanistan the US ran out of valuable enough targets to use the PGM on, so eventually it came down to drones attacking infantry riding in ordinary cars.
for modern militaries it then becomes required to deploy air defense units with the armies(aaa, missiles, ecm, and radar trucks), which forces the use of anti radiation missile aircraft. it then becomes a case of whack a mole as you try to sniff out real targets from decoys and radar emitters separated from missile launchers.
with directed energy defenses the cheap to operate laser can defeat the expensive missile. which leaves 2 options for missiles: overwhelm with numbers or go hypersonic. but if you have high alt superiority/stealth/airborne lasers, you can negate those 2 options.
so for first world militaries it will be business as usual once you get air superiority (which might take longer).
if apc/ifv mounted lasers can defeat agm/mpat then it is status quo.
the real change will be even smaller and cheaper drones with anti personnel weapons. if ground units are given quad copter type drones with mini clusterbomb-like weapons then infantry will have to keep up 24/7 portable laser defenses (something like boston dynamic's spot with a laser on its back) walking with the soldiers.
for those fearing AI killbots, that's a ways off.
the US had enough problems with human piloted drone strikes in afghanistan hitting the right targets (mostly due to pakistan intelligence hostile to the US feeding us bad intel and after action reports). for any democratic nation military using AI drones, they would have to be perfect given the risk of civilian deaths. we cant even get self driving cars working right now.
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