The advantages of acquiring and exploiting advanced military technologies for increased military leverage is self-evident. At the same time, we must recognize that we live in an era when the notion of what constitutes a “militarily relevant technology” is becoming harder to identify and define. The 4IR – particularly artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous systems, “big data,” and the like – is largely embedded in the commercial high-tech sector; at the same time, the military potential of the 4IR is both vast and mostly self-evident. For all these reasons, therefore, militaries and governments around the world are increasingly focused on how and where advanced commercial technologies, innovations, and breakthroughs might create new capacities for military power, advantage, and leverage. This process of exploiting such civilian-based advanced technologies for military use is increasingly known as “military–civil fusion” (MCF). MCF is essentially about transferring advanced commercial technologies to military use through the joint civil–military development and application of cutting-edge technologies to military products.

After 2011, the Syrian opposition took on the Assad government directly through military means and indirectly by establishing pockets of rule beyond the government’s reach. As rebels took control of many government-held locations, they sparked the establishment of insurgent governing institutions in hundreds of communities. Local opposition-run institutions in the form of civilian-led local councils proliferated, dotting the provinces of Aleppo, Idlib, rural Damascus, Raqqa, Hama, and Homs. They worked to deliver basic relief and restore public services, sometimes in collaboration with, but often operating separately from, their armed counterparts. The boundaries of this “political marketplace”1 grew increasingly porous as a number of foreign states and private actors directly championed clients of their choosing, bolstering their favorites with financial and military support.2

The assimilation of 4IR technologies into the Israel defense forces has coincided with a profound doctrinal change, that is, the replacement of extensive ground maneuvers with precise, lethal operations against the enemy’s critical capabilities in wartime and between wars. While 4IR technologies have not been the driving force behind the new operational concept, they have enabled it and moved it forward. In particular, these technologies allowed the IDF to carry out more frequent, yet limited, accurate operations at long range and with a smaller number of casualties. Subsequently, emerging technologies are being distributed across the IDF. But lacking the capacity to develop the entire range of emerging technologies by itself, the Israeli defense establishment relies increasingly on advanced technologies developed by civilian entities for the civilian market. As the relationship between Israel’s defense and high-tech sectors is close and civilian technology is ever more required, the defense establishment works to develop various means to overcome MCF’s inherent obstacles.

As the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) has become one of the central paths to military modernization, the ability of states to implement military–civil fusion (MCF) will likely factor more in how militaries gain advantages over their rivals. Critical 4IR technologies are increasingly viewed as key force multipliers. Many countries have adopted measures to promote MCF in order to exploit the 4IR for military needs but the implementation of MCF remains challenging. Constraints include differing priorities between the military and commercial sectors when it comes to 4IR and the reluctance of civilian enterprises to enter into technology partnerships with the military. Countries with restrictive, statist approaches toward economic development, such as China and India, may find themselves stymied by a culture that hinders innovation, as opposed to the United States and Israel where entrepreneurism, experimentation, and risk-taking are encouraged. Nevertheless, MCF is likely to become a core military-technological development strategy for most countries seeking great power status or who see technology as a critical force multiplier in national defense.

The very project of counter-state-building, as conceived in twenty-first-century international relations, required Syria’s opposition leaders to convince prospective foreign patrons of the worthiness of the revolutionary endeavor. For those institutions that became clients of the West, they worked, as Clifford Bob would have it, to market their rebellion with agility.1 To make their case, they attended, paradoxically, to an outward-facing politics at the expense of cultivating an authoritative closeness from within. Still, both donor and recipient engaged one another “as if” the introduction of limited foreign support could do the work of connecting an aspiring commanding heights to the revolutionary grassroots. As such, we interpret this performance of counter-statehood not merely as a product of Syrian opposition politics but rather as a collaboration between the opposition and its foreign patrons.