Bullets and bombs killed nearly three-quarters of a million people in wars between 2021 and 2024. Many more died from the indirect effects of conflict, such as hunger and disease. Combat deaths in the past four years have been the highest since the end of the cold war. And for what purpose? Not even the leaders who started recently wars can be pleased with the results. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has become a humiliating quagmire for Vladimir Putin. President Donald Trump’s war on Iran has gone badly awry. These two wars of choice exemplify two new battlefield truths. Technology has made it harder for any army to advance on the ground. It has also made it easier for weaker powers, when attacked by stronger ones, to cause havoc.
In a valedictory essay this week, The Economist‘s defense editor reflects on how war has changed over the past decade and how it might evolve in the future. The first big shift is that soldiers are more exposed on the battlefield. Sensors and satellites can see them; small, cheap drones can kill them. Armies have to work harder than before to hide, move and survive. Ukraine’s expanding front-line “kill zone”, where soldiers move in small groups and ground robots evacuate casualties and deliver supplies, embodies this shift.
Technology quickly spreads. Israeli soldiers in Lebanon now face the same kind of drones that were pioneered in Ukraine. Iranian missiles are far more accurate than the Iraqi Scuds fired during the first Gulf war. Were China to attempt to invade Taiwan, its landing forces would be met with a blizzard of drones. Air superiority is now harder to achieve and buys soldiers less protection than before, thanks to the new drone-saturated layer of airspace.
Some experts draw the lesson that maneuver—attacking an enemy’s soft spots through shock and rapid movement—is no longer possible. But war is a Darwinian environment, driving constant adaptation, and the battlefield is never frozen for long. The lesson from Ukraine is not that future wars will always involve wretched infantry moving only a few meters a day on long, static front lines. It is that armies will have to train and equip themselves properly to blind, disrupt and elude the cameras, sensors and munitions above and around them.
Western armies are woefully behind in this regard. They need far more jammers and counter-drone defenses to avoid being seen and struck. They need realistic training to simulate those conditions, which is why NATO armies are getting help from drone-savvy Ukrainians during exercises. And they need to move more boldly in bringing unmanned systems into their forces for everything from reconnaissance to logistics.
They should not simply copy Ukraine. Though astonishingly innovative, its army has serious flaws. Soviet-trained generals still micromanage brigades at the front. Ukraine’s drone forces may be world-class, but they are not as synchronized with assault forces as they could be. And the drones now plying the skies of Donbas and the waters of the Black Sea are smaller, shorter-range and cheaper than those that would be needed in a war over the vast distances of the Pacific.
The second shift is that new technology has transformed targeting. AI-enabled software allows armies to find and strike targets at a previously unimaginable speed and scale. America’s blitz in Iran offers a future of this. An army that can outpace its enemies in identifying and destroying command posts, depots and weapons can, in theory, paralyze them and force them to capitulate. In practice, this is fiendishly hard.
America and Israel could bomb Iran at will, yet Iran shows no sign of buckling. On the contrary, it kept launching drones and missiles through 39 days of conflict and has been able to cling on to its nuclear program, close the Strait of Hormuz and cause global economic mayhem. Mr Trump celebrates the number of Iranian targets destroyed by superior American kit, but targeting should be a means to an end, not a substitute for strategy. What he expected would be a short, sharp war quickly started to exhaust America’s stocks of expensive munitions and exposed its limited tolerance for economic costs, let alone casualties. In previous wars, such as America’s in Vietnam and the Soviet Union’s in Afghanistan, the smaller, weaker side won because it was fighting on home terrain. Now the weaker side can afford precision-guided weaponry, too.
A third development, alongside these technological shifts, is that the laws of war are increasingly under strain. Mr Putin’s forces have subjected Ukrainian civilians to torture, indiscriminate bombing and systematic attacks on medical facilities. Hamas has gloried in the mass murder of Israeli women and children. True, past wars were vicious, too. What is new is that it is not just dictators, terrorists and rebels who openly flout norms. Some leaders of Western democracies do so, too. Israel has inflicted brutal collective punishment on civilians in Gaza. America’s secretary of war mocks “tepid legality” in military operations. Mr Trump has threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization and joked that it is “fun” to torpedo ships full of sailors. The brazen violation of norms is not just immoral but unwise, because in future wars, involving long-range drones and missiles, Western civilians will not enjoy the sanctuary they have come to take for granted.
What is it good for?
The coming years will surely bring new conflicts. Mr Trump, by making clear his scorn for allies, has weakened America’s power to deter aggressors. And political leaders everywhere will keep imagining that, under their brilliant leadership, the next war will be swift and painless. Yet the evidence shows that war is becoming harder and costlier; that it is easier for weaker states to hold off and bleed stronger ones; that it is easier to start wars than to end them. That is something for Mr Trump to ponder as he mulls whether to resume war on Iran, or wage one in Cuba; for Mr Putin, as he keeps incinerating lives and cash in Ukraine; and for Xi Jinping of China, as he decides whether to invade Taiwan. As military technology gets smarter, wars of choice are looking ever dumber.
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