defence; conflict; europe; russia; united states; geopolitics · 17 min
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The war in Ukraine is the most important military laboratory since 1945. Most of the weapons involved were around before February 2022; what is new is what the fighting has revealed about modern combat, and what it has revealed is awkward, because the war of the future looks a good deal more like the war of the past than any planner at the Pentagon or in Brussels was prepared to admit.
Three years of industrial-scale fighting between two conventional armies have left behind a long catalogue of tactical and operational lessons, and those lessons will define military doctrine for decades. A few are spectacular and made for social media, like the four-hundred-dollar drone destroying a tank. Others make less noise and matter more, such as the collapse of Western ammunition stockpiles or the trench moving back to the centre of the battlefield. What follows tries to sort through them and separate what matters from what gets clicks.
Russia invaded Ukraine; that much is fact. The idea that it did so in a geopolitical vacuum is fantasy, and to see why you have to go back a little. NATO began moving east in 1999 with Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, and carried on in 2004 with the three Baltic states, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, brushing Russian warnings aside all the way. George Kennan, the intellectual architect of the Cold War containment strategy, told Thomas Friedman in 1998, when the US Senate approved the first round of enlargement, that the decision would be "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era". In 2008 William Burns, who would later run the CIA, sent a diplomatic cable from the embassy in Moscow whose subject line was hard to misread: "Nyet means nyet". Russia would not put up with Georgia and Ukraine joining the alliance, and on that point Putin was speaking for the entire Russian political class.
Then came Bucharest. At the 2008 summit NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia "will become members" while refusing them a Membership Action Plan, a timeline or any concrete mechanism at all. That unbacked promise was probably the worst outcome on offer. It told Russia its neighbours were on their way into a hostile military alliance, and it told Kiev and Tbilisi they had a security umbrella that in practice did not exist. Russia invaded Georgia four months later, and Ukraine fourteen years after that.
None of this justifies the invasion, though explaining it is another matter, and geopolitics runs on power far more than on morality. Russia did what any great power does when it feels its sphere of influence being eaten away. The United States did the same in Cuba in 1962 and in Central America for decades, and would do it again without blinking if Beijing put military bases in Mexico. If anything, the double standard confirms the rule.
The most powerful image of this war is also the most misleading. An FPV drone put together from commercial parts, costing somewhere between three hundred and five hundred dollars, flies into a Russian T-72 tank worth millions and destroys it. The video does the rounds on Telegram, and defence commentators line up to announce the end of armoured warfare, the tank having turned into a dinosaur.
Things are messier than that. According to a NATO official quoted by Foreign Policy, more than two thirds of Russian tanks destroyed in recent months were taken out by FPV drones, a figure that impresses until you look at it closely. Rob Lee, the Foreign Policy Research Institute analyst who travelled regularly to the Ukrainian front, estimates that overall FPV accuracy is below fifty per cent and that destroying a tank can take ten attempts or more. It is a cheap, mass-produced weapon that works by sheer volume.
What the FPV really changed was the economics of war. An army that can turn out two hundred thousand drones a month, as Ukraine claims to, can afford to fail seventy per cent of the time and still inflict devastating losses. Since 1940 armoured warfare had rested on the idea that an expensive but well-protected tank paid its way in firepower and manoeuvre, and that sum no longer adds up. The tank is as useful as it ever was. Against a swarm of disposable machines, though, it has stopped earning its keep.
What a drone cannot do is take ground. Clearing a trench or holding a flank remains a job for an infantryman, just as in 1918 or 1943. The tanks in Ukraine haven't gone anywhere; they are just costlier to keep alive and doing different work. More and more they serve as mobile artillery, firing from further back instead of leading assaults, and crews bail out at the first hit because they expect a second, more destructive strike.
In December 2024 Ukraine sent in the first fully robotic assault force, dozens of unmanned ground vehicles armed with machine guns and coordinated with kamikaze drones against Russian positions in the Kharkiv region. It was a real milestone. Calling it the future of war would be getting ahead of ourselves, though, since it was a successful experiment in one sector, against one particular position, in a war still being decided metre by metre by men with rifles.
The FPV gets the footage, but the everyday reality of this war is artillery. Ukraine and Russia are getting through artillery rounds at a rate not seen since the Second World War, and probably since the First, and that rate has exposed something the West preferred not to look at, namely that NATO's defence industrial base is not ready for a long war.
Russian production of 122mm and 152mm shells went from about four hundred thousand units a year in 2022 to over four million by 2025, with millions of North Korean rounds on top. That gave Russia a five-to-one fires advantage over Ukraine. On the American side, shell production had sunk below three thousand a month during the 2010s. By 2024 it was up to forty thousand, with a target of one hundred thousand a month by the end of 2025, which is enormous progress and still not enough.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte put it in terms that ought to make any European planner squirm: Russia produces in three months what all of NATO produces in a year. It manages this with an economy twenty-five times smaller than the alliance's, so the trouble lies in industrial structure, after decades of "peace dividend", offshoring and just-in-time logistics left the West unable to produce conventional munitions at scale. NATO got ready for short, surgical wars fought with precision missiles under air superiority, and Ukraine showed that the next one could be long and dirty, with an appetite for conventional artillery shells that never lets up.
One detail tends to slip through the broader analysis. Ukraine operates seventeen different types of 155mm howitzer, from NATO and non-NATO manufacturers, and has nearly fifty different models of high-explosive shell alone. That creates massive interoperability problems nobody saw coming. Some barrel-and-round combinations fit together physically and then behave unpredictably once fired; modern propellants produce unsafe pressures in 1950s shells; and for most of those combinations there are simply no firing tables. NATO standardisation, it turns out, worked mostly as a political concept. Cost is the other problem. A Russian 152mm shell costs about a thousand dollars and a NATO-standard 155mm about four thousand, a gap that in a war of attrition counts for more than any technological edge.
Perhaps the most disorienting image of the war in Ukraine, more than any drone or hypersonic missile, is a trench, or rather kilometres of them, with layered fortifications and minefields of a density not seen since Kursk in 1943. The front runs for more than a thousand kilometres, advances are measured in metres, and soldiers live with rats, mud and disease much as they did at Verdun.
Some take this as proof that war has not changed, and they have it backwards, because the trench came back as a result of technological change. The paradox has played out before. In the First World War firepower shot up with artillery and machine guns, moving in the open became suicidal and armies had to dig in. In Ukraine the same effect comes from reconnaissance drones that seem to be everywhere at once, guided artillery and FPVs hunting any vehicle or group of soldiers that shows itself. With thousands of electronic eyes watching everything in real time, the battlefield has become transparent, and transparency favours the defender. Hiding is almost impossible, and moving is worse.
Both sides are stuck in an operational paralysis that frustrates them equally. Russia cannot mass forces for a decisive offensive without Ukrainian drones and artillery breaking up the concentration before it forms. Ukraine cannot punch through Russian defensive lines, as the summer 2023 counteroffensive showed painfully, because the layered defences of the so-called Surovikin Line, together with dense minefields and artillery fire, make every metre gained come at an unacceptable cost. So both armies end up doing the same thing, small-scale infantry assaults, company by company, against prepared positions, in a pattern that has less to do with the "war of the future" than with Passchendaele.
Stephen Biddle, writing in Foreign Affairs, put it precisely: although the tools are new, the results they produce mostly are not. Cutting-edge technology sits alongside echoes of a past we thought we had left behind, because every new gadget enters a kind of war that has kept its constants for centuries, the relationship between fire and movement among them.
Inside this war there is another one, electronic warfare, which produces no viral images and yet shapes the outcome of every operation. It decides whether a drone reaches its target or drops out of the sky and whether a GPS-guided missile lands where it should or vanishes into nothing; it also decides if a unit can still reach its command or is left cut off and blind.
Russia never let it go. The West moved its resources elsewhere after the Cold War, while Moscow kept investing in and developing first-rate EW capabilities. It has more than four hundred radar sites spread across its territory and a doctrine that puts electronic warfare at the centre of operations, and you can see the advantage at the front. Russian EW systems bring down drones, spoof GPS signals, jam communications and degrade the accuracy of Western guided munitions such as the Excalibur shell.
Ukraine's answer has been an adaptation race that never lets up. Each innovation lasts weeks, months at most, before the other side finds a counter, and drones that worked in March had stopped working by June. FPV operators report that in areas of dense electronic warfare their aircraft survive only minutes, in a cycle of innovation faster than anything modern military history had seen.
The answer that counted most was the fibre-optic drone, which appeared in 2024. Rather than communicating by radio, it pays out a fibre-optic cable as it flies, which makes it immune to electromagnetic jamming. It is an elegant and slightly absurd fix, since beating twenty-first-century electronic warfare meant going back to a physical cable, the oldest communication technology there is. But it works, and it pushed both sides towards the next turn of the screw, artificial intelligence. In 2025 drones with autonomous target recognition, able to stay on course for an objective even after losing contact with the operator, started turning up at the front. They are still primitive and stop at basic visual recognition, but you can see where this is heading.
All of this leaves NATO badly placed, because in electronic warfare the alliance lags a long way behind Russia. For decades the United States supplied the alliance's critical EW capabilities (electronic intelligence collection, suppression of enemy air defences, jamming), and with the second Trump administration looking to other theatres, that dependence has turned into a vulnerability. According to a RAND analysis, Europe now finds itself in a position of comparative weakness that erodes deterrence against Russia in a dimension of war that counts for more every year.
There is an asymmetry that never makes it into the drone footage and weighs more than any of the systems that do. If the war settled anything beyond argument, it is that American intelligence plays at a level no other actor on the planet can match.
Washington chose to declassify intelligence and share it with Kiev in real time, before the invasion and during it, and that choice was probably the single biggest factor in Ukraine getting through the first weeks. Before 24 February, American intelligence published Russian plans in enough detail to leave the Kremlin off balance, with lines of advance, units involved, operational intentions and even the date of the invasion. No major power had ever declassified sensitive intelligence systematically to strip an adversary of strategic surprise, and it worked; by the time Putin launched the operation, nobody could call it a secret one.
Once the fighting started, satellite, signals and human intelligence together let Ukraine hit high-value targets with a precision its own resources could not have managed. The sinking of the cruiser Moskva in April 2022, the systematic strikes on Russian ammunition depots throughout 2022 and 2023 and the general effectiveness of HIMARS against Russian logistics make no sense without the steady flow of Western intelligence. A HIMARS is a rocket launcher that knows where to aim because somebody, in a building in Virginia, tells it.
Much the same goes for Western weapons systems generally. Javelins and NLAWs were devastating early on, when Russian armoured columns were advancing without proper cover, and HIMARS changed the artillery war by making precision strikes deep behind the lines possible. The Leopard 2s and Abrams, delivered amid a great deal of media fanfare, did less; they were useful, but a long way from decisive on a battlefield ruled by drones, mines and artillery. The systems themselves may be excellent. Modern war still wears down any platform that operates outside an integrated system of intelligence, air defence, electronic warfare and constant surveillance, and today only the United States has that system in full.
If Ukrainian innovation produced a genuinely revolutionary result anywhere in this war, it was at sea. A country with no navy to speak of managed to knock out roughly a third of Russia's Black Sea Fleet and push the rest out of its main bases in Crimea, using naval drones that can be built in a garage.
It starts in October 2022, when a small flotilla of USVs (unmanned surface vessels) got through the defences of Sevastopol harbour and attacked several warships. They did little damage, but the message landed. By February 2024 the Magura V5, the flagship naval drone of Ukrainian military intelligence, had become the first maritime drone to sink enemy warships in combat, the corvette Ivanovets and the landing ship Tsezar Kunikov. In its first year of operation the Magura destroyed eight Russian vessels and damaged six more, causing more than five hundred million dollars in losses.
Each Magura V5 costs between two hundred and fifty thousand and three hundred thousand dollars, against tens or hundreds of millions for a Russian warship, so the economic asymmetry is even more brutal than with aerial drones. The drone itself is, after all, a fast boat with a camera, satellite communications and an explosive charge in the bow. What makes it dangerous is the operational concept wrapped around it. Ukraine folded the USVs into a system that brings together real-time intelligence, swarm tactics with decoys, aerial reconnaissance drones and shore-launched anti-ship missiles, a multi-domain arrangement that lets a country with no navy exercise effective sea denial against a naval power.
The most striking result came in May 2025, when Magura V7 USVs armed with reconfigured Sidewinder air-to-air missiles shot down two Russian Su-30 fighters. It was the first time in history that unmanned maritime drones had brought down manned military aircraft in combat, which ought to worry any admiral in the world.
None of it would have worked without Starlink, which is not a military component at all. Two-way, high-bandwidth satellite links are what allow a drone to be steered in real time from hundreds of kilometres away. Without Starlink, Ukrainian USVs would be little more than primitive autonomous torpedoes; with it they become flexible combat platforms that can abort a mission, switch targets or operate in swarms. That critical military capabilities should hang on commercial civilian infrastructure belongs on the list of this war's lessons in its own right.
Every army in the world is watching Ukraine, and not all of them are drawing the right conclusions. Everyone seems to have got the point about drones changing war. From Washington to Beijing and from Tel Aviv to Ankara, military drone programmes have multiplied. The United States launched the T-REX programme to train FPV operators under realistic conditions, and Ukraine created a whole branch of its armed forces, the Unmanned Systems Forces, equal in rank to the Army, Navy and Air Force. Companies like Anduril test their autonomous drones at the Ukrainian front to earn their "combat-proven" credentials. Even Mexican cartels, according to reports in Small Wars Journal, have sent fighters to Ukraine to pick up drone tactics.
What many have not grasped, or would rather ignore, is everything else, starting with industry, the first thing people look away from. The war has shown that a high-intensity conflict between conventional powers consumes ammunition and equipment at a rate that outstrips peacetime production capacity by orders of magnitude. Stockpiles empty in weeks and production takes years to scale up. Europe's defence industrial base in particular is fragmented, underfunded and reliant on globalised supply chains, which is just what thirty years of peace dividend and the belief that future wars would be short and precise were bound to produce. Ukraine showed they can be long and brutal, and industrial too.
Then there is transparency. On a battlefield where everything is watched and anything can be targeted, the defender holds a structural advantage. Attacking prepared positions, with minefields, trenches, pre-registered artillery and drone swarms, takes a level of combined-arms coordination that few of the world's armies can manage, and neither Ukraine nor Russia has shown it can manage it at scale. Large-scale offensive manoeuvre, the heart of NATO doctrine since the Cold War, has become enormously harder, and that reaches well beyond Ukraine.
The most uncomfortable lesson is for the Europeans. Europe lacks the industrial capacity and the depth of stockpiles to sustain a high-intensity conflict, and it lacks the political will as well. NATO works for as long as the United States is willing to subsidise European defence, and the United States is signalling fairly clearly that its priorities lie elsewhere. What the war laid bare is a European security that hangs on an American guarantee nobody can take for granted any more. For all the rhetoric of "Zeitenwende" and rearmament, the European response still looks to me slow and fragmented, and far too content to wait for someone else to deal with the hard problems.
The temptation to look at Ukraine and see the future is understandable, with its autonomous drones, battlefield AI, combat robots and full-spectrum electronic warfare. It is all there, and it all matters. Still, I suspect the deeper lesson runs the other way, and that the war of the future will be older than we think.
There will be trenches, because on a transparent battlefield whatever moves gets killed, and artillery in industrial quantities, since precision-guided munitions cost too much to sustain a long war. Industrial bases will have to turn out ammunition by the millions rather than the thousands, and that is merely where things start. Infantry will be needed for as long as no drone can take ground. And on top of all that comes the political will to keep the whole thing going for years, not weeks, the rarest condition of all because it depends on electorates that say they want to be ready and rarely seem willing to pay the bill.
Ukraine was a warning written in heavy chalk.