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Wars remake war. New weaponry, new tactics, new strategy time and again produce results no one predicted or thought possible.
Revolutionary France’s levee en masse and Napoleon’s bold attacks prevailed over staid 18th-century siege warfare and subdued all Europe. The aggressive assaults produced horrendous casualties but were unable to move the Western Front trenches more than a few meters in World War I.
Less than 20 years later, the European theater in World War II was the scene of blitzkrieg attacks - France, with Europe’s largest army, was overrun in six weeks - followed by the heavily mechanized Allied forces moving forward as fast as logistics permitted.
The war in Ukraine seems to be remaking war once again. When Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops to march into Kyiv in February 2022, he expected they’d be welcomed, and U.S. intelligence assumed they’d encounter no serious resistance and called for evacuation.
Both nuclear superpowers assumed superior conventional forces would prevail. Volodymyr Zelensky’s response - “I need ammunition, not a ride” - was considered naive, and the stalling of his 2023 counteroffensive was seen as proof Russia would win.
Successive U.S. presidents operated on that assumption. Joe Biden pressed Ukraine not to lob missiles into Russia for fear of a wider war. Donald Trump, in Anchorage in August 2025, pressed Ukraine not only to accept Russia’s Donetsk advances but to yield more territory to them.
Both underestimated the ingenuity and morale that enabled Ukraine to turn relatively cheap and unsophisticated drones into war-winning weapons. As General David Petraeus explained in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, Ukraine “is imposing persistent strategic pressure on a much larger adversary by attacking Russia’s front lines, air defenses, fuel depots, logistics and military infrastructure and by trying to isolate occupied Crimea,” which Putin seized in 2014.
While imposing damage on Russia, Ukraine’s drones have created a killing zone into which Russian troops can’t venture. As economist Noah Smith writes, “The era of human infantry on the battlefield is drawing to a close.”
Ukraine has developed a market system for manufacturing cheap drones and supplying them to units in proportion to their successful strikes, as reporter Yaroslav Trofimov writes.
At the same time, Ukraine’s backers in Europe, having stepped up their defense spending as Trump (and previous presidents) urged, have moved from handcrafting to mass production of artillery shells.
“The nature of war has changed and is changing much faster and more radically than most observers - and most of the world’s militaries - yet understand,” writes the Hudson Institute’s Walter Russell Mead. “Rifles, mortars and tanks appear to be going the way of sword fights and cavalry charges.”
This type of warfare seems closer to the way the United States and its allies operated during WWII than how they have planned for conflicts in the Cold War and the years after. The U.S. used the industrial infrastructure built up by capitalist “robber barons” to mass-produce relatively simple and unsophisticated weaponry in very large numbers, to be deployed by large numbers of highly motivated but not very sophisticated troops.
In the Cold War, in contrast, American strategists concentrated on developing very sophisticated and very expensive weapons, to foil what Soviet strategists were doing. After the Cold War, these weapons enabled the U.S. to enjoy total control of the air and to deploy troops capable of advancing and occupying territory with very low casualties.
The limitations of that posture seem apparent in the current war with Iran. The U.S. and Israel were able to destroy the regime’s leadership class but without compelling surrender.
Operations to open the Strait of Hormuz have been frustrated by Iranian missiles and drones inflicting damage on U.S. allies, as the Trump administration (and its Democratic opponents) remains unwilling to engage in ground operations. As in Ukraine, the drone-equipped defense is prevailing.
This has enormous implications for how the Pentagon does business.