This article is a break from commentary on the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

I will admit that I am a bit of a fan of Formula One racing. My interest stems from how teams combine individuals, groups, operating concepts, tactics and technological endeavours, and do so across short, medium and longer term learning and adaptation cycles. It is very similar to how military institutions function.

It occurred to me, as I watched the Australian Grand Prix over three days last weekend, that there was another reason why now is a good time to examine what F1 and military institutions might learn from each other. Both are going through major transformations which are disrupting old ways of doing business.

The military is experiencing a disruptive period due to the large scale introduction of drones as well as AI. This is transforming warfare on the land, in the air and at sea, and has impacts on individuals, organisations, technology, training and ideas. Concurrently, 2026 has seen the implementation of a significant change in rules for Formula One racing. With new technical specifications related to car and wheel size, aerodynamics, energy harvesting and use, it is a disruptive period for the sport.

My hypothesis in this article, just published by the Lowy Interpreter, is that Formula One and military institutions could share ideas about dealing with disruption and rapidly achieving the leading edge in their respective endeavours. Enjoy!

The Formula 1 Grand Prix in Melbourne is over for another year. Businesses and government in the host state of Victoria are examining how more revenue might be generated next year as F1 continues to grow in popularity. Likewise, event organisers will assess the effectiveness of their preparations and F1 teams will undertake post-race evaluations.

However, there is another organisation that could learn from the event, and from F1 more broadly: the Australian Defence Force. Survival in both the F1 world (financially) and in military organisations (literally) hinges on the ability to rapidly learn and adapt.

Military learning and adaptation shares several important characteristics with F1.

First, in both endeavours, learning is partially technological but always intellectual. Both feature the interaction of humans and advanced technology where learning and adaptation is ultimately a human undertaking. While technology will play a prominent role, human decision-making, energy, drive and creativity is the critical component of learning and adaptation. Providing the right purpose and incentives for learning and adaptation, and undertaking the right training, educational and organisational reform to improve it, is vital.

Second, both military and F1 have a need for rapid learning, sharing of lessons, and adaptation. In war, survival is often driven by an individual and team capacity to learn and adapt better and faster than the enemy. In F1, this same pressure exists in an even more compressed time frame against 11 competing organisations. And, given the increasing application of AI in military and commercial entities, the pace of the adaptation war is likely to increase.

A third shared characteristic is that learning and adaptation occurs (or should occur) concurrently at different levels. In military institutions, tactical, operational and strategic learning should be taking place at the same time, with interaction between each level. Likewise, F1 learning occurs tactically (in a car and in pit lane), operationally (the conduct of a race campaign across a weekend) and strategically (ongoing learning across a season, including frequent technological and tactical upgrades).

A final shared characteristic is that both military and F1 organisations suffer from imperfect insight about their adversaries. In war, the enemy always seeks to obscure their strategies, intentions, tactics and technologies. The same occurs between the various racing teams in F1, as they struggle to find the smallest advantage.

While perhaps not the most obvious pairing of learning partners, F1 and military institutions have much to share with each other about their learning and adaptation systems.

Thus, the shared imperatives of military institutions and F1 teams offers the chance for sharing about learning processes and how these can be applied to more rapid, real-time endeavours on the racetrack and on the battlefield.

But there is an additional imperative to do this now. Both military institutions and F1 racing are in a period of technological disruption and transformation in how their affairs are conducted.

In 2026, F1 introduced new rules that changed, among other things, the size of cars, their power units (including the balance of combustion and electrical energy), and active aerodynamics. This has fundamentally changed the “balance of power” among race teams. It has also forced drivers to learn new ways of generating advantage on the track through new methods of power harvesting and management.

Since 2022, military institutions have been disrupted by the widespread use of drones and then artificial intelligence. It has led, at least in some leading-edge military organisations, to a transformation in tactics and military structures, training and force structure models.

You can read the full article, for free, here at the Lowy Interpreter.

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This year, I will be inviting a range of experts on military affairs and strategy to write for Futura Doctrina. The subjects will encompass war, strategic competition, national strategy, technology, human capacity and other issues germane to learning from modern war and preparing for future conflict. The first guest contributor is Dr Frank Hoffman, who writes about the importance of aligning critical thinking skills and the employment of AI in military organisations.

With all the hype and hyperbole about Artificial Intelligence (AI) it is hard to determine what these rapidly evolving technologies can and cannot deliver. The opinions range from posing an existential threat or being less than useless machines. Many military institutions are now carefully exploring where AI might have payoffs. Conservative by nature, the armed services have more concerns and less consensus about AI applications due to the nonlinear character of warfare.

Ultimately however, rapid algorithmic technological advances will be available to security leaders and provide valuable assistance in strategy and operational execution. This will not make traditional professional expertise redundant or replaceable. Quite the contrary, humans will have greater value than before. Nor should we be concerned that introducing AI-enabled systems results in the end of audacity in miliary officers. But we should retain an acute appreciation for human factors in decision-making.

There are important political, moral and social dimensions of command (including purpose, leadership, empathy) that the human brain processes better than machine intelligence. However, there are also tremendous challenges of command in this age, including multi-domain complexity, cognitive overload, and accelerating temporal change that we must account for. In an age where seconds can impact outcomes, “the ability to think and act faster and more coherently than any adversary” is increasingly salient. Because of this, exploring the risks and opportunities of AI-enhanced military decision-making is now an urgent issue. The militaries that properly adopt these tools will hold a distinct warfighting advantage over opponents. The challenge is finding the proper changes in doctrine, structure, process, and education to achieve that advantage.

In this article, four questions are addressed: 1) What is critical thinking? 2) What is the impact of AI on critical thinking? 3) What are we expecting from AI? and finally 4) What should be done to enhance critical thinking and decision-making?

What is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is a key component of effective decision-making. It is foundational for good military judgment. To the military profession, critical thinking is a deliberative process of analyzing a problem by exploring available evidence and exposing basic assumptions, perspectives, and biases that may influence the judgment being made. Scholars contend that self-awareness and personal reflection about biases and past experiences is needed to excel at critical thinking. Self-awareness helps ensure that decisions are not colored by one’s own biases or cognitive “blind spots.” An officer’s capacity to think creatively requires both awareness about one’s own prevailing operative frameworks and openness to new ideas. Openness requires and values curiosity, creativity, and imagination. This mindset can be cultivated and trained, and a good deal of the curricula at command and staff colleges is geared to sharpening that mindset.

Enhanced critical thinking is a highly desired outcome. It is also recognized as a key component and necessary reform to professional military education. The collective Joint leadership of the U.S. miliary highlighted critical thinking in their vision for professional military education (PME). They stated that “Our collective aim is the development of strategically minded joint warfighters, who think critically and can creatively apply military power…” They challenged the PME institutions with an objective that “All graduates should possess critical and creative thinking skills, emotional intelligence, and effective written, verbal, and visual communications skills” in support of strategy formulation and complex operations.

The implementation of this vision has been limited. A team of U.S. PME professors recently found the efforts falling short and concluded that the vision is not operative. They compared the goals of this vision, and concluded, “it is not clear that fundamental change.in PME programs has actually occurred to accomplish these aims.” That vision was written at the dawn of the age of AI, but it stressed additive education in emerging disruptive technologies.

Impact of AI on Critical Thinking

The presumption behind AI is better informed and faster decision-making in competitive environments. Our larger interest in AI is about improving and accelerating critical thinking to inform judgment. Clausewitz’s conception of genius in action is predicated upon critical thinking and creativity. The underlying assumption in much of the investment with AI is that it will enhance critical thinking and professional judgment.

This assumption is challenged in some recent research. A recent study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that popular AI chatbots may actually reduce critical thinking. Microsoft’s research suggests that the use of AI results in “diminished critical reflection” instead of deeper insights. A limited MIT study generated similar results. That research was not conclusive, but the implications reinforce startling reports from educators. Some teachers claim that the introduction of generative AI in schools is “killing critical thinking.” University professors warn that overreliance by students has reduced deep thinking and decision-making abilities, in short, AI makes you stupid. One commentator talks of AI’s “malevolent seduction: excellence without effort. It gives people the illusion that they can be good at thinking without hard work.”

More study is required but the long-term implications for defence institutions are not reassuring. Over the next decade, the armed forces are likely to have increasing numbers of new officers entering the armed forces after graduating from their formative educational years less able to skeptically challenge data outputs from generative AI systems. If today’s undergraduate students (and future officers) are leveraging Generative AI tools extensively, future military officers may be commissioned with less developed critical thinking skills. It is not that it will rewire our minds, as much as produce students with flabby thinking.

AI and Decision Advantage

There is reason to be optimistic about progress with applications of AI models and functional agentic systems. They will be increasingly valuable in supporting commanders and their strategic and operational decisions. But the state of the art in AI remains fragile or jagged. However, the trend line of AI as a general-purpose technology with increased utility seems clear.

AI is now delivering impactful results in wartime operations, particularly in intelligence and targeting, and will see more concrete benefits for commanders and staff in the near future. With properly educated leaders and thoroughly vetted decision tools, we can anticipate value from a convergence of human and machine intelligence to make good judgments. Hence I agree with advocates claiming we face a paradigm shift “from tools that assist humans, to agents that actively pursue campaign objectives alongside humans.” The human commander should remain the dominant partner in this integrated relationship.

As noted by retried Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, military command and control is best conceptualized as human-centric and tech-enabled. He acknowledges that there are risks in AI-enabled battle systems but they must be balanced against the unmistakable evidence of human biases throughout military history. On balance, properly prepared officers can get more out of the AI systems that can a team that is not supported by one. Human-Machine teaming or what some call strategic centaurs should outperform individuals.

AI is still evolving and is yet to prove itself in our profession, but Large Language Models (LLMs) are making significant advances. There is a growing sense that AI can “revolutionize military decision-making.” Defence experts anticipate they will assist commanders particularly in the observation and orientation tasks of the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act Loop. In fact, as noted by the founding Director of the Pentagon’s Joint AI Center, advancements in generative AI will soon generate a lot of value in joint planning. AI will expedite collaborative, real-time course of action (COA) development, analysis, and offer recommendations.

Such capabilities could improve and accelerate the development of strategic and operational orders, and in assessing implementation. It is anticipated that bespoke LLMs or agentic tools will also alert commanders when critical assumptions are invalid or risks are overlooked. This should be invaluable. As Mark Twain allegedly quipped, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” A useful model will underscore outdated or erroneous assumptions and question risks. Models may offer continuous risk assessments, and be able to track the risk appetite of decision-makers. This suite of contributions enhances numerous aspects of Command and Control.

Another benefit from AI models should be COA analysis and enhanced group collaboration. The decision science and risk scholar Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie-Mellon University has described the value of unbounded discourse in complex decisions. Overly bounded and rational discourse can occur within single discipline organizations or cultures that limit collaboration and learning. Decision-making in hierarchical institutions where deference to rank/experience can be pronounced and where participants share a common background (career experiences/doctrine/education) can be less than optimal. This tends to enforce norms and boundaries that can restrict discourse. A good LLM may help offset that and serve as a sort of red team against group think. Such systems could support the Design Movement efforts to push beyond methodical planning processes, and promote creative solutions.

Finally, there could be applications that also facilitate and accelerate the dynamic learning battle by identifying anomalies for investigation and altered praxis. Technology can play a part in supporting the speed of the adaptation competition as seen in Ukraine. Automated data collection and analysis can generate feedback loops to spur the assessment and adaptation cycle in combat.

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The following is a fictional narrative about an American expedition to Greenland in the coming year. It is written from the first-person perspectives of a military officer and civilian policy official in the Pentagon.

Eschewing the style of think tank papers, I have instead sought to provide a readable and more accessible account of what a very worst-case scenario for an American takeover of Greenland might look like. Indeed, any kind of military action should be considered worst case.

Like most others, I hope and expect that this troubling situation will be resolved in the coming months well short of military operations. But the world is an uncertain place, and there is no guarantee of that.

Sometimes, to prevent the worst occurring, we need to imagine it.

Lieutenant Colonel White, U.S. Army

Fort Richardson, Alaska

14 May 2026

The flight over the Pole would take about eight hours, including at least one air-to-air refuelling enroute. That didn’t include the time spent mustering the troops, issuing weapons, ammunition, radios, and other items we would need for this operation. It also didn’t include the time to issue our parachutes, shrug them on along with the other combat equipment we all wore, undertake buddy checks, assemble at our aircraft and get boarded.

This was all a well-honed drill, something we had all done many times before. But even a well drilled battalion of paratroopers takes time to get into their air. Training exercise, readiness check or operational mission, it took time to do well.

I had been excited when we had first received a warning order from our brigade headquarters. I had been summoned to the brigade headquarters, and in the SCIF, had been briefed by the Brigade S3 and then the commander on a new compartment for a highly classified planning activity. My parachute battalion, one of two parachute infantry battalions in the brigade, would be the tip of the spear for the contingency that was the subject of that planning.

At first, the object of the mission took my breath away.

I was a combat veteran of course and had done my time in Iraq and Afghanistan as a junior officer like most in my generation of army officers. But back then, even though the mission was somewhat blurry at times, we had a reasonable sense that the enemy was not like us. We knew, if needed, we could engage and kill our adversary without legal or moral qualms.

This would be different.

One of the members of my syndicate at Leavenworth when I attend Command and General Staff College there had been a Danish officer. He too had served in Afghanistan. He was an armour officer and had led a troop of Leopard 2 tanks for a six-month tour in the south of that troubled land. Like me, he had been in a few gun fights, and I knew from friends in that part of the country that the Danes were happy to engage in a stand-up fight against the Taliban.

Not all of our so-called ‘coalition partners’ were willing to do so.

So, my Danish syndicate mate and I had formed a close friendship during the year at Leavenworth. We had shared beers over war stories and hosted each other’s families for cook outs when the weather permitted. Both of us had also been selected for a second year at Leavenworth to attend the School of Advanced Military Studies, or SAMS. Known throughout the U.S. military as a Jedi Knight course for operational planning, the year had been a professional and intellectual highlight.

I suppose my time at SAMS was part of the reason my battalion was chosen to participate in the early planning for this operation. That, and the fact that the commander of the other battalion had only just assumed command. I had been with the battalion for nearly 18 months, and both the brigade and division commander probably thought they had a good sense of my strengths and weaknesses.

As the U.S. Air Force C-17 transport aircraft carrying my chalk of paratroopers lifted off the tarmac in Alaska, I thought back on the year at SAMS. It had been heavy in theory and history. The ideas of Clausewitz had resonated with most of us, particularly the concepts of uncertainty, surprise and the human elements of war. Regardless of how transparent that clever think tank analysts thought the battlefield had become, those of us who had seen war knew that it was no such thing.

War remained the province of chance and the unknown despite the technology and the efforts of the tech bros to convince the administration otherwise.

So, despite our planning, our battalion sand table exercises and rehearsals, our frequent and detailed intelligence updates, and the energetic motivational speeches we received from people that included the brigade and division commanders, we did not really know the full scope of what we were flying into.

Would this be a simple parachute operation to intimidate the locals, and small company of Danish infantry at the objective into surrendering? Or would we have to fight – to fight the soldiers of a nation I had served with on combat operations, trained with at school, and who are our allies?

While the situation might not be something you anticipated, you foresaw all of the uncertainty that I feel right now, Clausewitz you old bastard.

*******

Mr Black

Washington DC

H-1 hour, 15 May 2026

Being called into a meeting about military options for Greenland was the last thing I expected that day.

Last October had been the start of my third year in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. After three years of school in Baltimore and then two more years completing a Master’s degree at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, which we all called SAIS, I had looked around for jobs in government. The really smart graduates sought out jobs on Wall Street and paid off their student debts within a couple of years of gaining employment there.

Me, I was never interested in the economic side of things. I had trouble creating and living by even a basic personal budget. My student debt didn’t help. Nor did the costs of living in the national capital region.

But I loved defence and national security policy. So, after applying to several different agencies, and a couple of think tanks in the DC area, I was accepted for a junior policy officer position in the Strategy, Plans and Forces section of Office of the Secretary of Defense.

It took a while for me to finalise all the administration that went with the job, including Pentagon badges, security clearances, and just learning to navigate my way around the massive office building that was the Pentagon. But after six months, I was comfortable that I had developed a basic grasp of the physical and bureaucratic geography of the building.

For a while, I was not able to attend meetings and had been employed in fairly meaningless administrative jobs. But, as time went by, and I became more of a known quantity within the policy shop, I was invited to more meetings and allowed to draft more policy options briefs for my boss.

Thus, it was on a day last October that my boss was out of the building due to a root canal operation, I was invited to sit along the back wall for an initial scoping activity for a new compartment that was involved in updating the contingency plan for taking control of Greenland. At that time, it felt a little like the old Rainbow Plans before the Second World War, which included plans for war against Britain and its dominions (including GARNET for New Zealand and SCARLET for Australia).

No one seriously thought they would be required, but they were developed as part of strategic due diligence.

The Greenland CONPLAN, at least back then, felt the same.

Then Venezuela happened.

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The quote above is from a speech given by the President of Ukraine at the end of the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. It was an important speech. Zelenskyy offered an update on the situation, and a declaration that he would remain at his post to lead his people. Importantly, it provided an example of effective leadership and strategic communication that guided the Ukrainian people in adapting from peace to war.

The modern concept of adaptation is based on early research in the biological sciences. When Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution and natural selection, he sought to explain the causal mechanism for how new species emerge and how others disappear. Adaptation filled this theoretical gap. It is a term that refers to how organisms, and more recently institutions, fit themselves into the environment.

This makes the concepts of adaptation and complex adaptive systems important for the examination of learning and the development of organisations in societies, businesses and military institutions in the constant search for improvements in effectiveness. And if you have read any of my articles here, you know I have a particular interest in how military organisations learn and adapt. I have sought to apply this to the war in Ukraine as well as in studies of war in the Middle East and the potential for future conflict in the Pacific.

The study of adaptation in military organisations is a fascinating and growing sub-genre in military history, contemporary military affairs and in the study of future war. Military organisations exist within a competitive learning environment, in peace and war. This drives them to build and evolve learning and adaptation cultures, which includes both individual and institutional concerns. In military literature, one of the best-known adaptive cycles is Colonel John Boyd’s OODA (observe-orient-decide-act) loop.

Military institutions rarely have the capacity to foresee every possible future contingency. Nor do they possess the ability to continuously and accurately predict the actions and reactions of their known (and potential) adversaries and allies. Uncertainty is an enduring component of war; little has changed from when Carl von Clausewitz wrote on this subject in On War in the early 19^th century. Therefore, military organisations, as well as the larger national security enterprises they are part of, must learn how to learn better, apply what has been learned, and possess the ability to adapt to both expected and unexpected events.

Both Russia and Ukraine have learned and adapted since the beginning of the war in Ukraine in 2014. The vast expansion in interaction between the two since February 2022 has resulted in an accelerated adaptation battle with both sides fighting to attrit the forces and morale of their enemy, while also engaging in a competition to learn, adapt and improve their military effectiveness faster than their enemy. In a more recent yet crucial development, this learning and adaptation in Ukraine has now grown into a global adaptation war. This too is occurring at pace, especially in the collaboration and sharing of ideas and technologies among authoritarian states such as Iran, Russia, China and North Korea.

When exploring contemporary learning and adaptation, one requires an understanding of the kinds of adaptation taking place concurrently. Different countries are executing different forms of adaption. For example, Ukraine, Russia, Israel and Iran are adapting during war. Other countries, such as the UK, the United States and China, remain in peace time adaptation settings.

But there is a third for of adaptation that is absolutely essential: Peace to War Adaptation. The aim of this article is to explore Peace to War Adaptation, the rationale for understanding it as well as what might be done to execute effective adaptation of this type in the political, military, industrial and societal spheres.

Adaptation Types

Adaptation Before War. Wartime adaption is built on peacetime learning and innovation, and the learning culture that is established in military institutions. The organisational learning culture established in peacetime will have a very significant impact on how institutions prepare themselves for conflict. It also influences how military organisations learn and adapt in the transition to war, and how they perform, learn and adapt throughout the course of a war. As Williamson Murray has observed, “military culture may be the most important factor not only in military effectiveness, but also in the processes involved in military innovation, which is essential to preparing military organizations for the next war.”

The learning and adaptation processes developed in peacetime must be linked to evolving concepts of military effectiveness. Allan Millett and Williamson Murray defined military effectiveness as “the process by which armed forces convert resources into fighting power.” Effective military organisations, while often focused on the day-to-day challenges of training in peacetime, also need to invest in updating their ideas for what makes a military institution most likely to succeed in war. Learning and adaptation provide a significant contribution to this.

The aggregate effect of many adaptations at various levels should be to assist senior military and political leaders to constantly redefine what an effective modern military looks like in peace and war. This is a crucial foundation for the adaptation of a military institution from peace to war: it provides a strategic aiming point for change and improvement.

The historical lessons available to inform adaptation before war demonstrate that the optimal path to integrating new technologies into military institutions is to accompany technological insertions with different ideas, evolved organisations and new leadership and training models. Andrew Marshall, who headed the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment for several decades, undertook dozens of studies on this topic throughout his tenure. Writing subsequently about the lessons of transforming military institutions, Marshall noted that “the most important competition is not the technological competition…the most important goal is to be the first, to be the best in the intellectual task of finding the most appropriate innovations in the concepts of operation and making organisational changes to fully exploit the technologies already available.”

Adaptation in war. Wartime adaptation has an existential imperative and generally proceeds at a faster pace that peacetime learning and adaptation. However, the breadth of events than occur in a war can vastly outstrip those in peacetime. This means leaders need to pay even more attention to learning and adaptation as part of their expanded wartime responsibilities.

In her book, Learning to Fight, Aimee Fox describes how the British Army learned and adapted during the First World War. Her research challenges some of the existing narratives about intellectual rigidity in the allied high command. Fox writes that “through a combination of its pre-war ethos and increased fluidity in wartime, the army displayed organisational and cultural flexibility, allowing for high levels of learning and adaptation. This was not limited to a single formation, branch or expeditionary force. It was an institutional undertaking.”

There are many notable developments in Ukrainian adaptation since 2022. The drone-counter adaptation battle is accelerating with the construction of a new drone wall, evolving electronic warfare, new forms of AI for drone control, and sophistocated drone interceptors that are cheaper to produce than the Russian drones they destroy.

Ukraine has developed a new, advanced defence manufacturing sector from minimal foundations in 2021, and it now produces a wide variety of advanced munitions, missiles, drones and digital systems. Ground tactics are co-evolving between Russian and Ukrainian forces month-by-month, including the application of new technologies and new units such as the Russian motorcycle assault units. Next generation robotic warfare has seen drones attack other drones, as well as carry drone sub-systems and offensive weapons. The methods, organisations and technologies for the learning and adaptation battle continue to improve and timescales for adaptation continue to contract. Ukrainian drone units can often adapt and update their software daily and evolve their tactics every few weeks.

The Russian capacity to learn and adapt has also improved since 2022. It has ‘learned to learn’ better which has resulted in a faster adaptation cycle across many aspects of Russian military affairs. The Russians are clever observers of Ukrainian operations, and the Russians will often rapidly copy Ukrainian tactics that they think work well. Recent Russian adaptations include improvements to infiltration tactics and tactical speed to cross dangerous parts of the battlefield; and the widespread use of FPV drones and next-generation drone jammers. In parallel, Russia has continuously evolved its recruiting and force generation methods.

Adaptation’s Third Form. Besides adaptation in peacetime and adaptation in war, there is a third and less studied form of adaptation. This is the adaptation that occurs in the short period between peace and war: Peace to War Adaptation. It is important to understand this form of adaptation because it is the crucial process of learning and change that connects peacetime and wartime adaptation. The effectiveness or otherwise of Peace to War Adaptation can also influence the trajectory of a war.

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For some time, I have been collaborating with Peter Singer to explore deception operations, how deception and surprise have played a role in the Ukraine War, and to ascertain what this might mean for the future of military deception in Ukraine as well as in other military institutions.

Deception, the act of deliberately misleading an adversary so that they will take actions that contribute to your own goals, has a long history and enduring value in war. However, there is a difference between how countries such as China and Russia emphasize deception in all military endeavors, and how Western nations integrate deception into military planning. To compound the challenge for modern military organizations, new technologies and ongoing conflicts are reshaping how military deception is planned and conducted.

Because of these factors, a “deception gap” has opened up between the military institutions of authoritarian powers and the West that must be addressed.

Our report explores existing ideas about military deception, principally through the lens of doctrinal principles of Western military doctrines. It has also investigated the military trends that act as disruptors to force change in the planning, execution, and measurement of military deception operations.

The contents of this report provide foundational knowledge for developing multiple lines of endeavor that could improve the conduct, and outcomes, of future military deception activities. A range of changes and new programs, across the breadth of military endeavors, are examined in the final chapter of the report. These areas for improvement incorporate personnel training, education, and development; doctrinal and tactical evolution; equipment design and procurement; and strategic and policy issues.

The pace of learning and adaptation that is being witnessed now in Ukraine, from both sides, continues to accelerate. Learning cycles for drone operations and technology are now just a couple of weeks. Ukraine and Russia are locked in an adaptation battle on the ground where tactics change every two to three months.

And, more broadly, Russia has developed a learning and adaptation “bloc” with Iran, China, and North Korea, where it shares lessons from the war in a wide variety of subjects. As the most recent Annual Threat Assessment from the U.S. intelligence community describes, “Cooperation among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea has been growing more rapidly in recent years, reinforcing threats from each of them individually while also posing new challenges to U.S. strength and power globally…Russia has been a catalyst for the evolving ties.”

This learning and adaptation cooperation among authoritarian governments is almost certain to include insights about tactical and strategic deception. Indeed, as the report proposes, it is very likely that the combination of cultural predisposition to deception activities and new technologies has opened up a “deception gap” between authoritarian and democratic military institutions.

Thus, this is yet another driver to ensure that the best thinking, best technology, and best leadership are applied to evolving the conduct of military deception in American and allied military institutions in the coming years.

As we note in the report, we should not deceive ourselves into thinking that change is not needed.

You can read the entire report at this link. The report is also available to download as a pdf document, which can be read here.

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In March this year, the Ukrainian Armed Forces announced the creation of a Drone Line. This Drone Line, which is also described as a Drone Wall, is designed to provide a continuous defensive corridor of drones along Ukraine’s most vulnerable frontiers to inflict significant casualties on Russian forces, and act as a deterrent against aggression in quieter areas of the frontline.

This article explores the concept of the Drone Wall, as well as its many opportunities and challenges. Finally, I assess how the Drone Wall concept might be applied in other theatres and for non-military problems.

The Drone Wall Cometh: Strategic and Operational Imperatives

For some time, Ukrainian officials have discussed the creation of a Drone Line, or as has it has been described more recently, a Drone Wall, along the frontline. This Drone Wall is designed to establish a 10-15-kilometre-wide zone which, according to recent comments by the Ukrainian defence minister, offers “air support and cover to the infantry, that makes the enemy's advance unattainable without losses.”

There has been a pseudo drone wall in development for some time. Since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukrainians have been expanding the scope of drone missions, and the breadth and depth of the battlefield which they can cover. But until recently, the enormous scope of drone operations across the frontline was not envisaged or constructed as a single technological entity.

There are several imperatives for the Drone Wall concept.

The first and most obvious one is to blunt Russian offensive operations in the south, east and northeast of Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief, General Syrskyi, the Russian 2025 offensive has already commenced. Russia is reported to have over 640, 000 troops now deployed in Ukraine. The Russians have a significant advantage over Ukraine in their ability to recruit soldiers, generate forces and replace their casualties. The Drone Wall is a concept that is designed to help Ukraine address its current manpower deficit and overcome the Russian manpower advantage by generating a disparity in killing power and impose even greater attrition on Russian forces.

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This is a short piece, but I wanted to write something on this topic because it is demonstrative of how uncrewed systems are changing how some military institutions are thinking about their inventories of large, exquisite platforms and how uncrewed systems are having an increasing influence over how force is projected in all military theatres, not just eastern Ukraine.

This week, saw two important events regarding the application of uncrewed systems in the maritime environment. First, the Government of Ukraine publicly unveiled its range of Magura uncrewed naval vessels. Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence in the Ministry of Defense unveiled several classes of the maritime sea drones capable of destroying enemy ships and aircraft:

• The Magura V5—Black Sea fleet killer.

• The Magura V6P—multifunctional platform.

• The Magura V7 (missile-carrying), which destroyed a combat jet for the first time in history

• The Magura V7 with a mounted machine gun.

Second, and central to the subject of this quick assessment, the government of South Korea announced that the planned light aircraft carrier (CVX) project for the South Korean Navy had been shelved in favour of a new Uncrewed Aerial Systems ship.

This has implications for how other navies might think about the employment of uncrewed systems, and how offensive capability might be projected from naval vessels. This quick assessment will explore the background of the CVX project, and how this shift in role for the vessel might influence naval operations and the force designs for other navies in Europe and the Pacific. The assessment also poses several questions about these naval drone carriers and their role in future conflicts.

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Nearly 18 months ago, I explored the key intellectual challenges that had become apparent as the result of technological insertions into the Ukraine War. This includes the impact of drones and the democratisation of battlespace knowledge through digital command and control systems.

In that two-part series, I proposed that the Russo-Ukraine War had evolved into a more static ground because both sides were fighting a 21st century war with 20th century ideas. Most attention was being focussed on generating more munitions, more units, more territorial gains and more people. But I also proposed that even if Ukraine and Russia were to mobilise more people and industry, the trajectory of the war would not change significantly unless there was a mobilization of intellectual capacity to develop new warfighting ideas.

The period since those articles were published has proved this out. The ground war, with the exception of short periods of tactical energy such as the Ukrainian Kursk offensive, remains largely static in nature. Where advances have been made, they are achieved at very large costs in humans and equipment. The air, drone and missile war has more dynamism and is having an impact on the economy and warfighting capacity of both nations. However, this air and missile war is still yet to prove politically or strategically decisive.

More intellectual dynamism and innovation is necessary to develop more effective and survivable offensive military concepts for the modern technological and political environment. This is not just a military concern, however. Being able to threaten the use of offensive operations is central to a viable strategic deterrent. While nuclear weapons remain an important component of deterrents, conventional and cognitive options must also play their part. These two elements are currently a weakness in Western nations.

This article examples looks beyond the challenges facing Ukraine that were examined in the previous articles and looks more broadly at the big problems that all western nations face with modern warfighting concepts. The article proposes the key strategic challenges in contemporary warfare that require clever and affordable solutions.

However, before examining these challenges, it is important to appreciate the kinds of advantages that the global authoritarian movement now possesses, and how these magnify the problems faced by western governments and military institutions.

The Authoritarians Have Some Advantages

The warfighting challenges covered in this article are examined against the background of an alignment of authoritarian powers which currently appears to possess several strategic advantages over western nations.

The Authoritarian Learning Community. The first advantage is that in the last three years, an international collaboration and adaptation system has emerged among the authoritarian powers of Russia, Iran, China and North Korea. This has become the core of a learning culture in Russian and Iranian organisations, as well as a model for Russian sharing lessons with North Korea and China. This learning community assembles various sets of knowledge to build a much-improved knowledge base.

A key learning and adaptation grouping has developed between Russia and Iran, and by extension Iran and its proxies in the region. Coercion and precision are key subjects for this core learning community. Russia and North Korea also have a learning and adaptation system, largely based on the provision of North Korean munitions to Russia and the experiences of North Korean troops in Kursk combat operations. China has also been active in learning lessons from Russia. How much of this learning is through active sharing of lessons and how much is through vicarious learning is yet to be clarified. Chinese officers are reported to have visited Russia and have been reported behind the front lines in the Donbas region. You can read more on this authoritarian learning community here.

The Arsenal of Authoritarians. A second advantage is that the authoritarian nations appear to have collectively developed a superior military production capacity in terms of scale and speed. China’s production capacity is well documented, particularly in ship building. But it has also developed very advanced indigenous aircraft, armoured vehicle, drone and munitions capabilities. Most of these probably already operate at a scale that outstrips most western nations combined. Chinese defence industry also delivers capability much faster than western nations. As a 2024 CSIS report notes, from initiating capability requirement through to delivery is about seven years in China and 16 years in the U.S. Four of the top ten largest defence conglomerates in the world are Chinese. While not without weaknesses, Russia too has stepped up defence production in the past three years.

Authoritarian Cognitive Warfare. The 2024 Pentagon report on Chinese military capability notes that “the PLA is exploring a range of “neurocognitive warfare” capabilities that exploit adversaries using neuroscience and psychology.” As Dima Adamsky describes in The Russian Way of Deterrence, Russia’s operations in the information sphere - cognitive-psychological (CP) and digital-technological (DT) activities have seen increasing convergence. These activities aim to achieve informational deterrence, and the achievement of cumulative coercion. The key aims of authoritarian cognitive warfare, which basically align with an approach that could be described as ‘win without fighting’ are as follows:

• A principal objective of China and Russia in particular is to convince western societies that they cannot prevail against the advantages – military, economic, national will - of authoritarian powers.

• The west is in decline. This has long been a strategic message from President Xi but is also a key message in Russian messaging, particularly with regards to religion. There is also an economic dimension to this messaging, particularly from China in the wake of the disastrous flip-flopping on tariffs from the Trump administration.

• Another objective is to convince western citizens that western values and systems are not worth defending. This can manifest in lower defence budgets and in lower recruiting for military organisations. As we have seen in recent years, it also results in breaking down the cohesion of western communities by empowering small minorities with extremist views.

Given the demonstrated willingness of the big four authoritarians to share ideas and lessons, it should be assumed that developments in cognitive warfare in one will quickly be shared with other authoritarian regimes.

Authoritarian Will. Authoritarian leaders clearly believe that their time has come. They have watched the meltdowns in western societies since COVID-19, and the shortfalls in leadership and governance, and decided now is the time to exploit western weaknesses and assert themselves. They exhibit a confidence in their upwards trajectory. Xi described the role of Russia and China last week in Moscow, noting that “it is imperative that we remain the defenders of a world order in the spirit of equality and justice… China and Russia, as great world powers and emerging markets, have a noble mission to ensure global development in a more equitable and rational vein.”

Further back in 2020, Xi used a phrase more indicative of his views during the fifth plenary session of the 19th Central Committee of the CCP: "the East is rising, and the West is declining". The global authoritarian movement appears to have gained in confidence and may well have superior will to sustain their trajectory than western nations have to oppose it.

Our Intellectual Deficit is Not a New Problem

Fortunately, western nations and military institutions have deep historical familiarity with solving challenges in military affairs. Military institutions have always faced difficult problems, on the battlefield, during long campaigns and in the overall national efforts to fight wars. This has required formal and informal adaptation mechanisms, which sometimes produces transformative solutions to key battlefield and operational problems.

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In the past few days, it has emerged that the Ukrainian Armed Forces achieved yet another first for 21^st century warfare: they were able to shoot down at least one, and possibly two, Russian Su-30 fighter bombers from an uncrewed naval vessel in the eastern part of the Black Sea. It is not the first time this form of next generation robotic warfare has occurred, however.

Since the beginning of the February 2022 full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, uncrewed systems have been employed in an expanding range of missions by Ukraine and the Russians. As the war progressed, Ukraine began to experiment with, and has now mastered, the development and employment of uncrewed aerial, maritime and most recently, land strike systems.

In the air, uncrewed systems were used in the early days of the Russian invasion and have since progressed to be a crucial, non-discretionary element of combined arms combat operations, and long-range strike operations, for the Ukrainian and Russian military organisations. At sea, a variety of modified small boats, jet skis and semi-submersibles have been developed and used to strike Russian naval vessels and observation platforms in the Black Sea, forcing the Russians from the western parts of the sea and opening up Ukraine’s maritime trade routes. On the ground, Ukraine and Russia have developed uncrewed ground vehicles for reconnaissance, mine laying and clearance, logistic resupply, casualty evacuation and assault missions.

This expansion in the use of uncrewed systems in Ukraine has also resultied in a fast-moving adaptation battle, where drones are developed, deployed and evolved with an increasing tempo. Software updates occur almost daily, and the tactics and technology of drones change every week.

A more recent trend has been the use of uncrewed systems to carry and launch other uncrewed systems or long-range strike weapons. This trend, robotic teaming, has emerged over the past year with the advent of drone-on-drone combat in the air and on the ground. Recent events in this type of robotic combat provide observations and lessons that should be be studied and translated for their application for other military organisations in Europe and the Pacific.

This article examines the latest use of an uncrewed systems to shoot down crewed aircraft, as well as the developing trend in the use of such tactics. It proposes several areas where this next generation robotic warfare will impact on all military institutions around the world. The importance of the weekend’s event extends well beyond it being a ‘world first’.

The Latest Next-Gen Robotic Warfare Action

The details of the shoot down of the Russian Su-30M fighter bombers emerged over the weekend. The action occurred in the eastern Black Sea, about 50 kilometres west of the Russian city of Novorossiysk. The reports of the shoot downs were confirmed by the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Lieutenant General Budanov on 3 May.

The Ukrainian system used to shoot down the Russian aircraft was a new variant of the Magura uncrewed maritime vessel, the V7. The Magura V7 was described as an air defence variant of the Magura-V5 by General Budanov in his interview with The War Zone. According to Ukraine’s military intelligence, the Magura V5 has previously destroyed or damaged 15 Russian naval vessels. A useful examination of the Magura-V5 can be found at this link.

The air defence variant of the Magura-V5, dubbed the V7, was apparently armed with AIM-9M Sidewinder missiles, which have been provided to Ukraine by the United States. This is an upgrade from the Russian R-73 missiles used last year to shoot down Russian helicopters in the Black Sea (see more below on this).

As I explore below, the shoot down of the Russian aircraft is not the first event where uncrewed systems have played a role in transforming the character of modern combat operations.

Transformative Events in Next-Gen Robotic Warfare

A variety of events have occurred in the past year which might also be described as the next generation of robotic warfare. These combat actions represent the initial forays into more sophistocated uncrewed systems, or robotic, combat. They have yielded insights that inform subsequent robotic warfare actions and provide lessons for other military institutions who wish to learn about how close combat, long-range strike and war generally is changing in the 21^st century.

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This week I have had the honour of visiting the United States Military Academy at West Point, and to speak with cadets and staff about the lessons of modern war, and what these insights mean for how they lead soldiers in the 21st century. I have also had the opportunity to discuss the employment of fiction to round out the development of military officers, and my book about a war over Taiwan, White Sun War.

Today, I had the privilege to speak about a different topic however. I spoke with cadets and staff about the imperative in the technological age to not out-spend or ‘out-tech’ our adversaries, but to develop our minds in order to out think them.

Thank you to the convenors of this symposium for your invitation to speak here today. I have been asked to discuss why leaders must read, write, research, and think critically about war, strategy, and military service and how research and writing can serve as leadership tools for future officers

I don’t suppose you have many Australians speak here you, and probably even fewer just-retired senior Australian Army officers!

But believe me when I say that even standing here in front of you is somewhat fantastical to me. I was brought up in a speck of a mining town in the Australian outback. It was a great place to grow up, particularly in the 1980s, which as we all know was the highpoint for music in all of human history!

Now, in this small town, I didn’t even wear shoes to school until high school. The idea that I would one day have the honor of speaking to cadets and staff at the world’s most famous military academy would have been dismissed out of hand by my friends and family, even if I had the audacity to imagine such a thing was possible.

But I had the great privilege of being accepted into the Australian Defence Force Academy in 1987. But in my first year I failed every subject. All eight. I think it is still a record. But amazingly, the commandant of the academy – who was an Army major general – took me aside, told me a might still make a half decent army leader, and sent me to our 18-month officer training course.

I learned a couple of important lessons. First, that second chances matter. They can be life changing for those who receive them, and those who give them. I was in touch with the general who gave me a second chance until he passed away, and still correspond with his widow. Second, this taught me that failure did not have to be the end of all things. It was an opportunity to learn, to reflect, and to hone my personal resilience and philosophy on life.

Now you might be wondering, why is he telling me all this?

Well, I am telling you because I was determined to make the most of my second chance. I have always wanted to be a soldier, and while I messed up my first chance, I was not going to mess it up a second time. I was going to be the best army leader possible. And part of my journey of learning about leadership, a journey that never ends by the way, has been my reading, writing, and research about war and military affairs as well as a range of other topics.

These are topics I feel very strongly about. Good armies have always been clever armies. And the cleverest have been those that recognise the need to hone the bodies and the minds of their people.

Our most important possession is the capacity to generate what I have called an intellectual edge over our competitors, whether this be in areas such as trade, or in more perilous endeavours in national security. In particular, overcoming the predations of vicious techno-authoritarians this century will demand NOT that we out spend them BUT that we outthink them.

Technological disruption and recent developments in national security affairs, are challenging the orthodoxy established in the 1950s with regards to the profession of arms. The analogue, machine-based world that existed when important publications such as Huntington’s The Soldier and the State were written has changed considerably. In addition to traditional instruments of war, current and future military leaders must prepare for various non-kinetic instruments such as cognitive warfare that will threaten our societal cohesion and our national security.

Advantage is what military leaders seek to generate over their adversaries. Historically, while we could observe that it takes many forms, advantage in the military can be generated in one of five ways. These are: geography, mass, time, technology and an intellectual advantage.

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Over the past three years, both sides in the Ukraine war have learned and adapted. Both sides have learned to learn more quickly and to proliferate lessons into their military and industrial systems. In the past six months the adaptation battle has intensified. It has technical dimensions, but also organisational and doctrinal aspects as well. Ukraine’s adaptive stance is driven by an existential threat that is not apparent to western nations not currently at war. Russia too is now learning and adapting quickly. Where they aren’t innovative, they are fast followers.

Adaptation, in technology and tactics, is now moving at a speed that is probably incomprehensible to western politicians and defence bureaucrats.

Ukraine’s learning system, which is not always fully joined up from the tactical to strategic levels, offers lessons on how western militaries might improve and speed up their learning and adaptation processes and cultures. On the other hand, Russia has learned to learn better and faster as the war has progressed. This makes it a more dangerous adversary for Ukraine, as well as a much more capable and dangerous military to threaten Europe.

Perhaps the most important feature of the interactive adaptation struggle is that it can no longer be described purely as an adaptation battle. While there are important issues to research and analyse from the battlefield and at the strategic levels of war, there is now an important international dimension. Ukraine is sharing lessons with its partners and Russia has fostered the development of an active learning community with Iran, North Korea and China.

The learning and adaptation enterprise spawned by the war in Ukraine, as well as the war in the Middle East, is now international. Ukraine, and the west, are therefore involved in an intensive Adaptation War with authoritarian powers.

The aim of this article is to examine the three components of this global Adaptation War. The article concludes by undertaking an initial exploration of the following question: is the new global learning and adaption war a new revolution in military affairs?

The Adaptation War: Three Components

During war, adaptation takes place at multiple levels. The new Adaptation War has three important components: battlefield, strategic and international adaptation systems.

Battlefield Adaptation. At the most basic level of military operations, armies, navies, air forces, and their supporting networks must be able to fight and win battles and campaigns. Thus, battlefield adaptation is the sum of actions that underpin learning and improvement on the battlefield, the dissemination of those lessons to other battlefield elements, as well as the training that prepares reinforcements and new units. In essence, this is the learning and adaptation that helps win battles as well as larger campaigns. This includes the capacity to learn and then improve military effectiveness for the employment of major forces in the achievement of strategic aims in a theatre of war.

Both Russian and Ukraine have demonstrated the capacity for battlefield learning and adaptation during the war. Ukrainians accept that they have no choice but to learn and adapt, but that they also have to continuously speed up their learning and adaptation given Russian improvements in this subject. Key Ukrainian battlefield adaptations have included:

• Distributed digital C2 and fires enable rapid tactical kill chain.

• Fibre optics control for UAVs and UGVs.

• Increasing the use of autonomous systems in Gen 2 robotic war, including the maritime operations by drones and the ground and air attack during the 2024 Battle of Lytpsi.

• An expansion in use of deception, decoys and dummy equipment.

• Focus on force preservation over retention of territory at all costs since early 2024.

• Improvements in defensive operations in 2024 and early 2025 including widescale use of defensive fortifications in the east, and more focused targeting of Russian artillery in 2025.

Multiple interlocutors during my recent Ukraine visit indicated that the ability of Russian military organisations to learn and adapt has vastly improved over the course of the war. Russia has ‘learned to learn better’ and it has sped up its learning and adaptation cycle across most aspects of military affairs in the past year. Some interlocutors indicated that they felt that the Russians had in some areas surpassed the Ukrainians in tactical learning, analysis, doctrine and training changes in the past year. Russia is now a much more capable and dangerous military institution before the war, and it will use this to improve its operations in Ukraine as well as to threaten Europe.

The Russians are close observers of Ukrainian operations, and they actively copy Ukrainian tactics and methods that they believe work well. This observation was made on several occasions that the Russians are ‘fast followers’ and they can scale up their changes – in tactics or technology – faster than Ukraine can.

Some examples of Russian adaptations over the past year include:

• Improvements to infiltration tactics. This has been an ongoing effort by the Russians to counter the pervasive drone—ISR-strike complex that dominates the region either side of the ‘zero line’ along the eastern and southern fronts.

• In urban areas, the Russians often use civilian-clothed (and sometimes unarmed) personnel as scouts and forward reconnaissance.

• Russian meat tactics continue to improve and become more sophisticated. The Russians have become good are finding weak points in Ukrainian units or along stretches of the frontline. They have also been very good at discerning when unit rotations are taking place and using this knowledge to attack the Ukrainians at their most vulnerable.

• Improved human-machine teaming for aerial and ground autonomous and remotely operated systems, which includes widescale deployment of fiber-optic controlled drones.

• Streamlined tactical and operational strike kill chains.

• Reinvigorated and broadened EW operations.

Strategic adaptation. Strategic adaptation is the learning and adaptation that has an impact on the making of national and military strategy and the direction of the war overall. In short, it is the learning that underpins winning wars. If strategic adaptation is to take place, some of the fundamental assumptions held by political leaders about the objectives and kind of war being fought must also adapt based on strategic learning.

This level of adaptation is also founded on understanding one’s adversary and continuing to build that knowledge as the war develops.

One of the defining elements of the Ukrainian war effort has been the massive surge in civil adaptation to assist the operations being conducted by military forces, the intelligence services and border security forces in Ukraine. From day one of the war, private citizens have assisted with provision of drones, supplies for soldiers and funding larger research efforts in private entities.

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As many of my readers know, I have been visiting Ukraine in the past ten days on another research visit. I have had the opportunity to speak with many people in the capital as well as in units on the eastern front and elsewhere. The war in Ukraine changes quickly. Every six months it is a different war, and therefore regular visits are a must.

I have learned many things during my visits to Ukraine during the war. And among all the insights I have taken from my current trip, one stands out above all others.

The adaptation battle, a feature of this war since the full-scale invasion began in 2022, has intensified. It is now occurring at a pace that I believe is largely incomprehensible to the majority of politicians and defence procurement bureaucrats in the west. That is a problem.

This article was originally published by the Lowy Institute.

I am in Ukraine on my fifth research visit, and it is clear that the adaptation battle between Ukraine and Russia has intensified in the past year. It has battlefield elements as well as aspects founded on pre-war capacity and military-industry links. Each side is learning and adapting based on the actions and reactions of their enemy.

The best example is drones. At the start of the war, neither side had significant quantities of drones in their inventories. The Russians had capable loitering munitions, and both sides had small numbers of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) for reconnaissance.

Once the Russian invasion began, Ukrainian drone operators offered their services to friends in various units, particularly in the Battle for Kyiv. Thereafter, a modern Cambrian Explosion in drone capability occurred. Largely, this has been driven by the Ukrainians, who have been nimble innovators capable of exploiting their pre-war tech base. They also have the capacity to liaise directly between units and drone makers to evolve various models.

The Russians have been fast followers of the Ukrainians, and they possess one significant advantage: they can rapidly scale up production of solutions to Ukrainian adaptations.

Adaptation is the mechanism to build advantage in many areas of warfighting concurrently, while at the same time negating enemy advantage by attempting to interfere with their learning and adaptation. To understand this better, here are six dictums which I believe guide military adaptation.

First, adaptation is an essential foundation for continuous generation of battlefield advantage. Effective adaptation must be nurtured at every level of a military institution.

Second, adaptation is central to learning about the enemy and improving the capacity of friendly forces to negate an adversary’s advantages in technology, tactics, people and generation of smart ideas and massed capability over time. This occurs in war but must start in peacetime.

Third, learning and adaptation cultures and processes must be well established before wars start, to minimise the shock of the transition. Russia and Ukraine both endured periods of military reform before the large-scale invasion in 2022, which provided the foundation for their “adaptive stance” in this war.

Fourth, understanding adaptation is vital to execute the most effective transition from peace to war for military organisations. This topic is one of the least studied areas of adaptation but is explored in detail by Meir Finkel in On Agility.

Fifth, adaptation is key to continuously improving productivity in defence industry in peace and war. There should be close links between military units and those who research and produce all forms of military materiel from boots to precision munitions to drones.

Finally, adaptation is crucial for the cognitive elements of war. It underpins learning about enemy misinformation and the impact it is having on populations and political systems. Adaptation is important to winning a war but also to winning the “story” of the war.

In Ukraine’s war against Russia, the drone adaptation battle is characterised by three key trends.

First, the use of fibre optic control lines for drones has severely limited the impact of electronic warfare against drones. Drones employing fibre optics are not only impossible to jam, they are harder to detect because there are no transmissions to give away their presence. This has led to a second adaptative trend: drone interceptors.

Drone interceptors were originally tried in units with existing drones but have now been systematically developed as a crucial capability in many Ukrainian brigades. With the help of organisations like Come Back Alive and the Drone Fall and Drone Fall 2.0 projects (undertaken in close collaboration with the Ukrainian Armed Forces UAV Training Centre), counter-drone teams now deploy sensors, intercept and command teams in many areas of the front line to deny the Russians the use of fibre optic controlled drones. And the Ukrainians have achieved a key objective of making their interceptors much cheaper than the Russian drones they are bringing down.

But the Russians are now deploying similar teams, and they have learned and adapted to the Ukrainian interceptor teams, resulting in a third trend, Russian counter-adaptation measures for interceptors. These include assessing new Ukrainian capabilities based on videos posted on social media, flying drones at higher altitudes, painting drones to make them harder for Ukrainian operators to spot, and the ability to detect interceptors and take rapid evasive manoeuvres. Russian adaptation occurred very quickly after Ukraine introduced interceptors and was quickly scaled up through Russia’s superior industrial capacity.

Military institutions that hope to be successful in war must never remain at a steady state. They must have the intellectual battles that develop new ideas, doctrines, technologies and organisations to respond rapid technological change and the changing threats posed by adversaries.

The war in Ukraine, and particularly the drone adaptation battle, offers many insights into how contemporary military organisations might hone their ability to learn and adapt in modern war. The Australian Defence Force would do well to pay close heed to these adaptation lessons for the battlefield, strategy and industry.

This article was originally published by the Lowy Institute and is available to be read (for free) at this link.

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There is currently a lot doom and pessimism about the global security environment and the post-WW2 alliance system in Europe. Increasing consideration is also being given to the likelihood of a similar geopolitical shift in American relationships with its partners in the Pacific.

But one thing is certain. All of us are going to have to learn and adapt to the new strategic circumstances. At the same time, the events of the past week have elevated - not reduced - the changes of military conflicts in both Europe and the Pacific. Whether it is strategic adaptation or tactical adaptation, we all need to be better at it.

To that end, the following is the text of a speech that I gave at the Australian National University in Canberra last night that explores military and national security learning and adaptation, how it can be improved with AI, and how we might apply this meshed human-AI adaptive stance to degrade and corrupt enemy learning and adaptation.

My journey of learning about adaptation began over two decades ago. In fact, just over 22 years ago, I returned from two years at Quantico where I attended the Marine Corps Staff College and School of Advanced Warfighting. I was posted to military strategy branch in Russell Offices. As we all know, in Russell Offices, the most important functions share the fifth floor with the CDF and Secretary. In those days, military strategy branch was on the fifth floor.

Early in my time there, my boss the brilliant John Blackburn asked me to take a brief from some scientist. At the appointed time, the scientist turned up for a half hour briefing on her research on adaptation and the military. Well, being a scientist, there was no way a briefing was going to be restricted to just 30 minutes. I recall at the two-hour mark asking how much longer the briefing had to go.

Now you might wonder why I waited until the two-hour mark. The reason was that I was being exposed to something new and fascinating. And ever since then, I have sought to learn and apply the theories of adaptation, complex adaptive systems, and organisational change in my command and staff appointments.

I based the concept of operations for our 1st Reconstruction Task Force in Afghanistan on learning and adaptation. As the lead staff officer for the Army’s Adaptive Army initiative in 2008 and 2009, the combination of theoretical knowledge and practical application was crucial. Since then, I have continued to write about it, study it in theory and on the ground in places like Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, Iraq, Afghanistan and in our own military institutions.

The interaction between military forces, be it training activities in peacetime or the most violent interaction during war, provides many opportunities for individuals and institutions to learn. Learning and adaptation is one of the ways that military commanders and institutions seek to reduce uncertainty[i] and the potential for tactical and strategic surprise.

But, as the multi-millennia history of military affairs demonstrates, not every military organisation has the learning culture necessary to recognise the need for change and then conduct disciplined, multi-level adaptation.[ii] It demands an array of different leadership, training, educational, technological and cultural elements that are put in place and practiced in peace, so that the institution may be reflexively adaptive when war eventually occurs.

This learning and adaptation culture is perhaps the most element of a military organization. The ability to adapt has always been important, but the pace of 21st century technological and geopolitical change makes it more important than ever. The events of last week in Europe are just one example of this.

Rapid technological change is driving faster adaptation cycles, but it also provides part of the solution to the challenge of recognising change, developing solutions, sharing them and repeating that process constantly and consistently. In the past decade, as the impact of artificial intelligence has become clearer and more compelling, it occurred to me that the meshing of adaptation theory and AI might provide an even better way for individuals and institutions to learn, adapt, improve and succeed in modern strategic competition and war.

AI offers the chance to improve all aspects of adaptive cycles for individuals, institutions and nations. But it also offers the chance to understand, and interfere with enemy adaptation cycles, in an approach called Counter Adaptation. The aim of this to degrade the impact of enemy coalition learning communities, such as the one we have seen emerge between Russia, Iran, North Korea and China.

So, the aim of my talk this evening is to propose an evolved concept for multi-level, military adaptation, through the fusion of new learning processes and Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the aim of speeding up, and enhancing the quality, of military adaptation and strategic decision-making in peace and war.

Adaptation is a Fundamental Institutional Imperative

The exploration of adaptation by military institutions has resulted in the development of a range of concepts that underpin the understanding of how adaptation occurs and how it can be applied. One of these is the concept of adaptive cycles.

In military literature, the best-known adaptive cycle is Colonel John Boyd’s OODA (observe-orient-decide-act) loop. Boyd’s fascination with gaining advantage through reacting and manoeuvring faster than an opponent was to constitute the basis for nearly everything he thought and did later. Boyd’s 1976 paper “Destruction and Creation” synthesized his ideas and theories to that date. His 1977 “Patterns of Conflict: Warp X” briefing contained the start of the OODA loop philosophy. Boyd continued to develop this thesis until the mature OODA loop concept appeared in a 1978 briefing entitled “Patterns of Conflict: Warp XII.” Boyd’s work has had significant influence in the military institutions of the United States and beyond.

By the late 1980s, Boyd’s concepts received advocacy from theorist William Lind and U.S. Marine Corps General Al Gray. The advocacy by Lind and Gray, widespread debate inside and outside the Corps, and the ideas of Boyd finally coalesced in the publication of the seminal publication, Warfighting, in 1989.

The 2009 publication by the Australian Army, called Adaptive Campaigning, examined the short- and medium-term applications of adaptation on the battlefield and in other military support functions. It proposed an Adaptation Cycle, based on the premise that “the complexities of the modern battlespace are such that it cannot be understood by remote analysis alone; rather, detailed situational understanding will only flow from physical interaction with the problem and success is achieved by learning from this interaction.”[iii]

But what does this look like in practice? Well, there are five key things that need to occur.

• First, military institutions must build and sustain environmental awareness: This includes fields such as geopolitics, national policy, demography, technologies, and national and institutional relationships.

• Second, they must develop a view of what is likely to succeed in that environment, from the tactical to the strategic level. The development of this view of what is likely to result in success and the extensive testing of such views by military organizations is crucial.

• Military organisations need to make changes that get them closer to their view of fitness and learn from those changes. This includes new and evolved doctrine and organisations.

• They must retain and share knowledge in themselves and in individuals about the information that improves their chances of success. This includes the ability to collect and absorb lessons, disseminate the implications of these lessons (new tactics and strategies, evolved training and education) and continue to learn based on the interaction of the institution with its environment.

• Finally, military organisations need to measure success and failure of engagement with the environment: This is the capacity of an institution to gauge its actions in moving toward this definition of fitness, which leads to further change in institutional and individual actions, objectives, and notions of suitability.

Modern technology and the new wars of the 21st century have sped this process up to historically unprecedented speeds.

Uncrewed systems, with growing AI capabilities, have been at the forefront of many examinations of adaptation in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Multiple studies have examined not only the massive expansion in the number of drones used in war, but the extraordinary fast learning and adaptation cycle in the improvement of drone capabilities and the expanding number of functions they are used for.[iv] As Oleksandra Molloy notes in her recent study of drones in the Ukraine War: The rapidly evolving nature of modern warfare in Ukraine necessitates an accelerated cycle of innovation, which currently ranges from a week to approximately three months.[v]

There are other examples of rapid innovation and adaptation in modern war. The Ukrainian capacity to mesh civil and military sensor networks and analytical capacity[vi] on the battlefield, in the air defence environment and in other national security endeavours is another important case study of adaptation. So too are the Russian developments to improve their electronic warfare capacity to degrade the performance of western precision munitions[vii] and minimise the impact of different kinds of Ukrainian drones on the frontline.[viii]

More recently we have seen the reports about Israel’s use of AI to speed up its targeting cycle and the Pentagon’s application of AI to enhance its kill chains. In the past month, we have also been surprised by the emergence of DeepSeek-R1 AI which, when copied by Western developers, may offer cheaper AI much closer to the coalface for many military institutions.

Despite these advances, adaptation does always not guarantee success. Systems have demonstrated adaptive capacity but have still suffered partial or catastrophic failure. For example, the U.S. Army, which demonstrated the capacity to adapt to the Cold War central European front and use the tactics developed there successfully against Iraq in 1991, then failed to quickly recognise changed circumstances after capturing Baghdad in 2003.

In the Russian system, collecting and sharing lessons is exacerbated by a fear of reporting failure and a culture of centralised command. This was examined in a Royal United Services Institute report on preliminary lessons from the war in November 2022. The report described how the ‘reporting culture’ of the Russian Army was deficient because it “does not encourage honest reporting of failures.”[ix] Anyone who is perceived to have failed is normally replaced or punished. For more senior leaders in the Army, failure can result in important missions being stripped from the organization they command.

This provides useful targetable vulnerabilities which I will discuss shortly.

Wartime Adaptation is Built on Peace Time Developments

But learning and adaptation is not just a wartime concern. War is normally only a small proportion of the life of any military professional. Many military personnel can spend their entire careers in a military organisation and not participate in an operational deployment. More importantly, it is the processes, technologies, leadership philosophies and cultures put in place between wars that provide the foundation for military effectiveness and adaptation in war. In general, the military institution that a nation begins a war with is not the military institution that it wins with.

Monitoring the readiness[x] of a military institution between wars, a process that has traditionally been subject to ‘gaming’[xi], as well as process and data corruption,[xii] can also be vastly improved with new approaches to ensure governments and senior military leaders better understand their deterrence and defence capabilities. Decision-making on other peacetime functions, such as testing options for different force structures and equipment procurements, training and education, logistics and personnel management and the strategic management of alliance interactions might also be improved through better adaptive processes that employ AI.

This also applies to our adversaries. Potential enemy states are rapidly absorbing and deploying new technologies, and their associated new doctrines, which must be understood and countered in peace and war. Russia has demonstrated a capable, if uneven, ability to learn and adapt in Ukraine.[xiii] China has demonstrated a well-developed adaptive stance over the last couple of decades.[xiv]

The question is: how might we influence and degrade this?

We must degrade enemy and competitor adaptation through AI supported counter-adaptation

In their 1990 book Military Misfortunes, Eliot Cohen and John Gooch explored significant military failures over the past one hundred years, producing failure matrices that identify the critical pathways to misfortune and failure. In seeking to adopt a more systemic approach to their analysis of failure, Cohen and Gooch defined the three types of errors that can result in either simple or complex failure: failure to learn, failure to anticipate, and failure to adapt.

Counteradaptation seeks to induce this failure to adapt—or at least prevent effective change—in our adversaries.

Counteradaptation that is informed by AI would need to focus on attacking the five elements of adaptation discussed earlier. These operations should seek to deny an adversary the capacity to effectively adapt to a friendly force’s strategy, presence, and activities. This will reduce the enemy’s range of options against friendly forces, as well as degrade the enemy’s fitness for operations and their capacity to influence friendly activities. Further, counteradaptation operations should also decrease friendly predictability during the conduct of military operations.

Counter adaptation has five components:

• First, it must degrade Adversary Environmental Awareness. The aim is to ensure that the adversary has a qualitatively poorer awareness of the environment than friendly forces do. Examples include deception, signature management, and information operations.

• Next it must Influence the adversary’s Notions of Fitness. We must influence how an adversary might exploit the picture they have of the strategic and operational environment.

• Third, we need to shape, Influence, and Corrupt Change Mechanisms. We must induce (or reinforce) in our competitors and adversaries what Peter Senge has called an organizational learning disability. Given the current techno-authoritarian learning community of Iran, North Korea, Russia and China, this must focus on corrupting international as well as national learning systems. They already have institutional behaviours such as centralisation and fear of reporting failure; we must reinforce this behaviour.

• Fourth, we need to Corrupt Sources of enemy Corporate Lessons. A competitor’s ability to adapt to friendly force operations is reliant on their capability to collect and then disseminate information about friendly activities. Interfering with the enemy’s ability to learn more about friendly operations and denying their capacity to share what they do learn are essential to counteradaptation.

• Finally, we must Monitor, Degrade, and Influence their feedback Loops. We will require an ongoing assessment process with adaptive measures of success and failure to ensure we are moving toward our objectives while influencing our adversary’s ability to adapt.

But…There are Many Risks in Algorithmic Adaptation Support

In a recent investigation of Israeli use of AI in its Gaza operations in 2023 and 2024, it was found that the headquarters of the Israeli Defence Force in seeking to cope with the war’s rapid tempo, “turned to an elaborate artificial intelligence tool called Habsora — or “the Gospel” — which could quickly generate hundreds of additional targets.”

However, critics have proposed that the focus on AI in intelligence analysis and targeting was one of the reasons Israel was surprised by Hamas on 7 October 2023. Human analysts who had warned of the Hamas attacks were ignored because the algorithmic assessments had not provided the same findings. And, in generating so many targets so quickly, there is unlikely to be sufficient humans to validate all such targets, thereby increasing the risk of increased civilian casualties.[xv]

There are an array of other risks with algorithmic support to adaptation.

One risk is that user adoption of AI for supporting analysis and decision-making about adaptation is too low for it to make a viable contribution. This might be the result of a lack of trust by users or that user interfaces are too complex. This might be addressed with building enhanced technological literacy in an institution as well as better design of the kinds of command and control and decision-support tools being used by personnel in a military organisation.

A second risk is corruption of data or analytical AI used in adaptation processes. This might be caused by environmental factors such as damage to servers by weather or adversary action. But it might also be the result of deliberate intrusion and attack by a state or non-state actor. While security protocols will be critical to addressing this, so too will basic cyber hygiene training for personnel. Ultimately this will be a risk for any organisation that actively employs AI in its decision-support processes. The ultimate manifestation of this risk would be an adversary corrupting the AI supported adaptation processes without our knowledge and that this results in increasingly maladaptive processes at different levels of an institution.

Another risk is that in the multitude of different programs to acquire different AI for institutional functions, algorithms that support learning and adaptation are given a low priority and essentially slip to the back of the line for funding. This has been a constant challenge in many training and education programs in military organisations and there are precedents for such behaviour.

In addressing these risks, it is also necessary to define where AI should not be used in adaptation support. There are a range of authorities and responsibilities currently assigned to humans, such as the authorities for lethal force or life-saving medical decisions or even crucial strategic and political decisions, that may be ‘carved out’ and not assigned to AI as the final arbiter.

Adaptation and AI: Building a Meshed Human-AI Adaptive Capacity

The foundational hypothesis of my talk this evening is that all of these aspects military and national adaptation processes might be significantly improved by meshed human-AI adaptation. To achieve this I propose that there are five elements in which military and national security institutions might wish to invest their time, people and technology.

The First Element: Embrace adaptation in the institutional culture. Adaptation, if it is to have a strategic rather than a local influence, normally doesn’t just happen – it must be led. While there are individual imperatives in some circumstances for rapid learning and adaptation, which is where the term ‘adapt of die’ comes from, even these most immediate of learnings can and should be shared to enhance the overall survivability of teams and larger formations. Senior commanders and other leaders must nurture people and formations that are actively learning and capable of changing where it is safe and effective to do so.[xvi] This culture must begin with clear statements about the leadership environment, and its tolerance for risk and new ideas. What leaders can and should do at every level to observe, collect, record and share lessons about combat and non-combat aspects about military affairs must be well defined and disseminated widely.

This must also be accompanied by definitions for acceptable failure, because failure is an integral part of learning. The tolerance levels for failure are likely to be different at various levels of military endeavour. For example, at the tactical level, there may be a greater tolerance for failure because the opportunities for learning are greater and the consequences for failure are less serious than they are at higher levels.

However, there will also be areas where failure cannot be tolerated, such as in unnecessary death of non-combatants or destruction to strategic assets, or in strategic decision-making where the stakes are much higher than on the battlefield. These ‘intolerable failures’ should also be clarified.

Adapted incentive frameworks will required to encourage risk taking to improve military effectiveness. In essence, military organisations must mature their institutional cultures so that they approximate what Martin Dempsey has described in No Time for Spectators as “responsible rebellion”.[xvii]

In changing their systems to embrace learning through failure, military organisations must also achieve a balance of rapid learning on one hand and not rushing to failure on the other. Sometimes, initial lessons from the tactical level may not be indicative of wider changes in the character war. There is a need for analytical processes that can achieve getting the right lessons to the right people at the right time and not leaping on every new observation as some profound shift in warfare.

The Second Element: Scale AI support from individual to institution. There is unlikely to be a one size fits all algorithm or process that can enhance learning and adaptation at every level of military endeavour. For example, the processes and context for the interaction of politicians and senior military leaders in policy and strategy discussions is very different from that of a tactical leader in the land, sea or air domains. Therefore, a virtual arms room of adaptation support algorithms will be necessary in any institution-wide approach to adaptation. At the tactical level, these algorithms will need to be very simple to train people on (otherwise they won't use them) and easy to use by people who are tired, hungry and under constant time pressure.

Strategic level adaptation tools must support strategic level decision making in peace and war about force size and structure, readiness and posture, options for different capabilities to achieve strategic effects and the foundational strategic wargaming that underpins decision-making. These tools are likely to be very different to those used at lower levels but must be linked to them. AI-enabled adaptation systems will also be needed that better aggregate the multitude of lower-level observations and quickly communicate them to the right assessment agencies.

We must use AI to build better learning communities inside our international alliances. As such, I propose that algorithmic supported adaptation should comprise Pillar 3 of AUKUS.

Element Three: Know where adaptation relevant data is found, stored and shared. In his 2018 book, The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis wrote about how AI has been used to better manage farmland and predict weather in America. While the algorithms that underpin this were important, more crucial was the process to discover, connect and apply datasets from many different sources including lost basements and older computers.[xviii] This is also the case in military institutions.

Over the past decade military institutions, as well as other government agencies, have discovered that they possess vast troves of digital data but have generally been poor stewards of that data. Data is held in different formats, in different security classifications with firewalls between different nations, services, and commands.

An enhanced adaptive stance in military institutions must have enhanced data awareness as a foundation. And while institutional measures will be an important element, it will also require data discipline in tactical units and by individuals. As such, data awareness and management will need to become one of the basic disciplines taught to military personnel. For example, a soldier in the field as part of their morning routine will potentially need to add a data assurance check for their digitised systems to their daily weapon clean. The key challenge moving forward will “not be finding enough data in this environment. It will be in finding the right data that is accessible to the user community that needs it.”[xix]

Element Four: Set (and evolve) Measures of Effectiveness. If AI-supported adaptation is to work effectively, there must be measures of effectiveness to guide the direction adaptation takes and where the best AI investments should be made.[xx]

At the tactical and operational levels, winning battles more often is a crude yet proven method of measuring success. But more sophisticated measures are required because not every military activity is battle.

At the strategic and political levels, AI-supported adaptation processes might be capable of measuring improvements in civil-military interaction and decision-making. This may be one of the most vital functions of AI-supported adaptive processes. In peace and war, no single strategic decision is purely military or purely civilian or purely political.[xxi] AI should not only be supporting these interactions but also used to support learning about the interaction in civil-military relations and to assist in finding areas where interaction and decision-making might be improved. Indeed, AI might become an entirely new sub-theme in the broader study of civil military relations.[xxii]

The Fifth Element is Military process and doctrine stripping and reform. The observation and absorption of lessons needs to be part of normal military interaction rather than a separate and parallel ecosystem that often has difficulty inserting itself into strategic decision making. Military institutions have made progress in this regard in recent decades, although as Ukraine, Israel and Russia have demonstrated over the past several years, this can still be an uneven process depending on the risk that personnel are facing and the priorities they are given by their leaders.

Tactical learning must be intimately connected with strategic learning, and the two must have an interactive, two-way relationship. Technology can provide for this in many ways, but human processes must also evolve to improve this interaction. Procurement and personnel decision-making processes, which remain heavily reliant on humans and humans in groups to reach decisions and assign priorities must evolve with the support of algorithmic learning support tools.

Crucially, the reduction of time and the number of senior defence committees might be needed to speed up decision-making processes, but this can only be led from the top. Government ministers and star-ranked officers must be capable and willing to lead a very different acceptance of risk in defence and military processes. Concurrently, these senior military and civilian leaders must better define acceptable failure in the learning process and accept more decision making at more junior levels in the interests of faster adaptation.

In conclusion, military organisations, at least those that wish to succeed in competition and conflict, cannot stand still. Military institutions need to be constantly adapting at different levels.[xxiii] And they must absorb AI-supported adaptive processes in peacetime that can then be applied at to improve adaptation at multiple levels during war.[xxiv]

At the same time, military forces (and the wider national security enterprise) must be continually interfering with the capacity of competitors and adversaries to do the same. This forms an ongoing adaptation battle—and it is one that is conducted at every level of military and national security activities.

War remains a human endeavour, albeit one continually evolving due to the impacts of new technologies, different warfighting ideas, and geopolitics. And it will demand continued investment in the ideas and institutions that make up the military instrument of nations.

But ultimately, the reforms necessary to implement a meshed human-AI adaptive stance to improve decision-making at all levels will require visionary and disciplined leadership.

And that is something no algorithm can provide.

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I have wanted to include that footnotes and acknowledgements for the speech were included. They are provided below.

Notes

[i] It is impossible to entirely remove uncertainty in war or in any human endeavor. In the military context, one of the best examinations of this is Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, published in the 19th century. It is difficult to appreciate the basic philosophical and doctrinal underpinnings of military institutions and their approach to war without reading Clausewitz’s work.

[ii] Millett and Murray, writing in Military Effectiveness: Volume 1, define military effectiveness as “the process by which armed forces convert resources into fighting power.” In my book War Transformed, I offer an updated definition: “the process by which military forces convert resources into the capacity to influence and fight within an integrated national approach.” Mick Ryan, War Transformed, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2022. 130.

[iii] Australian Army, Adaptive Campaigning – Army’s Future Land Operating Concept (Canberra: Australian Army, 2009), 31.

[iv] See Oleksandra Molloy, Drones in Modern Warfare: Lessons Learnt from the War in Ukraine (Canberra: Australian Army Research Centre, 2024); Colin Christopher, The Evolution Of UAVs In The Ukraine Conflict (U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, April 2024), https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/2024/06/04/the-evolution-of-uavs-in-the-ukraine-conflict/; David Hambling, “Interceptors And Escorts: Drone Tactics In Ukraine Are Evolving Fast”, Forbes, 16 April 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/04/16/interceptors-and-escorts-drone-tactics-in-ukraine-are-evolving-fast/; David Kirichenko, “The Rush for AI-Enabled Drones on Ukrainian Battlefields”, Lawfare, 5 December 2024, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-rush-for-ai-enabled-drones-on-ukrainian-battlefields; Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo, “Russian forces test flying flamethrower to target Ukrainian firedrones”, Defense News, 23 November 2024, https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/11/22/russian-forces-test-flying-flamethrower-to-target-ukrainian-firedrones/

[v] Oleksandra Molloy, Drones in Modern Warfare: Lessons Learnt from the War in Ukraine (Canberra: Australian Army Research Centre, 2024), 57-58.

[vi] I examined this with Clint Hinote in Empowering the Edge: Uncrewed Systems and the Transformation of US Warfighting Capacity, Washington DC: Special Competitive Studies Program, 2024, 7-9.

[vii] Isabelle Khurshudyan and Alex Horton, Russian jamming leaves some high-tech U.S. weapons ineffective in Ukraine, Washington Post, 24 May 2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/24/russia-jamming-us-weapons-ukraine/

[viii] These examples of adaptation, among others, are explored in Mick Ryan, The War in Ukraine: Strategy and Adaptation Under Fire, USNI Books, August 2024. https://www.usni.org/press/books/war-ukraine

[ix] Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds. Preliminary Lessons in Conventional Warfighting from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: February–July 2022, London: Royal United Services Institute, 2022, 49.

[x] A useful precis on military readiness reports is Luke A. Nicastro, Military Readiness: DOD Assessment and Reporting Requirements (Washington DC: Congressional Research Service, 26 October 2022). https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12240/3

[xi] Theo Lipsky, “Unit Status Reports and the Gaming of Readiness”, Military Review, September-October 2020, 148-157.

[xii] Philip Wasielewski, The Roots of Russian Military Disfunction, Foreign Policy Research Institute, 31 March 2023, https://www.fpri.org/article/2023/03/the-roots-of-russian-military-dysfunction/

[xiii] Mick Ryan, “Russia’s Adaptation Advantage”, Foreign Affairs, 5 February 2024. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/russias-adaptation-advantage

[xiv] Scott Tosi, “Xi Jinping’s PLA Reforms and Redefining Active Defense”, Military Review, September-October 2023, 87-101. https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/military-review/Archives/English/September-October-23/Active-Defense/Active-Defense-UA1.pdf; Eric Chan, “The Adaptation Battle: the PLA and Lessons from the Russia-Ukraine War”, Global Taiwan Institute, 28 June 2023, https://globaltaiwan.org/2023/06/the-adaptation-battle-the-pla-and-lessons-from-the-russia-ukraine-war/; Phillip Saunders and others (Eds), Chairman Xi Remakes the PLA, Washington DC: NDU Press, 2019.

[xv] Elizabeth Dwoskin, “Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza.” The Washington Post, 29 December 2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/29/ai-israel-war-gaza-idf/

[xvi] This senior advocacy is one of the essential elements of successful institutional learning and reform. For a useful case study involving the massive transformation of the US Army in the wake of the Vietnam War, see Don Starry, “To Change an Army”, Military Review, March 1983, 20-27.

[xvii] Martin Dempsey, No Time for Spectators: The Lessons that Mattered Most from West Point to the West Wing, New York: Missionday, 185-206.

[xviii] Renee Cho, “This is how artificial intelligence can help us adapt to climate change”, Global Center on Adaptation, 26 July 2019. https://gca.org/this-is-how-artificial-intelligence-can-help-us-adapt-to-climate-change/; Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk, Penguin Books, 2018.

[xix] Mike Groen, Digits Collide. Commanders Decide. Command and Control in a Digitally Transformed Age (Washington DC: Special Competitive Studies Project, 2024), 9.

[xx] The requirement for measures of effectiveness to guide institutional learning and adaptation is explored in multiple books and reports. Key references, among others, include Williamson Murray and Alan Millet, Military Effectiveness, Volumes 1-3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988; Meir Finkel, On Flexibility: Recovery from Technological and Doctrinal Surprise on the Battlefield, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007; and, Frank Hoffman, Mars Adapting: Military Change During War, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2021.

[xxi] Eliot Cohen describes this process as the unequal dialog. See Eliot Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime, New York: The Free Press, 2002.

[xxii] Civil-military relations scholars such as Risa Brooks have begun to explore this particular issue. See Risa Brooks, “Technology and Future War Will test U.S. Civil Military Relations” War on the Rocks, 26 November 2018, https://warontherocks.com/2018/11/technology-and-future-war-will-test-u-s-civil-military-relations/; Risa Brooks, “The Civil-Military Implications of Emerging Technology” in Reconsidering American Civil Military Relations, November 2020. Also, James Ryseff and others, “Exploring the Civil-Military Divide over Artificial Intelligence”, RAND Corporation, May 2022, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1498-1.html

[xxiii] Mick Ryan, “Winning Modern Wars through Adaptation”, Futura Doctrina, 31 October 2024.

[xxiv] In his book, On Agility, Meir Finkel offers the following as one of the key military capabilities for the “swift and effective transition from peace to war”: “mechanisms that facilitates fast learning and the rapid circulation of lessons so that the entire military system is updated on, and informed of, potential surprises and their solutions”. Meir Finkel, On Agility: Ensuring Rapid and Effective Transition from Peace to War, Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2020, 151-152.

The past 24 hours have seen technology and business publications reporting on the release of the DeepSeek-R1 chatbot in the United States. The developers of the latest version of the DeepSeek AI model have claimed that it operates on par with OpenAI-o1, that it is fully open-source and that it cost just $6 million to develop. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described it as “an impressive model”.

Understandably, investors in the United States have questioned the billions of dollars they have been pouring into American developers. Chip maker Nvidia lost $588 billion in value in a single day, which is slightly more than the GDP of Norway. Besides the reassessment of tech investment in America, and the losses suffered by tech companies, there may be a range of technological, commercial and political implications of the new DeepSeek-R1 model. As one commentator has noted, “it upends the way that investors have thought about how AI needed to be developed and implemented.”

I intend to explore in this article the potential military implications of this DeepSeek-R1 development. I should emphasise that I write this as an expert in military affairs, and someone who has written about the impact of new technologies on military organisations, not as someone who is an AI or software expert. Despite that, I think there are sufficient implications that we can identify now – and many questions that should be asked.

What Is DeepSeek-R1?

DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company founded in July 2023 in the Chinese city of Hangzhou. It released its first DeepSeek LLM in November 2023, with DeepSeek-V2 released in May 2024 and DeepSeek-V3 released in December 2024.

According to a report by the BBC, DeepSeek was founded by information and electronic engineering graduate, Liang Wenfeng, who was able to amass tens of thousands of Nvidia A100 chips, which are now banned from being exported to China. A report from Scientific American has proposed that DeepSeek engineers could have used those Nvidia A100 chips to develop the latest R1 model. But the crucial breakthrough appears to be that DeepSeek then used lower-powered Nvidia H800 chips to train its new model.

The DeepSeek-R1 AI-powered chatbot has become the most downloaded free app on Apple's app store. It was claimed in a Scientific American article that, “the new model has 670 billion parameters, or variables it learns from during training, making it the largest open-source large language model yet. But the model uses an architecture called mixture of experts so that only a relevant fraction of these parameters—tens of billions instead of hundreds of billions—are activated for any given query. This cuts down on computing costs.”

DeepSeek-R1: Some Unknowns

Given this chatbot has only been released in the past few days, it is yet to be exposed to the global testbed of technical experts and everyday users of AI in society. And, it has already imposed restrictions on sign up, due to alleged cyber-attacks. Could this be also masking a problem with scaling up the chat bot for widespread use?

Cost is another unknown. While DeepSeek has claimed this version of its chatbot only cost $6 million to develop, what range of costs are included and excluded from this figure. The $6 million development figure is orders of magnitude less than what Open AI and other models cost to develop. While this isn’t to say the developers of DeepSeek are lying, we might exercise some sensible scepticism on this low-cost AI until more data is available. And where did the money come from? Was there any PLA or CCP funding used to develop the model and if so, what does this mean about its reliability?

Censorship already appears to be an issue. Initial user query’s about Chinese President Xi’s policies and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre have mimicked Sergeant Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes – “I know nothing!” These are known censorship issues. What else has been deliberately left out from DeepSeek-R1 training to protect the developers from a harsh response from the CCP?

Given these unknowns, what are the implications for military institutions?

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Over the past year, I have been examining the strategic and battlefield lessons of the war in Ukraine and then translating these lessons so they might be applied in the Pacific theatre. You can read my previous articles on this topic here. In this article, I focus on recent robotic warfare events in Ukraine and assess their relevance for future operations in the Pacific.

From the start of the 2022 Russian invasion, uncrewed aerial vehicles have been used in a wide range of missions by both the Ukrainians and Russians. As the war has progressed, the Ukrainian navy began to experiment with, and has now mastered, the development and employment of uncrewed maritime strike systems. A range of small boats and semi-submersibles have been employed to strike Russian naval vessels in the Black Sea, forcing the Russians to restrict their operations in the western parts of that body of water.

This explosion in the use of autonomous and remotely operated systems in Ukraine has seen both Ukraine and Russia develop the ability to not only produce millions of drones annually, but it has seen the development of a rapid adaptation battle, where drones are developed, deployed and evolved with an increasing tempo. The Cambrian Explosion in Drones in Ukraine has also forced military institutions around the world to reconsider their investment in such systems, and to re-assess the balance of traditional, exquisite systems against uncrewed capabilities in military organisations, and how they might improve their defences against massed, uncrewed systems in the air, land and sea domains.

Another more interesting trend has arisen which will force policy makers and military strategists to undertake an even more careful analysis of Ukraine war trends, and how these trends apply in other theatres, particularly the Pacific. This trend, robotic teaming, has emerged over the past year with the advent on drone-on-drone combat in the air and on the ground. In particular, several recent combat actions in Ukraine provide insights that need to be studied and translated for their employment in the massive ocean expanses, tens of thousands of kilometres of littoral, thousands of large and small islands and at least three continents that constitute the Pacific theatre.

Transformative Events in Robotic Warfare

The Battle of the Black Sea Oil Platforms: December 2024. In a statement issued in March 2024, the Security Service of Ukraine described how its Sea Baby drones had been continuously evolved, noting that “the Sea Baby 2024 is a new-generation drone that is enhanced and even more lethal for the enemy." On 7 December 2024, videos appeared on social media of Ukrainian uncrewed naval vessels attacking Russian oil rigs in the Black Sea that were also being used as observation and surveillance platforms. While Ukraine has been employing successive generations of uncrewed naval vessels (also known as uncrewed surface vessels or USV) to push the Russian Black Sea fleet out of the western parts of that body of water, two elements of this attack stood out.

First, the USV used in the attack were of a type not previously seen in any public media. It appeared to have a trimaran arrangement that included large outriggers on each side. As H.I. Sutton has speculated, these could also be clamshell doors for a UAV hangar amidships. But these vessels also displayed another unique capability. The USV are observed in the video reversing up to the Russian platforms. As H.I. Sutton describes in an 18 December 2024 analysis of the attack, “the logical explanation is that this allowed them to drop an explosive charge directly next to the platform’s supports. This was possibly a time delayed, or depth delayed, charge. Since the USV was already pointing away from the platforms it would be able to accelerate away to safety.”

The second new feature observed in this attack is that the USV appears to have launched at least one, and possibly more, FPV drone that conducted a quick reconnaissance of the platform. These drones then shifted to attacking the sensors on the platform, and the Russian personnel installing the sensors.

The Battle of Lyptsi: Late December 2024. In late December (the actual date has not been reported), reports have emerged of a Ukrainian attack on Russian positions near the village of Lyptsi in the Kharkiv region. A spokesman from Ukraine's National Guard described how Ukrainian forces had conducted their first ground attack exclusively using robotic systems. According to the Kyiv Independent, the attack utilised dozens of uncrewed ground combat vehicles (UGV) and FPV drones. Ukrainian troops used UGVs armed with machine guns, while other UGVs laid or cleared mines along sections of the frontline near Lyptsi. The UGVs were supported throughout the mission by FPV drones. This combination of ground and aerial recon and attack capabilities means that the operation was air-land robotic mission.

USV’s as Anti-Aircraft Systems. In several engagements in 2024, Ukrainian Sea Baby drones were observed firing anti-aircraft guns and missiles at Russian helicopters, damaging the aircraft and injuring the onboard personnel. Then, in early January 2025, the Ukrainians were able to shoot down two Russian helicopters employing a similar methodology. The Russian helicopters were downed by See Dragon missiles(a short-range, infrared-guided air-to-air missile that Ukrainian has adapted to be fired from USV), that were fired from a Ukrainian-made Magura V5 naval strike drone, according to Ukraine's military intelligence agency. In a 2 January statement, the Ukrainian’s announced that two helicopters were shot down and one damaged.

The Crimea Strikes: 6 January 2025. In early January, three Russian air defence systems were attacked by the Ukrainians. The attacks, which took place in coastal areas of the occupied southern Ukrainian region of Kherson, were apparently executed by Ukrainian naval drone carriers. The drone carriers were able to launch FPV drones which then proceeded to travel towards the Russian aid defence systems, including two Pantir-S1 air defence weapons, and then destroy or disable them with explosive warheads. According to a report published by the Kyiv Post, the attacks against the Russians occurred near the Kherson village of Khorly, which is approximately 80 kilometres from the coast.

These events represent a next-generation approach to robotic warfare. Until this point, uncrewed systems have acted either alone or with similar systems in a single domain. Henceforth, we should expect that the employment of drone carriers will become more common in the ground, sea and air domains. This makes a lot of sense for many forms of missions, particularly if long endurance drones in one environment are best placed to transport shorter endurance, but heavily armed and high speed, drones that use a different domain. Additionally, given the probable lessons that the Ukrainians learned in the Battle of Lyptsi, more widespread employment of robotic systems with fewer (or no) humans for close combat activities.

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Back in February 2022 (that seems like a long time ago now), I published a book called War Transformed: The Future of 21st Century Great Power Competition and Conflict (USNI Books) It covered the key trends which were shaping contemporary strategic competition and conflict. The book also offered several hypotheses about key initiatives that might permit contemporary military institutions to better understand the challenges they faced, remain abreast of best practice and to undertake the organisational, conceptual and personnel adaptations required to do so.

Two great disruptors - new, confident and wealthy authoritarian regimes; and, advanced technologies like AI and robotics - are changing the shape and trajectory of war in the 21st century. This is hardly the first era of massive disruption of societies, and thereafter, military institutions. The end of the 19th century was also a period of significant technological and societal change which resulted in major changes in the character of war.

The Second Industrial Revolution, which straddled the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, resulted in widespread changes to how societies lived, communicated, and interacted. It also provided different means for waging war, with the birth of wireless communications, electricity, aircraft, the internal combustion engine and new materials and chemical sciences (including the development of dynamite).

This period also saw new production techniques being applied to military hardware which changed the increased the scale and lengthened sustainability of military operations. That the era has also been described as The Vertigo Years by author Philip Blom is an indication of the rapid pace of technological and strategic change.

In the late 19^th Century, several influential writers sought to identify the technological means to successfully conduct future operations. One interesting contributor to thinking about future in the late 19^th century was a Polish banker, Jan Gotlib Bloch. His 1899 book, The Future of War in its Technical, Economic and Politician Relations, is a detailed exploration of contemporary warfare, the need to adapt military institutions because of new technology, and the national cost of war. He proposed potential disruptions in human conflict, many of which would appear in the later world wars. His discussions on distributed command and control (now known as mission command) predates the German explorations in the later stages of the First World War and the inter-war year.

The late 1800s saw s multitude of fictional stories that explored how evolving technologies might impact military endeavours. The first entry in the literature was The Battle of Dorking (1871), written by British Army officer George Chesney. This was joined by publications in France, Germany and the United States, and several hundred books were published in the lead up to the First World War. Important contributions in this literature include La Guerre Infernale (The Infernal War) a series of illustrated stories published by Albert Robina in 1908, The Great War in England in 1897 (1895) by William Le Queuex, The Great War Syndicate (1889) by Frank Stockton, and Germany and the Next War (1911) by Friedrich von Bernhardi.

The examination of future war, through the lens of advanced new technologies, is hardly a new undertaking. And, many of the predictions explored in these books failed to materialise. But, as I examined in War Transformed, we should be able to learn from those who have studied future war in the past, to improve our capacity to do so in the future.

The Changing Character of War

The character of war, or the means with which humans fight wars, has continuously evolved throughout history. This evolution continues into the contemporary era. The ageless competition to develop and use the best weapons, achieve dominance over adversaries, and hone the best tactics and strategies for war has engaged the greatest - and sometimes the worst - minds over the past three thousand years at least.

Throughout the year I have sought to better understand, and write about, how the character of war is evolving before our very eyes. Back in February, I reviewed the strategic lessons from the war in Ukraine and how these had applicability in different environments and geostrategic contexts. You can read that article here.

But in reviewing the changing character of war, I have also been examining drivers for new approaches to war, and hunting for evidence of new concepts for war in Ukraine and beyond. In April, I published a piece that explored Ukraine’s evolved ways of war and in June I asked the question “are we seeing a revolution in military affairs?” in Ukraine. Also in June, the need for a new offensive doctrine was the subject of another article. In July, I examined influences on the trajectory of the war in Ukraine, and you can read that piece here.

Finally, just this month, I published a report with Clint Hinote in which we examined the character of war, how it has evolved since the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, what the key trends might be in the security environment out to 2030. You can read it here.

Besides this broader issue of the changing character of war, there have been a variety of themes I have examined in my articles this year. Each of these are worthy of deep study in their own right. However, most of the themes explored below also interact with each other in some way. This interaction adds to the complexity of understanding the trajectory of the war in Ukraine, and war in general. We should expect that this interaction will continue, and intensify, in the years ahead.

Below, I re-examine seven key themes in the trajectory of war that I explored during 2024, and provide links back to the articles related to these themes. The seven themes are:

1. Leadership.

2. Autonomous systems.

3. Victory.

4. Adaptation.

5. Failure.

6. Surprise.

7. Mobilisation.

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In the past 48 hours, reports have emerged of a Ukrainian attack on Russian positions near the village of Lyptsi in the Kharkiv region. According to the Kyiv Independent, the attack utilised dozens of uncrewed ground combat vehicles (UGV) and FPV drones. The ground vehicles deployed in the assault conducted several different missions, including surveillance, mine clearing and direct fire using machine guns.

The UGVs were apparently supported throughout the activity by FPV drones. While this doesn’t make the attack fully autonomous – the vehicles need human operators – it is one of the more significant examples of drone combat in this war.

This combination of ground and aerial recon - attack capabilities means that the operation was in effect an air-land operation. But it was probably one that was very different to that envisioned by the architects of the Cold War era Air-Land Battle doctrine.

The information on the attack provided about the attack was provided by a spokesman from the Khartiia Brigade. This brigade formed in March 2022, and is assigned to the National Guard of Ukraine, which is a military force under the command of Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs. In August this year, the National Guard established its Typhoon specialised unit which only operates uncrewed systems. They were sure to have either been involved, or supported preparations for, the attack.

The Battle of Lyptsi may yet prove to be a milestone in the history of human conflict. That is for future historians to decide. But it is fair to state that it is an important step in the transformation of the character of war from a purely human endeavour to something quite different in the 21st century.

Uncrewed Systems on the Land

From the beginning of the large-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, uncrewed aerial vehicles have been used in a wide range of missions by both the Ukrainians and Russians. As the war progressed, the Ukrainian navy began to experiment with, and has now mastered, the development and employment of uncrewed maritime strike systems. A range of small boats and semi-submersibles have been employed to strike Russian naval vessels in the Black Sea, forcing the Russians to restrict their operations in the western parts of that body of water. For coverage of this, see this report from Covert Shores.

However, until late in the second year of the war, uncrewed ground systems in Ukraine were relatively scarce on the battlefield. There have been several practical reasons for this.

First, autonomous and remotely operated vehicles have difficulties with navigation and crossing many forms of terrain. It is one of the major obstacles to widespread use of uncrewed ground systems.

A second reason for their later appearance on Ukrainian battlefields has been that the ground environment normally has a higher density of military forces than the air or sea. Deconfliction is an issue. And the last thing ground forces want is to be accidently shot by their own armed ground drones. This is a technological as well as an organisational issue that needs resolution.

Third, ground systems also consume larger amounts of on-board power than those in the other environments because of the need to travel across bumpy, vegetated terrain at slow speeds. Power and recharging ground systems in the tactical environment can be a problem, and this needs practical and scalable solutions that can be used, with minimal training and support, by large numbers of units.

Finally, trust by humans in these systems is a challenge. I mentioned earlier the problem of humans being shot by their own robots. But equally, if robotic systems are being employed to hold part of the line in a defensive scheme of maneuver, other soldiers want to ensure they can trust them to do so and not let the enemy through. Trust, that the UGVs will perform as designed, and only target the enemy, is a significant issue for military institutions.

Many commercial companies have been developing solutions to these challenges. The greatest contemporary driver for using UGVs is that both sides are seeking solutions to a more transparent and much more lethal ground combat environment, while at the same time they are trying to manage deficiencies in manpower (a bigger problem for Ukraine than Russia). The low signature, ability to use in large numbers and their expendability makes them very attractive in the mass casualty environment of the Ukrainian front line.

Robotic Ground Combat: Ukraine as a Battle Lab

The deployments of UGVs in Ukraine comprises a large, real-time battle laboratory. It is an important element of the larger adaptation battle which is occurring across multiple aspects of the war.

While Ukraine has generally led the way in deploying uncrewed ground systems, the Russians have also been experimenting with them and deploying them on the battlefield. Last year, American expert on uncrewed systems, Sam Bendett, produced a detailed exploration of Russian developments in uncrewed ground vehicles (UGV). Among systems being tested were the Marker UGV. The Russians have apparently also tested other uncrewed ground systems for armed reconnaissance and sentry operations as well as casualty evacuation.

Battlefield experimentation, some formal and much of it informal, is providing insights into the applications of UGVs, the variety of capabilities needed to make them feasible in the land environment such as power, sensors, propulsion, running gear and weapons, as well as how changes to land tactics are needed. This process is informing the deployment of successive generations of uncrewed ground systems for both Ukraine and Russia. Inevitably, their lessons are also leaking out further into armies around the globe to inform their development of uncrewed ground systems.

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Recently, I had the opportunity to once again to collaborate with Lieutenant General (retired) Clint Hinote to conduct an exploration of the security environment that military institutions must be prepared to face out to 2030. As with our previous collaboration, Empowering the Edge: Uncrewed Systems and the Transformation of U.S. Warfighting Capacity, it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience as we both challenged and pushed each other to ensure we thought through all the key issues.

Our paper is part of a larger series of papers on future defence challenges that have just been published by the Special Competitive Studies Project in Washington DC. The full list of these papers in this series is as follows:

• The Character of Future War to 2030.

• Exploring the Future Operating Environment: 2035-2050.

• Joint Warfighting Concept 2034-2044.

• Reimagining Command and Control with Human-Machine Teams.

• Digits Collide. Commanders Decide. Command and Control in a Digitally Transformed Age.

• Reimagining Military C2 in the Age of AI: Revolution, Regression or Revolution.

As we wrote our paper, it had been apparent for some time that military forces had to place an even greater emphasis on their capacity to orient, learn, and adapt to change. The U.S. military’s FOE 2035 document noted that “simply procuring superior capability will not be enough – the speed at which Defence can adapt and integrate technologies will be more important.” In response, militaries must continuously scan and reassess the strategic environment and interpret what it means.

This is not a new requirement. The pace of change, however, means that learning and adaptation are more challenging to accomplish and more critical to outcomes than in the past. The margin for error is vanishingly thin.

Several other reports in the past decade have also examined the security environment which is challenging military institutions world wide. These reports include:

• U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Operating Environment 2035: The Joint Force in a Contested and Disordered World.

• UK Ministry of Defence, Future Operating Environment 2035.

• Special Competitive Studies Project, Offset X: Closing the Deterrence Gap and Building the Future Joint Force.

• National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World.

In our collaboration, Clint and I did not attempt to replicate these previous reports' excellent work or challenge their conclusions. Instead, we identify relevant changes over the past three years and explore how they influence war's evolving character. Particular focus is placed on the wars in Ukraine and Israel, the escalation of Chinese confrontation against its neighbors in the Pacific and the United States, and how new technologies are making new military concepts possible.

The key findings in our resulting paper, The Character of Future War to 2030, are described below.

War is an enduring element of human existence, but it continuously evolves with societal, technological, and political developments. The current era is one of technological innovation and societal change, and disruptions impact human competition and conflict. Our paper addresses how recent changes, especially in the past three years, are influencing the character of war.

The accelerated pace of change is the fundamental factor influencing modern conflict. In this period of accelerated change, four additional factors are driving the security environment:

1. Authoritarians seeking to change the global system through violence, if necessary.

2. Authoritarians (and others) disrupting regional security.

3. The development of advanced technologies made widely available, and

4. The deepening impacts of climate change.

In this fluid security environment, the most relevant trends that will inform military force development in the short and medium terms (through 2030) are as follows:

1. A state of constant confrontation that takes advantage of rapid transition above and below the violence threshold.

2. An increasingly transparent understanding of the battlespace that remains imperfect and thus exploitable.

3. War conducted on a massive scale requiring mass for victory, which drives a need to mobilize society.

4. Learning and adaptation as prerequisites for victory.

These trends have serious implications for the future force. Our paper makes a total of 21 recommendations related to these trends.

In our paper, Clint and I attempted to anticipate changes in the character of war. No matter how well we have done this, we cannot be fully successful. The world is changing at an accelerating pace, and new and unexpected developments will further induce changes in the character of war.

We agree with Douhet that we cannot wait to adapt, but we also know that we cannot fully predict what will happen.

You can read our full paper at this link.

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For my regular readers, this is a slight variation on my normal topics. And this wasn’t the article I had intended to write this week. But, while watching the third chapter in the Star War prequel trilogy over the weekend, I could not help myself. Fiction, and science fiction, can help us think about contemporary challenges.

Next year, the third prequel film in the Star Wars saga, Chapter III: Revenge of the Sith, celebrates 20 years since its release. The movie, which provides the closing chapter in the prequel trilogy that explored the life of Anakin Skywalker and the rise of Darth Vader, was a commercial success, taking over $840 million world-wide.

Most rankings of the Star Wars films place Revenge of the Sith somewhere in the bottom half of all Star Wars movies released to date. A 2024 Buzzfeed ranking had it at eighth of 11 movies (Solo takes last place), Entertainment Weekly in 2023 ranked it in 6^th place, Space.com put it in 10^th (ouch) and the Rotten Tomatoes ‘Tomatometer’ has it in 7^th. So, it is fair to say that the film has its lovers and haters, as do the prequel and sequel trilogies more generally.

There have been hundreds of articles written about this subject in the past two decades. To get a sense of this debate, I have included some of these pieces below:

• How the Star Wars Prequels Went From Being Hated to Loved - Link

• Why I love the ‘Star Wars’ prequels (and you should too) - Link

• Explaining Why The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy Hate Disappeared - Link

• How I Forgave George Lucas and Learned to Love Star Wars Again - Link

I am sure I could write pages and pages to justify which Star Wars films I love (generally the original trilogy, Rogue One and the prequels) and the ones I don’t love as much (the rest). But that is not the aim of this piece.

Let me go back a step. Last night, I sat down to watch Revenge of the Sith As always, the movie provides outstanding visuals and a good conclusion to the Anakin Skywalker trilogy, even if the dialog is shaky at times (“no, it’s because I love YOU so much”).

Anyway, as I watched the opening sequence with Anakin Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi conducting their approach to the Separatist ship on which Count Dooku and General Grievous are holding the abducted Chancellor Palpatine, it occurred to me that the scene contained a plethora of issues with autonomous systems, as well as human-machine and human-AI teaming. Key themes in this opening sequence might be useful for current military leaders and those involved in developing new tactics, strategies and force constructs for the 21^st century.

Science fiction and speculative fiction have been used for this purpose for some time. As I explored in a recent piece for Engelsberg Ideas:

Military fiction emerged as societies and their military institutions sought to understand and adapt to the wide-ranging and rapid technological changes that occurred during the Second Industrial Revolution in the latter half of that century. With that great change came new opportunities and fears.

Militaries also recognise the virtue of fiction as a speculative tool for contemplating the future of conflict. Retired senior military officers have sought to leverage their long military experience to explore contemporary security threats through the lens of high-technology military conflict. The standard was first set by Sir John Hackett with his 1980 novel, The Third World War: August 1985 about a possible clash between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

In recent years, the concept of FICINT, an acronym for fictional intelligence, has been applied to futuristic stories that contain lessons for those facing new technologies, as well as societal and strategic challenges in the modern world. Peter Singer and August Cole, authors of the influential novel of a future war, Ghost Fleet, have coined the term Useful Fiction to describe the application of fiction to real world problems. As they note in their paper Thinking the Unthinkable With Useful Fiction:

FICINT remains ideally suited to a world not just of technologies evolving at machine speed and geopolitics undergoing systemic changes, but also in the midst of a historical crisis that tests the limits of our comprehension. It can spread research in a manner that is understandable, and more shareable, as well as foster emotional connections that make readers, in turn, more likely to drive change. FICINT can aid in answering the question of ‘what do we do next’ as timelines move forward at an unpredictable pace which every organisation has to contend with, whether it is planning for war or justifying the next budget.

So, that is the background to why I believe that fiction and science fiction can be very useful in complementing our study of current affairs, new technology and military history. The thoughtful combination of fiction and non-fiction can provide solutions and useful pathways to deal with the rapidly changing technological and geopolitical environment.

Five Key Insights

But the question remains, how is Revenge of the Sith relevant in providing insights for contemporary military leaders and planners? There are five key insights (but there are probably others) from the opening sequence of Revenge of the Sith that I would like to explore in the following section.

First, the application of massed, cheap autonomous systems to protect small numbers of exquisite, highly capable crewed military platforms. As Obi Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker thread their way through the massive space battle between Republic and Separatist ships above the galactic capital of Coruscant. As Obi Wan and Anakin progress, it becomes clear that a multitude of small drones are being used to help defend the large Separatist starships fighting in what is known as The Battle of Coruscant.

While in Ukraine we have seen drones used to help protect armoured vehicles in combat, as well as on casualty evacuation and logistics missions, these are generally operated and piloted by humans. Drones have even been used to lead some Ukrainian attacks against Russian positions. And the Russians have tested rudimentary uncrewed ground systems to accompany crewed ground vehicles to protect them from attack from Ukrainian UAVs.

In the near future, fully autonomous drones might be routinely attached to crewed platforms, be they large ships, bombers or tanks. These could be linked into digital battle command networks and have the ability to autonomously scan for threat, prioritise them and then attack threats without human intervention. This might be a much more advanced version of current capabilities such as the Trophy system mounted on armoured vehicles. However, more survivable and multi-use drones might be a future solution to the protection of expensive, crewed military platforms.

The second insight is about fully autonomous warfare where autonomous systems attack other autonomous systems. In Revenge of the Sith, this occurs several times in the opening sequence, but is most obvious when a Separatist Buzz Droid (also known as a Pistoeka Sabotage Droid) lands on Obi Wan’s Jedi interceptor and destroys the R4 droid that assists in piloting and operating the ship. Droid on droid combat is common in the Star Wars universe and in science fiction more generally. But what about in the real world?

Until the start of the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there were few if any examples of autonomous systems targeting each other in combat or in defensive scenarios (I don’t count CIWS or missiles shooting down drones). However, in the past three years there has been a steady development of autonomous or remotely operated systems that can target enemy drones.

In the air, drone on drone combat has become more common with some drone types being specifically adapted for this kind of aerial combat. There have also been instances of uncrewed aerial vehicles attacking uncrewed ground vehicles (UGV). An example of this was Russian army’s use of new grenade-armed robotic mini-tanks in an assault on Ukrainian positions west of Avdiivka in March this year. The Ukrainians destroyed the Russian UGVs using drones. The Ukrainians have also used drones to destroy Russian mine-laying UGVs.

New technologies specifically designed from the ground up to intercept enemy drones are becoming available, and some are being deployed in Ukraine. The Fortem DroneHunter F700 and Andruil drone hunting Roadrunner are two examples of what is certain to be an expanding range of drone-versus-drone combat capabilities in the coming years.

More importantly, what role does drone-on-drone combat in tactical operations? The array of missions will likely encompass defensive tasks, such as defending high value targets against loitering munitions and enemy surveillance and kamikaze drones, through to offensive missions where drones are used to destroy other drones that are defending targets so that attack drones and missiles can penetrate through to their targets. This drone-on-drone combat will increasingly spread into the maritime and ground environments, with military institutions seeking to exploit the advantages of their own autonomous systems while denying them to the enemy.

This is not just a technological challenge, however. It will require revisions of tactical doctrine as well as the evolution of military organisations and, as the Ukrainians have done, potentially the development of entirely new and novel drone institutions.

A third theme from Revenge of the Sith is the issue of autonomous systems being used to attack crewed military platforms. In Revenge of the Sith this manifests as Separatist tri-fighters attacking a squadron of clone-piloted Republic ARC-170 starfighters. Most of the crewed Republic fighters are destroyed in this engagement.

It is a situation that we have also seen from the earliest days of the Ukraine conflict as well as in the war in the Middle East. Drones, and more recently FPV drones, have been used extensively by both sides in the Ukraine war to target tanks, artillery, headquarters and even individual soldiers. This has become a normal operating method for both sides and is increasingly being included in the inventories of other nations as well. They are transforming the conduct of modern war in doing so, while also changing the character of the military institutions that employ them. As Clint Hinote and I wrote in a recent piece for War on the Rocks:

In the coming decade, military institutions may realize a situation where uncrewed systems outnumber humans. At present, the tactics, training, and leadership models of military institutions are designed for military organizations that are primarily human, and those humans exercise close control of the machines. Soon, the ratio of humans to uncrewed systems will flip.

We are only seeing the tip of the iceberg in this issue in Ukraine. As the number of drones accelerates, and their missions expand, we will see a transformation of how autonomous systems are used across the air, land and sea domains. It is also likely to drive significant changes in tactics, doctrine and the fundamental organisational constructs of military forces that have dominated for the past century.

Fourth, future autonomous systems might be able to transform their shapes and operating modes to be able to function across different domains. In Revenge of the Sith, Separatist vulture droids (also known as the Variable Geometry Self-Propelled Battle Droid, Mark I) that walk across the exterior of large starships are able to change shape and function as defensive tools against Republic fighters. to missile-launching fighters.

What kind of utility might a multi-domain drone have in modern conflict? They may be useful for applications that require stealthy approaches (by sea or land) to an objective area, but then require rapid speed and manoeuvrability for the final prosecution of a target (be it for reconnaissance or more lethal missions).

Drones capable of operating in more than one domain are already being developed. The air-sea drones such as the Sea Dart and the TJ Flying Fish (both being produced by Chinese companies) and the Diodon amphibious drone. An even more intriguing development, presented at the 2023 International Conference on Automation, Robotics and Applications, is a tricopter drone capable of flying, driving on the ground and operating as a surface vessel on water. There is a clearly a future for these multi-domain autonomous systems, although there will probably be a cost element which could see these multi-domain drones being more expensive than single domain autonomous systems.

A final theme from Revenge of the Sith that is relevant in modern war is drones and their integral AI providing cognitive augmentation or the ability to offload human tasks in complex environments. During the opening sequence of Revenge of the Sith, Obi Wan on several occasions speaks to his astromech droid, R4-P17. At the same time, Anakin Skywalker communicates with his droid, R2-D2 several times. Obi Wan even states at one point that “flying is for droids”, which provides an insight into the mindset of some humans about the role of non-human sentience. How might our own views on the role and functions of drones and other autonomous systems evolve?

The droids in the opening sequence of Revenge of the Sith, are integral to the functioning of the Jedi interceptors being flown by Obi Wan and Anakin; they provide navigation aid, manage many of the ships systems, and provide an adaptive capacity for in-flight ship repairs when battle damage is sustained. R2-D2 even provides a basic ‘ship defence’ capacity on Anakin’s ship during the sequence when it electrocutes an attacking buzz droid. This provides a useful metaphor for how humans are beginning to use, and partner with, tools that provide cognitive augmentation.

Humans have long used different tools to aid in their ability to undertake cognitive tasks. Whether it was an abacus, a calculator, pen and paper or computers, human cognition has been assisted with tools and machines external to the human body. Newly developed algorithms, high performance computing and artificial intelligence are already demonstrating the ability to assist humans to plan and think through complex tasks. The myriad of applications for AI now extends from calendar management, food menu planning and data management through to complex systems analysis and generation of images, video, and text.

The offloading or delegation of human cognitive tasks to ‘droids and AI’ has already begun. Both Ukraine and Russia use AI in a range of tasks that extend from assisting the targeting of UAVs, catching Russian sanctions busters, cyber warfare and combating disinformation, identifying and tracking war criminals, geolocation and analysis of open-source data to identify enemy units and to provide faster imagery and intelligence analysis. The Ukrainians have even employed AI to understand how targeted military activities have a cognitive effect on the Russians.

For some further reading on the use of AI during the war in Ukraine, I have attached the links to some reports and articles below:

• CSIS: Understanding the Military AI Ecosystem of Ukraine - Link

• ICDS: Russia’s War in Ukraine: Artificial Intelligence in Defence of Ukraine - Link

• CNAS: Roles and Implications of AI in the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict - Link

• CEPA: Ukraine’s Secret Weapon – Artificial Intelligence - Link

• IISS: AI’s baptism by fire in Ukraine and Gaza offers wider lessons - Link

Despite the growing use of AI during this war, it remains a niche capability and is still poorly understood by many military leaders. This will demand changes in how military personnel and their leaders are trained and educated, new ways of delivering technological literacy to military personnel and units, as well as enhanced collaborative methods with commercial entities which provide the expertise and technologies required by current and future military organisations. There is a compelling, and even existential, requirement to do this quickly. As I have written previously:

Military command and control and strategic decision-makers alike will need artificial intelligence that can process information and recommend options for making decisions faster (or of higher quality) than an adversary can…military organizations will likely contain thousands or even tens of thousands of unmanned and robotic systems, all-encompassing some form of artificial intelligence. In this environment, where all sides may possess artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, the race will go to the intellectually swift.

Revenge of the Sith: More Than Just a Movie

As one short sequence at the start of Revenge of the Sith demonstrates, there is more to movies than their entertainment value alone. They can provide important insights into contemporary military challenges, and sometimes, even offer some solutions. In this instance, the large space battle at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith, and the intervention of Obi Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, offers multiple insights into the potential future pathways and capabilities offered by autonomous systems and artificial intelligence in military affairs.

While films (and books) cannot provide every solution to future challenges, they do provide a useful complement to the study of military history, current affairs, and technological developments for the modern military professional.

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As many of my readers will know, I am a big fan of using military fiction to explore important themes in national security, war and military affairs. My first attempt at this, White Sun War, was published in 2023 and I am currently working on a sequel. In this article, I explore the importance of Tom Clancy’s first book, The Hunt for Red October, and the enduring influence of military fiction.

The novel The Hunt for Red October debuted in the United States on 1 October 1984. Published by a small publisher, the US Naval Institute Press, the book went on to become hugely successful in the United States and beyond. Ronald Reagan publicly praised the book and even invited its author, former insurance salesman Tom Clancy, to visit the White House. ‘They’re not just novels’, explained George H.W. Bush’s vice president, Dan Quayle. ‘They’re read as the real thing.’

Clancy’s novels made him the most successful fiction writer of the 1980s, and his first three – The Hunt for Red October, Red Storm Rising, and The Cardinal of the Kremlin – were hugely popular representations of the drama of the Cold War in the Reagan era. The Hunt for Red October follows a rogue Soviet submarine captain who attempts to defect to the United States with a state-of-the-art nuclear submarine, igniting a tense standoff between American and Soviet forces, and the CIA analyst tasked with facilitating his defection.

The novel raised the standard for military thrillers in a decade of new-age military technology such as the futuristic ‘Star Wars’ missile defence system, which, to the Soviets, appeared as if it could upend the delicate strategic balance of the Cold War. As a contemporary New York Times review of the book noted: ‘It’s not heroes and villains who keep the plot afloat, or in this case submerged. Rather, it’s the sophisticated technology available to modern navies, and Mr Clancy describes its uses with a thoroughness bordering on folly.’

Because of its thorough treatment of cutting-edge military technology, The Hunt for Red October is considered a pioneering work in a new generation of military thrillers that feature higher levels of technical accuracy. Clancy’s extensive research ensured that his portrayal of military technologies – such as submarines, naval warfare, and radar systems – was highly realistic. Following the publication of Clancy’s debut novel, military thrillers began to focus more on technical and tactical precision. Authors such as Harold Coyle, Larry Bond, Dale Brown and Stephen Coonts followed in Clancy’s footsteps, each incorporating complex military systems and tactics into their fictional works. Clancy and this next generation of military fiction authors popularised the ‘techno-thriller’, a subgenre that remains highly popular in military literature and for a wider audience today.

However, The Hunt for Red October was simply the next step in a genre of writing that originated in the 19th century. Military fiction emerged as societies and their military institutions sought to understand and adapt to the wide-ranging and rapid technological changes that occurred during the Second Industrial Revolution in the latter half of that century. With that great change came new opportunities and fears.

In the late 1860s an officer in the British Army’s Royal Engineers named George Chesney became concerned with the poor state of the British Army. After failing to achieve any action through writing letters of concern, he decided to author a fictional story highlighting the shortfalls in Britain’s defence. Entitled The Battle of Dorking, his story described an invasion of Britain by a ‘German-speaking’ nation which he called The Enemy.

The story, published in 1871 in the wake of the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War, was a sensation. As Lawrence Freedman notes in his book, The Future of War: A History, Chesney’s work quickly sold over 80,000 copies and sparked a national debate about Britain’s defences. The Battle of Dorking was the start of the genre of fiction about the potential for, and the nature of, future conflicts.

The Battle of Dorking would be the book that originated the category of literature about a potential invasion of Britain at the turn of the 20th century. In the lead-up to the First World War, several other books joined this genre. One of the best-known is William Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910, published in 1906. The key theme in Le Queux’s book was the British military’s lack of preparedness for a European war. The book described a German invasion force landing on the east coast of England and fighting its way into London. Eventually, the British turn the tide on their invader through a popular uprising, liberating their nation. Over one million copies of the book edition were sold, and it was translated into 27 languages.

On the other side of the English Channel, the antagonist of many British military fiction novels was also producing literature for a future war that speculated about what conflict would look like against the British. Perhaps the best-known writer was the Prussian General and military historian Friedrich Adam Julius von Bernhardi. After the Franco-Prussian War and the end of his career as an army corps commander in Westphalia, from 1909 Bernhardi dedicated himself to writing on military subjects. Unlike many of the pre-war authors, he eventually got to put into practice many of his ideas, serving with distinction in the German Army on both the Eastern and Western fronts throughout the First World War.

In 1911, Bernhardi published his best-known work, Germany and the Next War. Gaining popularity among German nationalists, it became even more widely read in Britain when a translated edition was released in 1912. Many in Britain believed it provided evidence of the ill intent that Germany harboured towards them. The book is bellicose in character, and at one point, Bernhardi describes war as a ‘biological necessity of the first importance’. But Germany in the Next War was also a detailed examination of Germany’s place in the world and its aspirations (or at least those of the author) to become a world power. The book proposed the character of the next war while conducting in-depth examinations of German land and naval power. Bernhardi also notably recommended the development of what he called an ‘air fleet’.

Across the Atlantic, American author Frank Stockton described a different vision of future war. Published in 1889, Stockton’s The Great War Syndicate described a war between the United States and England. The twist of this story is that 23 ‘great capitalists’ form a syndicate in America and propose to the US Congress that they take charge of the war. The syndicate would ‘assume the entire control and expense of the war, and to effect a satisfactory peace within one year’. Stockton’s book was prescient, and it remained relatable to generations of readers familiar with the power of the military-industrial complex.

Another early work of speculative military fiction that has made a lasting impact is H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds. Unlike other stories centred on the threat of invasion from across the Channel or the Atlantic, this tale features an invader that does not even originate from Earth. Wells explored the theme of future war through the lens of science fiction – an invasion from Mars. Originally serialised in 1897 by Pearson’s Magazine in England and by Cosmopolitan in the United States, it was published as a novel in 1898.

Wells’ story is significant for several reasons. First, it was one of the earliest novels to explore conflict between humans and aliens, and its themes have permeated science fiction for over 120 years. It also serves as an exploration of conflict with ‘the other’. Most European and American future-war literature of the time dealt with familiar adversaries, as well similar methods of warfare, weapons, and ways of thinking. The War of the Worlds diverged from this approach by having its protagonists face an entirely new enemy, whose weapons, tactics, strengths, and weaknesses were unknown to Earth’s defenders.

The novel contained important themes that would manifest in the wars of the first half of the 20th century. Wells described a vision of total war – destruction without moral limitations – that emerged during the First World War. The widespread death and devastation depicted in Wells’ novel became a reality for cities including London, Hamburg, Berlin, Tokyo, and many others during the second great war from 1939 to 1945. Wells also focused on the Martians’ destruction of key infrastructure, the lifelines of the Second Industrial Revolution. The emphasis on demolishing British railways, weapon stores, and telegraph lines during the alien invasion presaged the Allies’ focus on destroying German infrastructure during the Second World War.

Over 400 military fiction novels were published between The Battle of Dorking and the start of the Great War in 1914. These pre-war novels laid the foundation for what would become a flood of military fiction after the Second World War. Military fiction truly came of age during the Cold War, in the shadow of nuclear tensions, great power conflicts, and the threat of total destruction, when technologies such as atomic weapons, radar and computing magnified the capabilities and dangers of modern war.

Yet fiction was also a valuable medium for exploring the enduring friction, chaos, and uncertainty inherent in warfare through the ages. The concept of ‘friction’ in war – the myriad factors that complicate military operations – was first articulated by Carl von Clausewitz in his 19th-century work, On War. This uncertainty in military affairs, whether stemming from the unpredictable actions of friendly and enemy forces during conflict, or the ambiguity surrounding a potential adversary’s readiness during peacetime, has been a consistent theme in military fiction across all eras.

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