Adaptation War

On the new adversary learning and adaptation bloc, the global adaptation competition and what America and its allies might do to respond.

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.

Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, March 2025.

Yesterday, my report on the new global Adaptation War was published by the Special Competitive Studies Project in Washington DC.

As the report describes, in the past three years, Ukraine and Russia have learned and adapted. Both sides have also learned to learn better and to absorb lessons into their military and industrial systems with increasing speed. But beyond this Ukraine adaptation battle, the learning and adaptation ecosystem spawned by the war in Ukraine has now metastasised into an international learning and adaptation competition.

The Ukraine Adaptation Battle is now a global Adaptation War.

A new adversary learning and adaptation bloc has emerged. While not a formal alliance, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have developed a mesh of different agreements and strategic partnerships that have allowed these authoritarian regimes to construct a connected knowledge market on 21st century strategic competition and conflict. Each of the contributors to this knowledge market can draw from it for their own purposes.

The aim of this report is to examine the components of this global Adaptation War.

It commences in Part I with an examination of adaptation and when adaptation occurs. There are three key areas explored in this section of the report:

1. Adaptation in peacetime.

2. Wartime adaptation.

3. Adaptation from peace to war.

Adaptation is not just a temporal issue. It occurs at different levels of war and national security endeavours. As I write in the report:

Adaptation is not a singular or holistic process that takes place at one level or in any single part of a military institution. In military organisations, there will be multiple instances of adaptation occurring at any single point in time, and these will be happening in different geographic areas as well as at different levels within the hierarchical construct of a military force.

As such, Part II of the report explores the three levels of adaptation – battlefield, strategic, and international - in the context of the Ukraine war. This section includes exemplar case studies, as well as exploring how the interaction between levels occurs.

But we should also note that learning and adaptation is hard. Not every institution has the requisite learning cultures to nurture individual and group creativity, and to analyse it to provide institutional solutions - technological, conceptual or organisational - to real or anticipated challenges. Therefore, in Part III of the report, I provide a section in the report that explores the challenges of learning and adaptation in military institutions.

Part IV of the report provides an overall characterisation of the adaptation war. The six key elements that characterise this new Adaptation War are important to understand because they provide insights into how to respond to the collaborative learning efforts of authoritarian regimes. I expect these characteristics will evolve however, and as I write in the report:

Like the character of war, the character of the modern adaptation war will evolve over time. As such, ongoing assessments of the character and components of the adaptation will be necessary.

The last part of the report summarises key conclusions emerging from the study of this new adaptation war, and provides recommendations for western governments and military institutions to respond to, and master, this new global adaptation battle.

Finally, I have included an epilogue. In this final section of the report, I pose the following question: is the new global learning and adaptation war a revolution in military affairs?

I have included this particular subject in the epilogue because the accelerating adaptation war is driving an array of new military concepts which include human-drone operating concepts, evolved command and control to take account of enhanced battlespace visibility and the access of military personnel to more information, 21st century manufacturing to support greater attrition in war, and evolved concepts for escalation and integration of different force elements on the battlefield (such as conventional and special operations units).

The conduct of enhanced and accelerated learning and adaptation, and the demonstrated ability of modern military organisations to learn how to learn better, are providing the intellectual and physical foundations for tactical, organizational, doctrinal, and technological innovation. Indeed, these make up a “cluster of changes” which lead to “new ways of destroying opponent” described by Williamson Murray and Alan Millett in their groundbreaking conceptual work on Revolutions in Military Affairs, The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050.

The alignment of the authoritarian nations of China, Russia, North Korea and Iran has resulted in the establishment of an adversary learning and adaptation bloc. This bloc poses a significant challenge to the political systems and military institutions of the United States and other democratic nations. The pace and breadth of learning, as well as the productive challenge of these four states combined means that they pose a considerable challenge to global stability as well as the security of individual democratic states, most profoundly Ukraine and Taiwan. But as the recent Israel-Iran conflict has demonstrated, this adversary learning and adaptation bloc is not without its limitations.

The four major authoritarian nations, while aligned in their opposition to the American-led international system that has existed since 1945, are a considerable but not insurmountable challenge.

But to overcome the challenge of this new Adaptation War will take deeper learning collaboration within the American military and national security system, and between the military, intelligence and other national security agencies of other democratic nations. Most importantly, as I describe in the conclusion of the report, perhaps the most fundamental requirement is for sustained and visible leadership from political and military leaders to build and sustain adaptation cultures.

I hope you enjoy and gain some useful insights from my new report. You can read it at this link.