Mobilising Western Intellectual Capacity to Support Ukraine

Part 2: The Big Five Operational Problems to Solve in 2024

Image: @Combined2Forces at X.

This is part 2 of an exploration of the mobilising of intellectual capacity this year to solve several key operational challenges faced by Ukraine on the battlefield. You can read the first part here.

Israeli futurist Yuval Harari has written that the “automation revolution will not consist of a single watershed event, after which the job market will settle into some new equilibrium. Rather, it will be a cascade of ever bigger disruptions. Old jobs will disappear, and new jobs will emerge…people will need to retrain and reinvent themselves not just once, but many times. In the 21st century they will need to establish massive re-education systems for adults.”

The same pace of change holds true with military institutions. They must constantly invest in redefining their understanding of the battlespace, and the character of modern warfare. And they must also invest in the intellectual endeavours that produce the new ideas and organisations that leverage technology and people to succeed in modern war.

The past two years of war in Ukraine, as well as the new Middle East War, have resulted in considerable adaptation by nation-state military institutions like Ukraine, Russia and Israel, and by non-state terror armies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Despite this, the Ukraine War has bogged down into a strategic and tactical slog-fest because the development of new warfighting ideas has not kept pace with the introduction of new technologies.