For centuries, rulers believed one thing about war: If you could gather more men, more guns, and more territory behind you, you could grind your enemy down.
Russia brought that logic into Ukraine. But Ukraine exposed something that may change war for everyone.
A giant army can still destroy, occupy, and kill on a terrible scale. But it no longer guarantees victory.
It is a break in military history. The closest comparison may be the First World War, when generals entered the war with one set of assumptions and technology punished them for it. Machine guns, artillery, railways, barbed wire, and industrial logistics changed war faster than commanders could understand.
Now something similar is happening again.
The war in Ukraine has not only changed Russia and Ukraine. It has changed how every country must think about armies, conquest, occupation, supply chains, drones, and survival.
Today I want to look at the war in Ukraine not only as a tragedy of the present, but as a preview of the future — where the giant army is no longer the ultimate answer, and security depends less on size than on adaptation.
Here’s our roadmap:
- The Purpose of War — how the goals of modern war have changed
- The Hidden Logic of War — why future wars may begin where law is weak and the global economy is vulnerable
- The Drone Future — how new technology is changing the battlefield
- The New Expectations of War — why occupation has become much more expensive
- The New Concept of Security — what countries must do to survive the wars of the future
The Purpose of War
For most of human history, war was robbery in different clothes. A tribe raided another tribe for cattle, grain, women, slaves, or treasure. Later, rulers fought for land because land meant food, taxes, workers, and soldiers.
Then came empires, and the purpose of war became more complicated. Empires did not fight only for the right to take something out of conquered lands. They also fought for the right to bring something in. Rome conquered territory, but it also built roads, ports, and administrative systems that tied conquered spaces into one imperial machine. Those roads moved soldiers, but they also moved taxes, goods, officials, and power. Much later, during the Opium Wars, Britain did not simply want treasure from China. It wanted access to Chinese markets. After China’s defeat, British merchants gained the right to trade through treaty ports, and Hong Kong was ceded to Britain. War became a tool for opening markets by force.
So the prize of war changed. It became access and the right to decide who trades, who pays, and who is excluded.
By the twentieth century, war was increasingly explained as security. “We must strike first.” “We need a buffer zone.” “Our neighbor is dangerous.” “If we do not dominate them, they will dominate us.” This was the language behind much of the First World War. It was also part of the language behind the Second World War. Expansion was presented as defense. Conquest was presented as survival. Aggression was wrapped in fear.
And this is exactly how Putin presented the war against Ukraine. He claimed it was about Russia’s security. But the problem is obvious. No one was preparing to invade Russia. Europe had no interest in fighting a nuclear power. For years, it was much easier and cheaper for Europe to buy Russian oil, gas, metals, fertilizer, and other resources than to go to war.
So if the war was not really about security, what was it about?
To answer that, we need to look at the hidden logic of modern war.
The Hidden Logic of War
The modern world is divided not only by ideology, wealth, or military power. It is divided by something more basic: whether a ruler can be replaced without violence.
In some countries, power can change hands legally. The transfer may be bitter, humiliating, even politically brutal, but it does not have to become a physical struggle for survival. The former ruler does not usually expect to be imprisoned, robbed, exiled, or destroyed by the next group that comes to power.
That kind of peaceful transition requires law. The system must guarantee that losing power is not the same as losing everything.
In countries where law is weak, the logic is completely different. The ruler and his circle cling to their positions because stepping down may be dangerous, as the next generation of elites may devour them. So they do everything possible to change the law so it would let them stay in power forever, which destroys the very idea of justice.
In a country ruled by arbitrariness, long-term investment becomes almost impossible. Why build something serious if it can be taken from you? Why risk your money, talent, and reputation if success only attracts predators?
This is one of the hidden reasons authoritarian systems fall behind. When citizens are defenseless before the state, they become passive, cynical, and careful.
This was one of the great weaknesses of the Soviet Union. The Soviet state could concentrate resources on a few strategic projects and produce impressive results. But it could not create a flexible, innovative, self-correcting society. Fear can mobilize people for a limited task. It cannot replace trust, protected property, open criticism, and personal initiative.
And this matters for war, because military technology does not come from nowhere. It grows out of the larger society. It depends on engineers, factories, universities, investors, entrepreneurs, logistics, software, electronics, and the ability to admit mistakes quickly.
That is the autocrat’s trap. Over time, autocracies tend to lose the deeper competition with open societies because open societies are better at correction, innovation, and long-term trust.
So what does an autocrat do when he cannot truly outcompete the democratic world?
He looks for leverage.
If he cannot build a stronger economy, he tries to control something stronger economies need. If he cannot create a more attractive future, he tries to make the future more dangerous for everyone else. This is the new logic of war.
Trade routes were always attractive to conquerors, but in the age of globalization, control over these arteries has become one of the most important weapons available to autocrats. A country may be corrupt, poor, technologically weak, or badly governed. But if it sits next to a vital chokepoint, it can suddenly make the whole world nervous.
This is why future wars will appear where ambition meets vulnerability. Near straits. Near ports. Near pipelines. Near grain corridors. Near the narrow places where the global economy can be squeezed.
The war in Iraq was not only about ideology, terrorism, or dictatorship. It was shaped by the strategic importance of the Persian Gulf, oil, and the routes through which energy reaches the world. The wars in the former Yugoslavia were not only ethnic and political conflicts. They unfolded in a region that sits between Central Europe, the Balkans, the Adriatic, the Mediterranean, and the corridors connecting Europe to the wider southeast.
And the war in Ukraine follows the same pattern.
Putin presented it as a war for security, like it was in the 20th century, but in reality, he needs control over the territory through which Russian energy and goods move toward Europe.
All of the wars of this type start in the same way. First, the ruler mismanages his own territory. He spends reserves, feeds his inner circle, makes mistakes, loses popularity, and begins looking for new resources. Then he notices a tempting target nearby. And suddenly the propaganda machine discovers that this target is dangerous, that it is historically “ours,” that justice must be restored, that the nation is surrounded by enemies, and that war is not aggression but self-defense.
At the same time, democracies often hesitate. Europe, after two world wars, has a deep instinct to avoid direct military conflict for as long as possible. The United States is willing to fight only when it sees a clear threat to its own interests, and when the war can be kept far from American soil and fought by professional forces rather than by society as a whole.
So the autocrat sees a chance. Democracies have elections. Democracies have public opinion. Democracies have voters who do not want inflation, mobilization, energy shocks, or dead soldiers. And if the pressure lasts long enough, they will tell themselves that one more concession will buy peace.
We should look at the bottlenecks of the global economy that lie near aggressive autocracies or unstable regimes. The key question is not simply where there is old hatred or disputed territory. The key question is where control can bring money, status, and blackmail power.
The Strait of Hormuz is one obvious pressure point, because so much of the world’s oil and gas passes through it. The Bab el-Mandeb, between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, is another, because it affects the route toward the Suez Canal. The Strait of Malacca matters because it connects the Indian Ocean and the Pacific and carries a huge share of trade between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The Taiwan Strait matters not only because of Taiwan itself, but because Taiwan sits at the center of advanced semiconductor production and major Pacific shipping routes. The Black Sea matters because it connects grain, energy, ports, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Europe. The Turkish Straits matter because they control access between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The Arctic may become more important as new routes open and competition for resources increases. Even undersea cables and data hubs may become targets, because modern economies depend not only on oil and steel, but on information moving safely across the planet.
These are the places to watch.
The Drone Future
Drones changed modern war in several unexpected ways. It turned out that a smaller and poorer country can now build a serious defense without matching the aggressor tank for tank, plane for plane, or ship for ship. To attack, you still need people, but to defend, you increasingly need eyes in the sky, cheap strike drones, and people who know how to operate them.
That does not make soldiers unnecessary. But it changes what soldiers are for. A defender no longer has to meet a large army with an equally large army in the old way. A defender operating drones can turn the battlefield into a transparent killing zone. This means that expensive military platforms no longer guarantee victory. A cheap drone can destroy a vehicle that took years to design and millions of dollars to build.
A large number of soldiers no longer guarantees victory. Poorly trained and poorly protected, they are not a strategic advantage anymore. They are targets. An authoritarian state can mobilize men by force, throw them forward, and call it strength. But if the defender can see them coming and strike them cheaply, mass becomes a liability: more money spent on mobilization, more weapons wasted, more training lost, and more bodies added to the bill.
This also changes the image of the ideal warrior. The most effective fighter is no longer necessarily the strongest and toughest man. Now the decisive skill may belong to a person sitting behind a screen, reading terrain, and piloting a drone through interference.
This creates a serious problem for autocracies.
The logical answer seems obvious: build robots that can attack instead of humans. But autocracies struggle with exactly these things. They can give orders, but they are bad at open feedback, fast correction, protected initiative, and honest reporting. And the smartest people often do not want to build the future for a regime that treats them as disposable property. They leave, hide, avoid military projects, or work only as much as necessary to survive.
There is another problem. Drones cannot be built entirely from domestic resources, even by a large country like Russia. They depend on global supply chains. Some of the components can be smuggled. Some can be bought through intermediaries or be hidden in civilian trade. This is exactly the world I explore in my upcoming novel, The Snow Queen’s Spring: the gray channels, the fake paperwork, the people who move forbidden technology through the cracks.
Learn more about The Snow Queen’s Spring
Sanctions still matter. They do not stop everything but they make everything slower, more expensive, more corrupt, and less scalable. And in drone warfare, speed of adaptation is as important as the drone itself.
There is also a hidden trap inside authoritarian procurement. In a system without real law, every official knows that money is protection. So when the state creates a large contract, the first instinct of many officials is not to build the best system. It is to redirect the cash flow.
That means a giant drone program in an autocracy will not simply produce drones. It will produce kickbacks and fake reports. The more money the state pours in, the more people line up to steal from it. And because criticism is dangerous, the ruler may not even know which part of the program is real and which part is theater.
This is why the drone revolution hurts autocracies in a strange way. At first glance, drones look perfect for them: cheap, brutal, disposable, easy to use for terror. But the full drone ecosystem rewards exactly the qualities autocracies suppress: initiative, transparency, experimentation, decentralized problem-solving, and fast correction.
The New Expectations of War
The morality of war has also changed.
In the old world, conquerors were not much concerned with the local population. They took resources and loyalty by force. If the conquered people suffered, that was their problem.
But today, if you seize territory, you cannot simply say, “We took it because we could.” You must say, “We liberated it.” “We protected people.” “We restored justice.” You must bring Good, at least on television.
After annexing Crimea in 2014, Russia had to pour money into the peninsula. Public sector salaries were raised. Pensions were converted and increased. Moscow built the Kerch Bridge, new power plants, roads, and other infrastructure. The point was not only practical. Crimea had to look like proof that Russia makes life better.
That is the trap of modern conquest. You must pay for the victory after you have already paid for the war. And even then, the story may still fail because occupation creates new problems, such as sanctions that isolate the territory and drive businesses away. That’s how the conquered land turns into a permanent bill.
In Crimea, outside analysts have estimated that Russian subsidies ranged from about $1 billion to almost $3 billion a year in some periods. These subsidies made up a huge share of Crimea’s budget. And that money did not appear from nowhere. It was taken from mainland Russia. Somewhere in Perm or Samara, hospitals were not built, gas lines did not reach remote villages, and ordinary Russians paid the hidden price of imperial pride.
Now look at the territories Russia has destroyed in Ukraine.
Mariupol. Bakhmut. Popasna. Severodonetsk. Vast areas with villages and even cities erased, mines flooded, factories and houses shattered, locals who either fled or were killed. Russia will have to invest billions to make these places livable again.
The New Concept of Security
The best defense against future war is making blackmail unprofitable.
If the enemy wants to squeeze a bottleneck, then your job is: do not let one bottleneck decide your fate.
This begins with energy.
A country that depends on one supplier, one pipeline, one refinery, one port, or one grid structure is inviting pressure. The answer is not romantic self-sufficiency but diversification. Multiple suppliers and terminals. Smaller storage facilities and power sources spread across the country. Faster repair teams.
Ukraine has shown this under brutal conditions. Last winter, Russia attacked its energy system again and again, trying to freeze the country into submission. Ukraine survived because people repaired, rerouted, improvised, and kept going.
That is the new definition of strength: not invulnerability but fast recovery.
The same applies to industry. Large factories are efficient in peacetime, but in war, they become easy targets. Future defense needs distributed production, with smaller sites and more 3D printing where it makes sense.
Then comes air defense.
No country can keep shooting million-dollar missiles at cheap drones forever. That is how the attacker wins the math. Defense must become cheaper, layered, and mobile: electronic sensors, interceptor drones, decoys, and civilian reporting networks. Democracies should use their natural advantage: the ability to adapt quickly, correct mistakes, and find the best technical solutions.
Europe is slowly waking up to this: admitting that drones are now a permanent threat and that no country can solve it alone. If drones can cross borders, then defense must also cross borders.
The same logic applies to the sea.
Undersea cables need mapping, surveillance, repair capacity, and consequences for sabotage. Ports need cyber protection. Shipping needs protected corridors when a crisis hits. Insurance markets need coordination with governments, because attackers now understand that frightening insurers can be almost as useful as sinking ships.
And finally, democracies need political clarity.
Gray-zone aggression works because the victim hesitates. Was it an accident or a provocation? Some criminal group or a state behind it? The attacker enjoys that fog. So the response must be planned before the incident. That is how blackmail fails.
