Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
Sarah Paulson
The modern battlefield no longer begins or ends with tanks and trenches. From the skies above Ukraine to the tunnels of Gaza, war has become a multidimensional contest—industrial, informational, psychological, and increasingly, algorithmic. The new face of conflict, as illuminated in the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ latest report War and the Modern Battlefield, demands a reckoning with how the world fights, deters, and even defines war itself.
A Shifting Axis of Power
One of the report’s starkest conclusions is that the world is moving toward a deepening web of cooperation among U.S. adversaries—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. What began as tactical coordination has evolved into systemic collaboration: shared weapons designs, drone production, and joint military training. North Korean artillery shells are being fired in Ukraine; Iranian drones strike with Russian insignia; and Chinese electronics fuel Moscow’s war machine.
This alignment is not yet a formal alliance like NATO, but it is far more than opportunistic convenience. CSIS scholars describe it as “deepening bilateralism”—a stage of security cooperation that stops short of a mutual defense treaty but binds the partners together in practical, dangerous ways. The strategic implication is clear: the United States and its allies must prepare to face simultaneous crises across multiple theaters, from Eastern Europe to the Pacific.
Industrial Power Returns to Center Stage
For a generation, Western militaries assumed that precision, not production, would define victory. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have shattered that illusion. The United States once produced 15,000 artillery shells a month; Ukraine now expends that many in a single day. Russia, with its Soviet-era mobilization capacity, has outpaced the West’s peacetime industrial base. Even Moscow, however, has relied on “industrial allies” like Iran and North Korea to fill its gaps.
The lesson is painfully simple: deterrence today depends as much on factories as on fleets. As the report warns, “industrial roadblocks” may become the Achilles’ heel of democratic states that cannot sustain high-tempo wars. Rebuilding arsenals is not a Cold War throwback—it is the price of staying relevant in the 21st century.
The Drone Age: Quantity Becomes Quality
Few technologies symbolize modern war’s transformation like drones. What began as small battlefield experiments has erupted into industrial-scale drone warfare. Ukraine alone now manufactures millions of unmanned systems annually. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet has suffered catastrophic losses from unmanned surface and subsurface attacks, while AI-enabled targeting has turned Israel’s conflicts into laboratories of machine-speed warfare.
The implications extend far beyond these warzones. Artificial intelligence now determines not only who fires but when and at what. Future conflicts will see swarms of autonomous drones operating cooperatively, blurring the line between human and machine decision-making. Terrorist organizations, too, are likely to acquire this capability. The democratization of lethality has begun.
War in Every Domain
Space and cyberspace—once supporting arenas—are now battlefields in their own right. With more than 10,000 active satellites orbiting Earth, the temptation to disable, blind, or weaponize space assets is growing. Similarly, cyberattacks have evolved from espionage to sabotage, capable of triggering real-world destruction. The next world war, if it comes, will not just be fought across borders but across bandwidths and orbital constellations.
Resilience as a Weapon
The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have shown that victory hinges not only on technology but on societal resilience—the will to endure. Ukraine’s ability to maintain basic services, produce drones domestically, and rally its citizens under constant bombardment has made it a fortress of morale. Israel, for all its divisions, mobilized hundreds of thousands of reservists within days of the October 7 attacks. In both cases, civilians have become the backbone of defense.
Resilience, as Daniel Byman argues in the report, is deterrence. Societies that cannot fracture under psychological or information warfare are harder to defeat than those that rely solely on weaponry. This insight carries a sobering warning for the United States and Europe: democracy’s openness is both its strength and its vulnerability. Adversaries from Moscow to Tehran exploit polarization, disinformation, and economic stress to erode national unity long before a shot is fired.
Toward a New Strategic Paradigm
What, then, does the future of war look like when all these dimensions converge—cyber, space, AI, propaganda, and nuclear deterrence? As Eliot Cohen notes in the introduction, it may resemble nothing humanity has ever seen: “a war unlike any experienced before in scope and scale, even World War II.” The coming decades could witness multi-theater conflicts waged across continents and domains, where speed, data, and endurance outweigh traditional metrics of power.
For the United States, this means rethinking strategy. The post-Cold War habit of assuming one regional conflict at a time is obsolete. Washington must plan for the possibility of simultaneous wars against technologically integrated adversaries. That demands not only higher defense spending but smarter coordination between military, industrial, and civilian sectors.
Conclusion: Winning Before It Starts
Ultimately, the new era of warfare is about foresight—winning before fighting. Deterrence will rest on the credibility of production, the resilience of societies, and the ability to out-innovate rather than out-bleed the enemy. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are not isolated crises; they are previews. They remind us that the battlefield of tomorrow will not wait for tomorrow’s doctrines.
If the 20th century was about controlling territory, the 21st is about controlling systems—industrial, digital, and psychological. The nations that grasp this truth first will define not just how wars are fought, but whether they can still be prevented.
