 Wars are not just contests of weapons and will, they're also laboratories of the sort. Their battles provide the lessons that will shape not just what happens next in that particular conflict, but also in all the conflicts to follow. The most momentous of these insights can create inflection points in history. They become moments from which the story of how, and even where, to fight is changed from that time forward. Like so many other major wars, the last year of fighting in Ukraine has shown this effect in action. We've seen signs of not just what will happen next in the battles there, but also in future wars elsewhere in the world, as every other military is now studying it for their own future fights. One type of inflection point in the history of war is when a new technology is introduced that points the way to the future, but in a way that is not all that powerful in the present. It may not be that significant in shaping that particular war, often because it is at the very start of its own story, but once it has been used as war, there is no going back. Future wars will surely see more and more of that technology in more and more powerful ways. A classic example of this is the first use of an airplane in war, less than a decade after its invention. On October 23, 1911, during a war between the then Kingdom of Italy and the Ottoman Empire, an Italian pilot took into the air in a canvas wing monoplane. He flew at the then incredibly fast speed of 45 miles per hour, circling over Tripoli in modern day Libya. With this new ability, he was able to carry back to his commanders the location of enemy positions. But the story of this new technology was not just better reconnaissance. A week later, that very same pilot decided to bring along with him four hand grenades, which he then dropped over the side of his plane onto the Ottoman troops below. This first bombing didn't affect the outcome of the war, but the era of air warfare had begun and there was no turning back. So too in Ukraine we have seen similar examples of new technology at use, not drastically shaping the outcome of the fighting, but providing signs of much more to come. One area is the utilization of artificial intelligence. Ukraine has seen AI deployed in an ever growing variety of ways. Uses range from face recognition software applied to identifying enemy soldiers to machine learning to make military and aid supply chains more efficient, to even deployment and propaganda and information warfare, where Ukraine was the first war in which deep fake videos appeared, tying to morph the line between the real and machine generated. The use of machine intelligence in all its forms in warfare is only going to grow as AI both advances in its capability and takes on more roles and importance in our world beyond war. No other area of technology is presently being funded as deeply and involves as diverse an array of actors as this space, involving not just all the world's governments and thus their armed forces, but also the leading civilian corporations. Indeed, Wired Magazine summed it well, quote, In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast. Take X and add AI, end quote. And of course, the very same thing is now happening in the defense economy, where the joke and the Pentagon is that the generals don't exactly know what AI is, but want to buy it by the barrel. Another new inflection point started with what might seem like just a joke, but actually opens a serious new front in both cybersecurity and warfare. The internet began in the 1960s as a U.S. military research project for improving human communication. Ever since, the cyber threats to this network of networks have been about attacking these very same human communications, whether to steal them or to block them. But over the last decade, the conventional internet has transformed to become not just a place for human communication, but also the operation of the systems that increasingly run our world. The so-called Internet of Things now links everything from smart thermostats and power grids to smart cars and smart transportation networks. At the start of the conflict, Russian hackers attempted to go after Ukrainian network systems ranging from power grids to space-based communication. But like with their conventional military attacks, they met with little success. This was due to a combination of Putin setting his own forces up for failure by not repairing them for the war that was to come, and by the actions of clever, prepared cyber defenders in Ukraine aided by an international coalition of cyber experts. Immediately after, Ukrainian allied hackers, including what became known as the quote Volunteer IT Army, began to swing back. They hacked almost willy-nilly at any vulnerable Russian systems they could find. One that made the news was the fun story in February 22 of electric car charging stations being digitally defaced in Moscow. Hackers sympathetic to Ukraine took over the computer displays to post some mean but arguably true things about Vladimir Putin. The translation was, quote, Putin as a dickhead. But what history should note is not the vandalism on the outside, but what was happening on the inside, a system shut down. It was arguably the first Internet of Things attack in a major war. If you owned an electric car in Moscow and wanted to power it up, you were as out of luck as Putin's forces in Ukraine. This prank certainly didn't sway the war, but think of what could be done in the future by a group or military unit that was much more organized with more preparation and intelligence and planning, going after a wider, more ambitious set of targets such as an entire infrastructure. Such attacks using digital means from afar to cause a physical effect on an enemy are the future of not just cybersecurity but also warfare. The risks are made all the worse and that our world is not just becoming more networked into the Internet of Things, but we are recreating many of the same original sins of the first generations of the Internet. At the very same time that the threat surface is growing, security for it is too often an afterthought, with IoT cybersecurity neither required nor well regulated such that too many vulnerabilities are just being baked in. And attackers will exploit that. This means cyber attacks will increasingly have physical effects, especially in realms like war, when the normal limits of cyber deterrence fall by the wayside and the incentives for causing harm are far different for militaries than they are for cyber criminals incentives for profit. A second inflection point in the history and future of war is when a technology that has already been used in conflict is brought together in a new application, doctrine or organization that finally allows it to reach its true potential, remaking the rules of what is viewed as the best way to fight. A good example is how the tank may have been introduced in World War I, but it was its incorporation into the Blitzkrieg in World War II that established the new mode of mobile armored warfare and helped the Nazis take over much of Europe. We may one day look back at the Ukraine war and unmanned systems in much the same way that history looks back at the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s as a historic proving ground for the Blitzkrieg to come. Drones have been used in conflicts for well over a generation, but they made their mark primarily in counterinsurgency nations in conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq, counterterrorism strikes in places like Pakistan and their use in relatively small scale wars of mismatched sides and locales like Libya. Indeed, literally as the fighting in Ukraine was beginning, the leading academic journal in international security published an article arguing that drones were not all that significant in conventional warfare. That academic and military debate, it's now over. Russian systems proved to be incredibly significant in the fighting in Ukraine across various roles and even domains. They proved crucial to stopping Russian tank columns, both by firing their own missiles and even more importantly by providing pinpoint accuracy for Ukrainian artillery and missile strikes that hollowed out Russian forces. They equally played important roles at sea, such as participating in the sinking of Russia's Black Sea's fleet flagship and striking at Russia's naval bases. What has also been notable is the array of unmanned systems filling the battlefield. The important roles in Ukraine have not just been by large expensive military grade systems, the size of the manned airplanes that they're replacing, but also by fleets of small, cheap, often civilian provided drones. Every unit on both the Ukrainian and Russian side now uses them. Not just to scout ahead, but also carry out strikes with an accuracy that would have been impossible just a few years ago for the most high-end military systems. As with AI, the use of drones is advancing every week in the Ukraine War. We are seeing increasingly autonomous systems deployed, sometimes melding with the concept of loitering munitions, operating singly and increasingly in swarms. An apt historic parallel of the Russian drone swarm strikes on Ukrainian cities may be the Germans' first use of missiles and rockets to attack English cities in 1944, an enemy losing on the battlefield trying to sway the population through terror bombings with a new technology. And here too, this growing importance and use means that we are seeing, just like with airplanes, the first fights between these technologies, the first drone-on-drone dog fights in Ukraine against signal what is to come in the future of war. Another area where a long-use technology has reached new heights in Ukraine has been in the weaponization of social media. While cyber war is the hacking of networks, perhaps what has been more significant in Ukraine has been its evil twin, like war, the hacking of people on the networks by driving information viral through online likes and shares. There is a long history of social media being weaponized, from its use in terrorism by ISIS in Iraq to Russian spy agencies using it to influence other nations' elections. In Ukraine, though, this new form of information warfare hit new levels of strategic significance by reshaping a major conventional conflict. One major effect came from the sheer scale and importance of open-source intelligence, also known as OSINT. Each and every cell phone and its social media accounts acted as a new kind of spy sensor and simultaneous broadcast network, collecting the most minute tidbits of information and then providing it to the entire world to sift through its greater meaning. OSINT, for example, proved crucial to debunking Putin's claims that Russia was merely reacting to an emergency inside Ukraine and not planning an invasion, thus undermining Putin's political strategy from the very start. In turn, Ukraine has mined OSINT from literally millions of its own local civilians and hapless Russian soldiers posts to track and target Russian military unit moves. Indeed, the information has been so extensive and so valuable that the Ukrainian government even created an app, DIA, to manage the flow from outside OSINT volunteer spies and analysts. But where social media has arguably been the most strategically significant is how Ukraine's leader turned the tables on the supposed Russian masters of information warfare. Before the war, Zelensky was little known outside the region, while inside Ukraine, Poles found him and his party at just 23% levels of support. Essentially, he was the least unpopular of a deeply set of unpopular Ukrainian political parties and leaders amidst wide distrust of the government in general. These political dynamics may well have tempted Putin to think that just a slight push would topple the regime. However, Zelensky made masterful use of the online space to get his message out while his nation was under attack and then drive it viral through a savvy strategy that utilized everything from personal demonstrations of leadership and bravery to quips and memes. This online effort yielded real effects for Ukraine. Very soon Zelensky became a global icon and 91% of Ukrainians rallied to support his actions up from that 23%. The Ukrainian state and society didn't collapse the way Russia had hoped would happen in the first few days of fighting. Indeed, besides the rapid swing and Zelensky's polling, surveys also showed that over 70% of Ukrainians believed that their military was on the side that would win the war, despite the very real combat power disadvantage and significant territory losses they were taking. In war, human will matters, and the digital is a new means of reaching and mobilizing that will. But where the online show has also been a crucial win for Ukraine is in influencing a second target audience, us. No matter the attitudes and bravery of its own people, Ukraine only had a chance if it enlisted the outside world in its fight. And here Ukraine went from not being on most anyone's minds to literally the most popular cause in the world. The surprisingly viral sympathy for its cause then reshaped the political context everywhere from inside the United States to as far away as Japan and Australia, altering both political priorities and what policies that leaders thought their populations would be willing to support. Indeed, the last month's controversy over Germany sending tanks to Ukraine, which it finally did, again due to changing attitudes. It misses what a historically momentous shift has taken place, casting aside 75 years of German foreign policy. Ukraine's win of the like war also had a powerful economic effect. Some 400 of the top 500 companies in the world pulled out of the Russian economy. Not because it was required by law or sanctions, but because to do business in Russia became viewed as bad for business. The effect of this new kind of geopolitical canceling will shape not just the Russian economy for the long term, but how other nations think about their own economies and war itself. And this may be one of the most significant effects of the Ukraine war for the future of war on the battlefield, but also decisions about war itself. The first major conventional conflict in 21st century Europe took place between the then 9th and 56th biggest economy in the world, according to the IMF. And yet, it disrupted everything from energy markets to supply chains, not just for the combats themselves, but for the wider world. Russia is now reduced to recycling microchips from old refrigerators, while the war has altered grain prices, risking stability in nations as far away as Asia and Africa. This points to one of the larger lessons now being wrestled with in capitals like Washington D.C. and Beijing. The question is not just should they reshape their military plans and technology to reflect the lessons of Ukraine, but also how should they rethink attacking their foes and protecting their own economies. In the future of war in the 21st century, nations will surely fight, but they will still be linked into a global market.