Validating existing and future military tech: A complicated process

But some conclusions are already clear.

- 

FROM B1 OLD WARS, NEW WARS AND INTEGRATION

Drones and other crewless aerial vehicles will dominate the future battlefield; the element of tactical surprise has largely gone because opponents can see and react to each other's moves in seconds. But drones are vulnerable to electronic jamming. And they are no substitute for holding and occupying territory, which still depends on tanks, foot soldiers, and vast quantities of ammunition. That's why old weapons which until now were considered redundant—such as anti-personnel mines—are now back in fashion, with several European countries neighboring Russia now announcing their withdrawal from the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, which prohibits the use, stockpiling, production, and transfer of anti-personnel mines.

The Ukraine war is also a testing ground for another emerging technology: hypersonic weapons traveling at five or more times the speed of sound. Russia has invested heavily in its long-range Avangard and short-range Tsirkon and Kinzhal missiles; China has developed two short-range hypersonic weapons: the operational DF-ZF and the upcoming Xingkong-2. However, the US cancelled in 2023 its Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon, a hypersonic air-to-ground missile development project. Was it right to do so? The Pentagon is having second thoughts in the light of lessons from Ukraine.

Meanwhile, as the latest military confrontation between India and Pakistan indicates, beyond the question of how existing systems perform, there is also the matter of how they are integrated into a cohesive punch against an opponent.