New world of warcraft: how conflict has forever changed

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0:35Shashank Joshi:The Economist

0:42Shashank Joshi:Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

0:51Shashank Joshi:Today on the show, a parting shot from our outgoing defense editor on the nature of modern war and a tribute to the trailblazing congressman Barney Frank.

1:12Eight Palestinians have been killed in Israeli drone attacks across Gaza. The strike hit a community kitchen in Daobala. The skies over Iran, blackwood smoke.

1:42The last eight years have been, to put it, mildly busy.

1:48Shashank Joshi:Shishang Joshi is our defense editor and incoming Washington bureau chief. When I started this role in 2018, the biggest questions were over Donald Trump's handling of North Korea. And there seemed like a very real risk of war, perhaps even nuclear war, on the Korean peninsula. That calmed down. And then, of course, we saw the great withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the debacle of American troops leaving in chaotic fashion out of Kabul. And I did remember thinking at the time, God, that was busy, but at least next year will be a little bit calmer. At the time, Vladimir Putin's armies were slowly building up on the edges of Ukraine.

2:33And that is what would come to dominate the rest of my time in this job. On top of that, of course, have been the incredibly destructive post-October 7th wars in the Middle East, in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Iran, alongside an array of lesser, though often similarly bloody ones, around the world. There was a great military historian, Michael Howard, and he once observed that the profession of the soldier was unique, he said, in that he may have to exercise it only once in a lifetime indeed that often. It was as if a professional swimmer had to spend his life practicing on dry land for an Olympic championship on which the fortunes of his entire nation depended.

3:16The soldier therefore turns to the wars of others past and present to discern the future. For after all allowances have been made for historical differences, wars still resemble each other more than they resemble any other human activity. That's always stuck with me because I think it tells us why we look at these wars around us, beyond the importance of documenting them and understanding the human experience, they teach us about what could be to come and what could happen elsewhere.

3:48There's been a big change in how we consume, interpret, talk about war.

4:00I think of America's current leadership, for instance, which sometimes appears to revel in conflict and in war. Donald Trump talks about torpedoing Iranian ships as being fun. We have seen the Department of War release these slick music videos which blend Hollywood clips with battlefield footage in a way that really glorifies that. I'm also fascinated by this profusion of first-person view drone footage from Ukraine. Depicting the terrified or resigned faces of cornered Russian or Ukrainian soldiers. And on both sides, it's frequently woven into these effectively snuff movies. Set to heavy metal.

4:50And these are recruiting videos. They're also propaganda. They're psychological intimidation.

5:04In some ways, there are actually comparatively few infantry-on-infantry attacks. Combat sometimes resembles remote-controlled execution. Death is dealt out on this artisanal scale. And it's in a contrast to semi-anonymous high-altitude bombing. There's one video that was highlighted by the U.S. Army's training in Doctrine Command. A Russian soldier gestures to an approaching Ukrainian drone. and the whole thing is being filmed by this drone. And the Russian soldier is saying, don't kill me, kill my comrade lying in a ditch nearby. You know, he points to him, gestures to him. And the drone pauses.

5:43It turns to the second soldier. It drops a grenade on him. It decapitates him. And then it returns to the first soldier and kills and decapitates him as well. That engagement is horrifying, though you could argue it is no worse than an artillery barrage that kills dozens of soldiers at once. It's just the intimacy of it that horrifies us. It's also not illegal. Both soldiers were legitimate targets from what we can see. But I do think amongst the professional military officers I talked to, not to mention lawyers and ethicists, I think there is a significant concern that the laws of war have been eroded away in many recent conflicts.

6:33Russia's campaign in Ukraine, which has involved the torture of civilians, attacks on hospitals, efforts to freeze civilians in wintertime, that stands out. We've also seen other developments. One of them is the revival of what you might call punitive language, threats of reprisals, for example, often shading into collective punishment. The Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said that Israel is racing to wipe out Gaza and will make it Jewish. I think the other development is threats against entire classes of targets, bridges and power plants, both of which have been threatened collectively and in totality by Donald Trump in Iran.

7:13Shashank Joshi:Where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o 'clock tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business. Military officers would possibly retort that, look, the public misunderstand the laws of war, that these are much more permissive than commonly believed, that we've become quite used to slow, deliberate wars of choice in the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that high-intensity wars are different. If Hamas built a tunnel under a building, it may, under some circumstances, be lawful to topple it. There is no easy or clean way to fight an enemy that's deeply woven into and below the urban landscape.

7:55But I think in wars with more powerful adversaries and in a world in which their missiles reach further than ever before and are more precise than ever before, I think Western populations would be shocked to find the same infrastructure in their own countries, their own bridges, their own power plants, their own critical national infrastructure become targets in the future. And I think it's hard for them to imagine that they could be the civilians one day in need of the same protections of the laws of war that are applied to war-torn countries today.

8:39In 2011, Steve Pinker, a professor at Harvard, put forward a provocative thesis. He said the world was becoming less violent in every way, murders, homicides. He also said war was on the decline. And that was a common argument. I think that that's become increasingly difficult to sustain for lots of reasons. Political scientists pointed out that, yes, battlefield deaths might be going down, but that was because medicine had improved, armor had improved, evacuation had improved, and so soldiers who would previously have died now ended up wounded. But on a bigger scale, I think there's just more evidence that war is really back.

9:17If you look at the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, a monitoring group that recorded 61 active state-based conflicts in 2024, that was the highest level since records began in 1946. There were 11 full-fledged wars, that was the highest level since 2016. The number of state-based conflicts has doubled. When I take all of that together, I think there's a paradox. We see that war is becoming harder to wage. The battlefield is becoming more lethal. Armies are still at the early stages of trying to work out how they evade and defeat this blanket of sensors and drones and munitions that darken the skies above them.

10:00And yet political leaders seem to be perennial optimists when it comes to the utility of war as an instrument of statecraft. They all think they can win. They all think they can deliver the knockout blow. And there's lots of evidence to the contrary all around them.

10:23Shashank Joshi:Shishank, to your mind, having done this job for eight years, how has war changed? I think we have seen a succession of battlefields in which the impact of technology has become really clear. That technology didn't appear on those battlefields. battlefields. It was evolving for years before, but wars are always clarifying moments where you see these technological trends that have been developing for years and years and years burst forth in different and sometimes unexpected ways. And for me, the thing that has stuck with me through various conflicts, some of the big ones, but also some of the ones you haven't heard of, you know, Nagorno-Karabakh, has been the idea that the battlefield has become more and more transparent.

11:05It means that there's stuff in the sky above you, whether that's satellites, but particularly drones, watching you all the time, watching every time you try and move, every time you try and attack. And there is more stuff that can kill you. Precision firepower, not just the smart bombs and big missiles of the first Gulf War of the 1990s, but small, intelligent weapons with chips inside them all over the place, accessible to a much wider range of actors, whether that is the United States of America or whether that is the Houthi rebels in Yemen firing Iranian made projectiles. And that transparent battlefield where everything is being watched, where it's increasingly lethal and which armies struggle to move without being struck.

11:51That, I think, is one of the single most important trends I've seen on the battlefield for many years.

11:58Shashank Joshi:And so what should the response to that be? If you were starting an army today, how do you make it? I don't think you'll find a single answer to that question that's uncontested among the big armies of the world. We all recognize that Ukraine has been incredibly innovative in how it's fought. It has no navy, but it's destroyed a big chunk of the Black Sea Fleet. We can see that it's staved off this much bigger Russian army in part through very, very clever use of technology, creating this incredibly lethal kill zone in which it's very hard for the Russians to advance. And they've done it with massive amounts of drone use, with electronic warfare, with new tactics.

12:35They've made an unmanned ground systems branch of their army. Things like fiber optic controlled drones. So types of weapons that are being revived from decades ago on the battlefield. But if you talk to Western armed forces, they'll say, we need to learn that stuff, but we would fight differently. We in NATO, for instance, would have air dominance over Russia. we would have long-range firepower in much greater quantities than Ukraine. So that debate is the one that has shaped my time in this job, which is which are the right lessons to take from the Ukrainian battlefield and the other battlefields, and which ones would not apply elsewhere.

13:14So, for example, drones, highly effective in Ukraine. But if you want a drone that can operate over the much bigger distance of the Pacific, it has to be bigger, it's much more expensive, It may not be as disposable or consumable as a tiny little Ukrainian drone. And suddenly you're in a kind of different world in terms of the hardware that you're using. The geography powerfully shapes the capabilities you need. And so I don't think there's a single cookie cutter answer of what should armies look like. It's about drawing the right lessons.

13:44Shashank Joshi:So it sounds to me that armed forces that wish to be prepared for a range of conflicts don't necessarily do different in light of all this change. They just do more. I think a great way to think about that is look at the war in Iran, which in military operational terms, though not in political terms, was a success for the United States and Israel. How did they project power into Iran? Well, it was legacy equipment. It was F-35 stealth aircraft that cost huge amounts of money. It was refueling aircraft, allowing these jets to be projected over these big distances. It was high-end cruise missiles that cost way more than the stuff Ukraine is using.

14:19Now, not all of that perhaps needed to be expensive, but it allowed for complete overmatch over Iran. And I think what we will see more of is the idea of hybrid forces. If you look at, for example, the Royal Navy in the UK, they talk about a hybrid fleet. So you'll have crewed ships, you'll have aircraft carriers, but you'll have drone ships operating off them. You'll have drone ships providing pickets and scouting ahead of them. If you look at air forces around the world, they're talking about loyal wingmen complementing their expensive crew jets, and they might be able to push into hostile Chinese airspace in the way that you might not put a crude aircraft.

14:53You might send your drones up ahead of it. So this hybrid concept, that I think is going to be a shaping force for Western armed forces in the years ahead.

15:00Shashank Joshi:Now, Zizhank, this is, I believe, our last conversation in your capacity as defense editor. So a question for you kind of more about the effects of war and the degree to which war is kind of just feels much more on almost everyone's doorstep. We're thinking about war. We're talking on the show about war far more than we did even five years ago. For the West, at least, we took a holiday from war, didn't we? And it's now coming back. It's more palpable. I just think of the fact that in the last couple of months, we've seen two ballistic missile attacks on Turkey, drone attacks on an EU country, Cyprus.

15:33We've seen Russian drones coming into Poland. Isn't that remarkable? Last year, we saw the first and most substantial Indian-Pakistani airstrikes since 1971. War occurring under that nuclear threshold. We have seen the Iran war spread all the way from the Mediterranean to Sri Lanka. The first act of an American submarine torpedoing an enemy warship since the Second World War. As you string all those things together, there is this sense that it's not the 90s anymore. It's not even the 2000s anymore. These are not wars that are far away, far from home, things that happen in the Middle East. They feel more all-encompassing.

16:13Society feels it closer to home. The defense burden on economies is rising, particularly in those countries where it fell dramatically, like in Europe, but also certainly also in Asia. And the players are changing. We have smaller groups like the Houthis able to shut down major international waterways. You have countries that were once quiet and restrained, like Japan, loading up with Tomahawk missiles brimming out of their pockets. War is just so much more palpable than when I started this job eight years ago. And I think that that is only going to continue.

16:46Shashank Joshi:On that frankly terrifying note then, Chishonk, tell me about what you'll be getting up to next. Well, I have the great privilege of going to Washington, D.C. to service the paper's Washington bureau chief. And I think there is some continuity here. America is a society that's been shaped powerfully by war. If I look at the people around Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, these are veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars. And I think the Iraq and Afghan campaigns really traumatized American society, had a lasting effect. They shaped its politics and attitudes towards government to this day. And of course, America is currently at war.

17:20It's blockading Iran. It has forces all over the Middle East. Donald Trump wants a Pentagon budget that's going well over a trillion dollars. So I'm not escaping war, but in this new role, I'll also have to think really deeply and profoundly about all the other big changes taking place in America, from the midterms to the 2028 elections to the technological forces reshaping American society. And I am really looking forward to that.

17:45Shashank Joshi:For now, Shishong, thank you very much as ever for your time. Thanks so much. Side note here to remind you about The Economist Insider, our video series. It gives you unprecedented access to our newsroom, to the people and the thinking behind our journalism. From dynamic debates to the latest developing stories, our senior editors explain what today's events mean for tomorrow. This week, it's an even deeper dive than you just heard on the new tools of war. Shashank is joined by Adam Roberts, The Economist's foreign editor, and our correspondents in Kiev and Jerusalem to talk about the swarms of armed drones, unmanned ground vehicles, and AI-enabled targeting systems that have transformed battlefields across the world.

18:28Shashank Joshi:But what has this technological progress actually achieved, and how might it evolve in the years ahead? If you're a digital subscriber, Insider is already included in your subscription. There's nothing extra to sign up for. And if you're listening for free, you can watch extended clips from Insider via the link in our show notes.

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19:14Ann Wroe:Barney Frank never really knew what it was to be in the majority.

19:22Ann Wroe:For a start, he was left-handed, and that accounted perhaps for the horrible mess he seemed to drop on himself whenever he went out to lunch somewhere. Also, he was Jewish, and that was not a very useful fact for making a career when he was growing up in Bayon, New Jersey, heavily Catholic city, also quite full of the mafia. A third way in which he was in a distinct minority was that he was someone who really believed in government.

19:59Ann Wroe:He had always thought that government was essential for helping everyone who was on society's losing side. And he'd felt that ever since he was a boy, when he'd been really startled by the racist lynchings in the South. He was gay, but not many people knew that as he was coming up through the political system. And he hoped no one would have to know about that. Because to be gay meant that you couldn't marry, that you couldn't join the army, that maybe you couldn't do the job you wanted to do. And when he went to Washington, And part of the reason why he suddenly decided that the 4th District of Massachusetts would be just right was that it would give him a chance to have a very full and thriving gay social life down in D.C., well out of the way of the eyes of his constituents.