Smart Weapons, Dumb Assumptions: Western Strategic Delusions Meet Industrial Reality in Ukraine

For all the vast commentary in the Western media on the Russia-Ukraine war, a persistent fact remains: beyond the immediate theatre of conflict, few observers possess a clear or consistent grasp of events on the ground. The fog of war—historically the product of battlefield confusion—has thickened in the digital age, not merely through competing strategic narratives and decontextualised drone footage, but also through the prevailing mists of Western wishful thinking.

For nearly three years, a steady stream of commentary—often by writers whose proximity to the conflict is more editorial than operational—has peddled forecasts heavy on conviction but light on corroboration. A familiar rota of Atlanticist voices,[i] supplemented by the op-ed pages of most of the major newspapers, have repeatedly assured their audiences that victory is within Ukraine’s grasp,[ii] or that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime is tottering on the brink of collapse.[iii] These declarations, rarely anchored in battlefield realities, have served less as strategic analysis and more as psychological reassurance: therapy disguised as insight.

This genre of morale-management has dovetailed neatly with the illusions that defined post-Cold War Western military orthodoxy. Political leaders and defence planners confidently envisioned a new era of warfare—rapid and surgical—executed by streamlined expeditionary forces deploying precision munitions and networked command systems. War, in this vision, would be not only decisive but decorous: fought at arm’s length and, metaphorically speaking, finished before lunch.

Instead, they got Bakhmut.

This essay seeks to dissect the collision between digital-age delusions and industrial-age realities. The war in Ukraine has exposed the fragility of Western military assumptions over the past three decades, not through a deliberate strategic reinvention but through war’s primordial nature reasserting itself—dragging Western theory back from its digital abstractions to the hard logic of force, friction and sustained political will.

The End of History did not arrive. The Return of Artillery did.

Digital Illusions, Kinetic Realities

Digitalisation—once heralded as the West’s definitive strategic advantage[iv] —has failed to yield the decisive political returns its champions so confidently forecast. The theory was seductively simple: by fusing precision munitions, real-time surveillance, and networked command, wars could be won quickly, cleanly and economically.[v] The doctrine was enshrined in the notion from the mid-1990s onwards that aimed to ‘impose’ an ‘overwhelming level of Shock and Awe against an adversary on an immediate or sufficiently timely basis to paralyze its will to carry on’.[vi]

But as Carl von Clausewitz warned nearly two centuries ago, war is a clash of wills—reciprocal, unpredictable and fundamentally political.[vii] It is not an efficient exercise in systems management, nor a technological showcase. It is organised violence pursued for political ends. War is messy and brutal. And always resistant to tidy solutions.

What these doctrines often failed to appreciate is a point as old as strategy itself and one certainly known to those who possess experience of war: adversaries adapt.[viii] And these adversaries have invested not only in cloud-based dominance, apps or digital platforms but also in much more traditional means: mass, endurance and industrial depth.[ix]

The idea that digital superiority would render conventional war obsolete and that the future of war belonged not to mass armies and tanks, but to decentralised networks and precision strikes[x]—has not merely proven over-optimistic—it has been inverted. Russia and other actors have appropriated these same tools, stripped them of their idealistic framing and employed them pragmatically, economically and at scale.

The West, by contrast, became increasingly enamoured with its own digital mythology: a vision of warfare conducted through code and connectivity, where liberal values could hitch a ride on the algorithm.[xi] Nowhere was this more evident than in the enthusiasm for ‘cyberwarfare’.[xii] This domain has long been hyped by Western policymakers as having the capacity to transform the nature of conflict, although its actual strategic effects have often fallen short.[xiii]

Advanced AI-driven weapons systems possess the potential to alter the character of warfare significantly, and Western analysts are right to acknowledge their utility and promise.[xiv] The difficulty arises, however, when such technologies are viewed as substitutes for—rather than complements to—the iron constants of war: the concentration of force and the inescapable physical costs of sustained combat.

Empirical reality continues to bear out these fundamental precepts. The digitalisation of war has not led to its dematerialisation but rather to its real-time mediation—wars that are livestreamed, memed and marketed for popular consumption. In a hyper-connected world, conflict is increasingly staged for global spectatorship.[xv] But if the medium has changed, the consequences have not.[xvi] War remains bloody, destructive and—for all the intrusion of high-tech drones and AI onto the battlefield—still deeply human.[xvii] Technology may change how we kill, but not why we kill or what killing does to us.[xviii]

From Liquid Dreams to Reinforced Concrete

We would do well to recall the intellectual mirage that framed Western military and strategic thought in the heady years following the Cold War—an era when it was believed history had ended and borders were assumed to be melting away. It was a time when Francis Fukuyama serenely declared the triumph of liberal democracy,[xix] Zygmunt Bauman introduced us to ‘liquid modernity’,[xx] Michael Mandelbaum speculated about the decline of great power conflict,[xxi] and Kenichi Ōmae prophesied the coming of a ‘borderless world’, flattened by global markets and lubricated by digital flows.[xxii]

These visions have not aged well. Rather than dissolving boundaries, the digital age has made fortification fashionable again. Far from ushering in a seamless, post-territorial utopia, we are witnessing a global resurgence of walls—physical, digital and strategic.[xxiii] Border fences, as well as internal security barricades, are proliferating, missile shields are expanding, and hardened command bunkers are once again very much in vogue.[xxiv]

And on the battlefield—from Gaza to Donbas—it is not hashtags, data packets or narrative ‘wins’ that are seizing ground.[xxv] It is bulldozers, concrete, and men entrenched behind sandbags and shellfire, knee-deep in the rust and mud of analogue war.[xxvi]

The future of warfare, it was claimed, would be light, fluid and frictionless.[xxvii] Precision would replace mass. Conflicts would be fought with pristine execution, cleanly resolved before the next election cycle. Yet what has emerged is not a paradigm shift, but a historical flashback: steel, trenches, and the long, grinding arithmetic of attrition.[xxviii]

To be sure, drones now circle the skies, bringing with them a new visual vocabulary of war and an expanded toolkit for surveillance and targeting.[xxix] But their strategic effect has been to amplify, rather than transform, traditional modes of warfare. Instead of revolutionising the battlefield, they have industrialised it anew—albeit in 4K resolution, complete with cinematic framing.

War, it turns out, has not dematerialised. It has reindustrialised—with better bandwidth and far more stylish infographics.

Ukraine: A Case Study in Strategic Overreach and Wishful Thinking

The war in Ukraine was meant to be a demonstration of Western strategic mastery—a proving ground where NATO’s technological sophistication, economic might and moral authority would combine to check Russian aggression without direct military engagement.[xxx] Ukraine, initially reliant on Soviet-era weaponry, was gradually armed with Western materiel—supplied unevenly and often with logistical friction—amid a broader surge of financial, diplomatic and intelligence support.[xxxi]

While Western leaders portrayed their aims as conflict containment and support for Ukrainian sovereignty,[xxxii] the cumulative effect—and at times the barely concealed subtext—was something more expansive: to discredit the Kremlin, weaken the Russian state, and reaffirm the West’s fading post-Cold War faith in its own historical direction.[xxxiii] If humiliation was not the formal objective, it was very often the desired outcome.

To take official Western restraint at face value is to ignore the deeper ideological and strategic context—particularly the long-standing tradition of rhetorical triumphalism and regime-change fantasising that has permeated Western policy circles. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) observed with striking candour: ‘The West does not have a strategy of regime change in Russia. However, if Ukraine can end the conflict on its own terms, Putin’s regime could fall. A failed war… makes regime collapse a possible outcome’.[xxxiv] That such an outcome is publicly entertained—even welcomed—suggests a broader ambition than mere containment.

Indeed, the public script may have emphasised stability and sovereignty, but the undertone—as echoed across media commentary, think tank literature and government rhetoric—has often leaned toward punitive ambition, systemic delegitimisation, and, at times, the outright dismemberment of the Russian state.[xxxv] The Atlantic Council was even more explicit in its framing, advocating that the West should ‘undermine Russian domestic support for the war, destroy the myth of Russian military superiority, and shrink the Kremlin’s sphere of influence’.[xxxvi]

In this light, Washington and its allies appeared less interested in returning to a stable international order than in using the war as a proving ground for a reassertion of liberal ascendancy. As one Brookings report argued: ‘“Shock and awe” should be the leitmotif of limiting Russia’s economic capacity to wage war’.[xxxvii] Even if not officially articulated as such, this rationale carried a distinctly retaliatory logic, one that went beyond tactical considerations and veered into the terrain of ideological retribution.

Instead, the West’s proxy war in Ukraine has begun to resemble a failed product launch—overpromised, underdelivered and still limping along on the exhaust fumes of its own marketing. While initial Western expectations were marked by caution—especially in parts of Europe that assumed a swift Russian victory—these quickly gave way to escalating rhetoric once Ukraine held the line. Within weeks, the narrative lurched from defensive solidarity to something far more grandiose: pledges of support ‘for as long as it takes’,[xxxviii] sweeping declarations about a global struggle for democracy,[xxxix] and the recasting of Ukraine as ‘part of our European family’.[xl]

The war’s strategic aims metastasised beyond political rationality, becoming integral to the West’s own political and moral identity. Now, with victory elusive and momentum stalled, the war has become too costly to abandon and too awkward to concede as a failure. It is too deeply entangled in the maximalist rhetoric and moral self-conceptions of both Russia and the West to be resolved cleanly. The result is that no obvious off-ramp exists for either side.[xli]

The subsequent misjudgements are worth cataloguing:

• Soft Power: A concept long valorised in Western policy circles, denoting the use of non-military tools to leverage instruments of cultural persuasion and win hearts and minds without recourse to force.[xlii] But hearts, as it turns out, are not for sale and minds are too busy doomscrolling through drone footage on TikTok or tuning out altogether.[xliii] Influence operations premised on Pride flag-waving embassies and finger-wagging hashtags have failed to move either publics or front lines.[xliv]
• Economic Warfare: The much-vaunted ‘sanctions from hell’,[xlv] were meant to crater the Russian economy in short order.[xlvi] Instead, Russia’s GDP has overtaken much of the Eurozone, the industrial capacity of which continues to falter.[xlvii] Germany, by contrast, has sent its manufacturing sector into a kind of auto-induced coma—collateral damage in a moral enterprise that neglected to run the numbers before pulling the trigger.[xlviii]
• Strategic Credibility: Once burnished by Cold War mystique, NATO’s reputation now wobbles somewhere between ceremonial leftover and crisis PR firm. The alliance increasingly resembles a séance for departed strategic purpose—hands clasped around the table, muttering slogans, hoping the ghost of 1989 will manifest and tell them what to do.[xlix] It oscillates between virtue-signalling and threat inflation, unsure whether it’s meant to deter adversaries or simply reassure itself that it still matters.

The underlying reality is chastening, though hardly obscure: strategically, Ukraine has already lost in the sense that it is now increasingly difficult to visualise the full recovery of its pre-2022 territory—let alone Crimea, lost to Russia in 2014. While some insist that Ukraine can still prevail by simply avoiding defeat,[l] this is less a strategy than a holding pattern. In fact, the notion that Ukraine might still win so long as it does not lose drifts perilously close to tautology and evades the strategic question by substituting persistence for victory.

Underlying this is a broader tendency in Western discourse to redefine success as indefinite resolve—‘for as long as it takes’—a phrase that entered the Western strategic lexicon as early as 2010.[li] Indeed, the situation evokes the strategically inexplicable escalation of the First World War. In that case, the conflict reached a global-order-transforming crescendo because, having committed themselves so fiercely to victory (howsoever defined), no political leader could be dislodged from the imperative to demonstrate their own side’s superior strength and will. Worse still, none could escape the gnawing fear of defeat—and the reckoning that defeat might entail, the consequences of which became increasingly difficult even to contemplate. Yet perhaps most fatally of all was the inexorable political need, once the fighting had begun, to persuade populations that their sacrifices had not been in vain.[lii]

The rhetoric of open-ended commitment has a dependable shelf life: it sounds resolute, postpones difficult questions and conveniently allows almost anything to pass for progress—until it doesn’t. Strategically, however, it is ambiguous, and—as the record of Western overreach in places like Afghanistan suggests—ultimately unsustainable. The war has frequently been defended as a triumph of strategic effectiveness. As long as Ukrainians are doing the fighting, the West ostensibly gains from Russian military degradation at no direct cost to itself. As American Senator Lindsey Graham bluntly put it: ‘I like the structural path we’re on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need, and the economic support, they will fight to the last person’.[liii]

Such a position is morally cynical but might still be justifiable as a matter of dispassionate realpolitik—if, that is, the underlying military and economic logic were sound. The problem is, it is not. As recently conceded by top NATO general Christopher Cavolli, ‘Despite extensive battlefield losses in Ukraine, the Russian military is reconstituting and growing at a faster rate than most analysts had anticipated. In fact, the Russian army, which has borne the brunt of combat, is today larger than it was at the beginning of the war’.[liv] It should also be noted that Western assessments of Russian losses are highly questionable with the Pentagon itself admitting that Russian casualty estimates are ‘low confidence assessments’, derived from varied sources—satellite imagery, intercepts, social media posts—and that the lack of transparency renders them ‘at best, an unreliable snapshot of the war’.[lv]

Similarly, the European Union as a whole has also lost, though more gradually and at greater expense, both economically and in terms of political credibility.[lvi] And for those willing to observe without ideological filters, the ending was never really in doubt—it was embedded in the opening act.[lvii] Compared to recent Western ventures—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria—Ukraine is less an exception than the latest instalment in a franchise of failure.

Curiously, viewed alongside these other glittering triumphs of Western statecraft, it raises the uncomfortable question: why do strategic miscalculations persist with such bureaucratic regularity? Strategic failure returns like a seasonal affliction, predictable yet untreated? It’s as if the logic of policy has become autonomous—advancing not through reasoned deliberation, but through the mechanical repetition of error, as though guided by some invisible staff college syllabus written in disappearing ink.[lviii] In Clausewitzian terms, the West has mastered the grammar of war but lost sight of its logic[lix]—substituting movement for meaning, precision for purpose and publicity for political ends.

Geopolitics After Virtue: The Great Dealignment

One of the more obvious strategic own-goals of recent years—easily foreseeable to anyone not still intoxicated by end-of-history euphoria—was the West’s attempt to isolate Russia.[lx] Marketed as a principled defence of the rules-based order, it instead accelerated the very multipolar world that liberal orthodoxy once dismissed as a polite fiction.[lxi]

China and Russia are now aligned more closely than ever before.[lxii] BRICS, long regarded as a branding exercise in search of a geopolitical function, is suddenly attracting real attention. Turkey and Indonesia, neither known for anti-Western grandstanding, are among those now eyeing membership as a hedge against Western volatility.[lxiii] De-dollarisation—once the province of fringe theorists—is quietly creeping into institutional portfolios.[lxiv]

The attempt to reduce the ruble to rubble has fared no better. It remains robust and more stable, in fact, than several G7 currencies.[lxv] Meanwhile, the broader economic offensive against Russia has boomeranged, damaging key sectors of Western industry far more effectively than any vodka-soaked strategy session in the Kremlin could have dared dream.[lxvi] German manufacturing sends its regrets—from behind a shuttered factory.[lxvii]

The geopolitical by-product is an incipient Eurasian compact,[lxviii] coalescing not from ideological affinity but from a shared scepticism towards the West—especially in its EU–NATO incarnation—where it increasingly appears distracted, decadent and no longer capable of shaping a global framework to which others feel bound to conform.[lxix] This is not yet the collapse of the post-1945 system, but it is a world in which many states no longer see themselves forced to choose between Western patronage and pariah status.[lxx]

One thing is increasingly clear: the world order that Washington and Brussels claim to defend—one rooted in liberal internationalism and post‑Cold War norms—no longer resembles the fractured, multipolar reality most of the world inhabits. Pronouncements from Western leaders in the recent past such as Joe Biden (U.S. President, 2021-25) and Secretary of NATO Jens Stoltenberg have repeatedly invoked this liberal order as a universal bulwark,[lxxi] even as its relevance beyond the West remains doubtful.

Mass Effect: The Return of Industrial Warfare

For decades, Western military doctrine elevated speed, agility and precision as the defining virtues of modern war. Mass, by contrast, was relegated to the historical dustbin—an outdated vestige of the past best archived alongside the flintlock and bayonet. Prevailing wisdom held that battlefield success no longer depended on sheer volume; instead, superiority in information and command velocity was expected to render attritional warfare obsolete.[lxxii] Mobilising at scale was seen not merely as inefficient, but as a strategic anachronism: too slow, too expensive and altogether too evocative of the dismal age when wars dragged on longer than a news cycle.

Then came Ukraine. And Gaza. And most recently, the outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Iran. Along with them comes the unwelcome re-statement of the ugly truth. We can debate what mass means in the digital age—whether cyber capabilities or information flows can be ‘massed’ like tanks, shells and infantry.[lxxiii] But the war in Ukraine has delivered a sobering verdict: mass still matters in its elemental productive and kinetic sense.[lxxiv] Industrial capacity—measured not in slick procurement briefings but in shells, drones and spare parts—continues to decide wars.[lxxv]

The numbers from Ukraine are instructive:

• Russia is producing artillery shells at roughly a 3:1 ratio compared to the combined efforts of the West.[lxxvi]
• It is manufacturing more armoured vehicles, drones and missiles than all of NATO put together.[lxxvii]
• It has achieved this without either defaulting on its debt[lxxviii] or torching its domestic economy[lxxix]—relying instead on retrofitted Soviet-era factories and a wartime mobilisation machine that, however grim, has proven effective.[lxxx]

The Western response has been less than inspiring. It struggles to maintain its own inventories, let alone support those of its Ukrainian client.[lxxxi] The U.S. production rate of SM-3 interceptor missiles, for example, is twelve per year.[lxxxii] That is not a misprint. It’s barely enough to guard one aircraft carrier, let alone a country, a continent or an alliance system.

What we are witnessing is not simply a war between Russia and Ukraine, but a clash between two rival theories of warfare: the West’s preferred paradigm of digital-era finesse and the industrial-age attrition model it prematurely consigned to history.[lxxxiii] One looks increasingly like a TED Talk. The other looks like it’s winning.[lxxxiv]

Elegant Theories, Muddy Realities: The Limits of Manoeuvre and Modern War’s Return to the Past

For decades, Western military doctrine has lionised manoeuvre warfare—fast-paced operations designed to outflank the enemy, strike at its weak points and collapse morale before a proper defence can even form.[lxxxv] It is, in essence, a vision of war as choreography: elegant, kinetic and preferably concluded before anyone’s risotto gets cold. Attritional warfare, by contrast, has been cast as a relic—graceless, maladroit and too evocative of First World War trench warfare to be taken seriously in an age of sensor fusion and satellite-guided munitions.[lxxxvi]

The battlefield, however, refuses to conform to this prescription. Ukraine’s much-heralded counter-offensives, for example, have foundered in mile-deep minefields and trench systems that would not look out of place in 1916.[lxxxvii] Russia’s allegedly obsolete static defences—written off in many Western assessments as ‘outdated and ineffective’[lxxxviii]—have proved not only durable but lethally successful. Gaza, too, has offered little comfort to the manoeuvrist imagination: less blitzkrieg, more bloodied crawl through concrete and chaos.[lxxxix]

The much-touted revolution in precision warfare—complete with ‘smart’ bombs, ISR drones[xc] and real-time targeting—has not so much upended old doctrines as underscored their abiding relevance. Precision, it turns out, does not render mass obsolete. It merely ensures that what is hit is hit accurately. However, this does not, in and of itself, dislodge the enemy when they are still dug in, still shooting back and still there after the smoke clears.[xci]

What we are witnessing is not the advent of a new kind of war, but the stubborn reappearance of what was once thought banished to history: less Silicon Valley, more Verdun with drones. And despite what the glossy tech brochures may once promised, war remains a test of strength and perseverance. And, ultimately, this still rewards the side that can absorb punishment, not merely dish it out with algorithmic elegance.

Tempo Tantrums: Velocity without Victory

Speed, we were told, kills. Victory, we were assured, belongs to the swift.[xcii] Modern warfare, in this telling, must be conducted at pace—executed rapidly, concluded even more briskly, preferably before voters grow bored or the polls turn south. But once again, theory has collided with reality—and reality, as ever, refuses to follow campaign plans or calendar deadlines.

From Iraq to Afghanistan to Ukraine, the West’s obsession with fast wars has yielded an unfortunate litany of open-ended debacles—not because speed is inherently flawed, but because it was mistaken for strategy.[xciii] In practice, rapid operations have too often been used in place of coherent planning, leaving policymakers unprepared for what follows the initial burst of momentum.

What we are left with is movement masquerading as progress. Digital velocity—complete with dashboards, drone feeds and situational awareness apps—has proven a poor substitute for more antiquated virtues: strategic patience, industrial stamina and political determination. The West has mastered the art of beginning wars at speed. It remains rather less adept at ending them.

Narrative Supremacy, Battlefield Reality

Few phrases have enjoyed such recent cachet as ‘information war’[xciv]—the idea that success in conflict depends not merely on battlefield outcomes, but on dominating the information space: protecting one’s own data flows, disrupting those of the adversary and controlling the narrative terrain.[xcv] From think tank panels to defence white papers, phrases like strategic communications, influence operations and narrative shaping have been lauded as the new instruments of advantage[xcvi]— as if they might obviate the need for tanks, shells, or the ability to absorb and inflict sustained losses. Victory, nowadays, it has been said, ‘is not about whose army wins, but about whose story wins’.[xcvii]

Ukraine, by almost every Western measure, has won the ‘information war’ hands-down: cinematic footage, clever memes and Zelensky’s branded defiance—all flawlessly packaged for global consumption.[xcviii] Ukraine’s audacious strike against Russia’s strategic bomber fleet in early June 2025, launched from modified civilian truck containers deep within Russian territory, was merely the latest flourish in the country’s drone diplomacy.[xcix]

The operation thrilled opinion writers in the West, with commentators hailing it as bold, brilliant and disruptive. One writer declared that it was ‘An extraordinary covert operation’ which has ‘left many Russian strategic bombers in flames and analysts reaching for superlatives’,[c] while another proclaimed that the strike had ‘revolutionary implications for the future of warfare’.[ci]

Ignored in all this was the fact that the Russian bombers were stationed in the open as part of the terms of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), which aims to safeguard the transparency and verifiability of nuclear forces between the U.S. and Russia.[cii] That this was viewed as a media triumph speaks volumes when it contains the potential to unravel nuclear-era taboos, destabilise longstanding arms control agreements and invite retaliation on NATO territory.[ciii] There is an almost touching faith that Russia—and future adversaries—will play by rules no longer respected by those celebrating their breach.

Yet, the crucial point is that none of it shifts the balance on the battlefield. Russia continues to occupy territory, outguns Ukraine in military output by a wide margin, and thus dictates the tempo of the war. The paradox is unmistakable: while Kyiv excelled in aesthetic resistance and drone-delivered dramaturgy,[civ] Moscow relied on bulldozers and blasting tactics.[cv] Just because Russia is not shock and awing its way across Ukraine does not mean that it’s concept of operations is flawed.

The reality is again simple. Winning the narrative is not the same as winning the war. It may matter—particularly in sustaining domestic support—but narrative dominance alone offers no shield once the shrapnel starts flying.

The West’s Strategic Malaise: Foreign Policy as Performance

Since the end of the Cold War, Western military interventions have rarely been driven by existential threat. Instead, they have functioned as expressive acts—emotional responses to atrocity, terror, or televised calamity. The guiding imperative has been less about strategic necessity than performative resolve: something must be done, and it must be seen to be done.[cvi] This is foreign policy as theatre—enough action to signal commitment to a universal principle, but not enough to see through that commitment over the longer term or to incur real risk to the metropolitan core.

The results are by now depressingly familiar. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria:[cvii] each was launched under the banner of moral urgency and rhetorical uplift, only to conclude in exhaustion, strategic incoherence, or the quiet burying of lessons left unlearned.[cviii]

Ukraine, however, is different. The stakes are higher. The adversary is much stronger. Russia’s industrial capacity and societal resilience is far greater than any number of brittle regimes in the Middle East or North Africa.[cix] Yet the West’s instinctive response remains curiously unchanged: morally emphatic, logistically improvised and industrially unsustainable. NATO appears intent on waging a 20th-century land war on 21st-century terms, with 1990s stockpiles, and attention spans more attuned to summit communiqués and quarterly press briefings than any long-term strategic intent.

In truth, many of these interventions seem optimised less for the battlefield than for the curated stage of liberal respectability—crafted to win plaudits in opinion columns, panel discussions and policy forums where moral posturing always trumps material constraint. They are calibrated for the approval of the right-thinking, not the requirements of strategic success. Here, victory is optional, while virtue-signalling is mandatory.

Conclusion: The Past Has Logged Back In

Of course, drones, smartphones and digital sensors have altered the texture of warfare.[cx] But not, as once hoped, in ways that inherently favour the West—or that offer a clean, clickable path to victory. We were assured the information age would flatten borders, replace firepower with fibre optics and substitute narratives for armoured divisions. Instead, we got trenches, mass mobilisation and an emerging Eurasian bloc armed with both industrial capacity and civilisational will—a bloc moreover that is increasingly willing to challenge a fading Western hegemony. Not quite the holographic utopia envisioned by the PowerPoint prophets.

Western military models aren’t faltering for lack of virtue, but because they rest on assumptions that, if they were ever viable, no longer apply. The future, inconveniently, failed to arrive on schedule. And the past, just as rudely, refuses to stay buried.

What has the war shown? Eight crucial lessons in strategic realism can be discerned:

1. Industrial capacity still wins wars – tweets don’t produce artillery shells, and likes don’t keep the lines supplied.
2. Mass matters – precision only works when you have enough of it to make a difference. Without mass, even the most exquisite strike becomes a gesture.
3. Soft power is not eternal – the West’s civilisational narrative no longer persuades as it once did. A culture uncertain of its own values struggles to project them abroad.
4. Cyberwarfare adds friction, not transcendence – it clouds judgement more than it clarifies the fight and cannot substitute for steel.
5. Shock-and-awe is no panacea – it can overwhelm weak opponents, but falters against prepared defences and determined resistance.
6. Manoeuvre has its limits – it promises elegance but often delivers attrition. What begins as operational art often ends in a cratered field, a stalled advance or an improvised occupation of hostile ground.
7. Digital dominance does not equal territorial control – You can’t seize ground with hashtags—and drones don’t hold terrain. Information may shape perceptions, but only boots plant flags.
8. Political courage remains decisive – victory belongs neither to the eloquent or the agile, but to the side that can withstand the storm.

In the end, strategic success depends not on who reacts fastest or trends hardest, but on the dull, unglamorous verities that underlie modern war: production, patience and purpose.

And if Clausewitz were alive today, he’d be updating his terms of service—while watching the West lose signal in a world it once thought it had debugged.