Ahmet Mehmet 
As the world shifts away from the west-centric order and conflicts become more entangled with politics and economics, one crucial dimension is being missed in many broad overviews: the rapid military evolution of warfare, and how it will shape conflicts of the future.
Part of the reason is simple—and accurate: no two wars are alike. The side that prepares for the next conflict by copying the last one is usually fighting the wrong battle.
Technology, terrain, and tactics evolve faster than doctrines and institutions. So yesterday’s “lessons learned” can become tomorrow’s blind spots. In practice, this means serious militaries study history for principles, not templates, then stress-test those principles against new realities.
Those who fail to adapt early tend to pay first and Russia’s significant losses in the opening months of the proxy war in Ukraine are a case in point.
Moscow appears to have treated earlier, more limited campaigns—Georgia in 2008 and the low-resistance seizure of Crimea in 2014—as usable reference points for a far larger, high-intensity fight. But Ukraine in 2022 was not Georgia, and it was not Crimea. It was contested battlespace facing the wider cabal of NATO regimes, deep intelligence support, and rapidly evolving battlefield tools.
In that environment, assumptions built on past “quick win” models became liabilities. The gap between expectations and reality showed up immediately in casualties, logistics strain, and stalled momentum.
During the first 12–18 months, the western propaganda narrative largely dominated the war’s information space, amplified by official messaging and media framing. As the conflict dragged on, however, reality steadily undermined many of those bombastic storylines. Even as the picture became more complex, Russian battlefield adaptations and tactical innovations were still, for the most part, kept out of mainstream western coverage.
While the widespread use of light drones became the most visible and most widely reported feature of the war on both sides, many other battlefield innovations received far less attention. It is precisely these less-publicized adaptations, combined with drone saturation, that are likely to define the character of future wars.
What are those key tactical characteristics?
As described by a prominent Russian military analyst Valery Shiryaev, tactical picture suggests that the defining adaptations of this war are less about “new wonder-weapons” and more about how forces move, see, and survive under constant observation.
Cheap, disposable mobility—motorcycles, small vehicles, improvised transport—replaces heavy, predictable movement because dense columns and slow concentrations become ideal targets for drone-guided fires.
The logic is straightforward: accept losing modified, low-cost civilian vehicles to preserve trained manpower and keep units moving under observation. So, the next time the western propaganda narrative pokes fun at Russian troops using electric bikes, horses or doorless Lada cars, it’s worth noting the military rationale behind those images: speed, dispersion, and a smaller signature can matter more than armor when drones and precision fires dominate.
Light vehicles help storming infantry by getting them towards enemy trenches faster and allowing rapid dismounts, reducing the time they need to engage in rapid close distance fire fights.
Likewise, footage of troops carrying hunting rifles and shotguns is not necessarily evidence of a shortage of modern weapons. In many cases it reflects a simple cost-benefit calculation. At close range, pellet spread can be one of the cheapest ways to bring down small tactical drones, especially when more sophisticated air-defense assets are too expensive, or too blunt for the job.
In urban fighting, the emerging method is less a dramatic “storming” than a staged, centrally directed process conducted through dispersed entry.
The first phase is concealment and observation: small teams infiltrate, hide, and avoid unnecessary contact, with reconnaissance focused on identifying drone operators and other key enablers rather than chasing frontline infantry.
The second phase is fire direction—artillery, mortars, and drones are brought to bear on those operator positions, relay points, and support nodes—so that the defender’s ability to “see” and rapidly cue strikes is degraded before the attacker fully commits.
Only when numerical presence becomes dominant in the area does the third phase unfold, where defenders are progressively displaced or destroyed through an incremental “absorption” of terrain rather than a single visible assault.
The war in Ukraine remains the primary strategic conflict in which NATO is, in effect, absorbing an indirect military setback. The repercussions will not only be political and psychological, but also tactical. Armies likely to confront NATO regimes—or militaries trained and equipped by them—will study Ukraine as a live learning model and adapt accordingly.
Something similar is already visible in North Korea’s approach. After decades without major battlefield experience, it sought opportunities for its forces to gain real combat exposure in Ukraine alongside Russia.
As stated previously, no war is identical. We are unlikely to see Iranian or Venezuelan armies copy the Russian experience exactly.
Different terrain, force structure, logistics, air-defense density, and political constraints mean tactics can’t be transplanted like a template.
What travels instead are the principles: disperse to reduce signatures, assume constant surveillance, harden logistics against precision strikes, and build cheap, scalable ways to generate firepower and deny the enemy freedom of movement. In other words, the lesson is not to “fight like Russia,” but “fight like a military” that expects drones, sensors, and precision fires to punish every predictable pattern.
Even with these innovations in mind, some fundamentals will not change.
Ukraine has again highlighted enduring conventional constants that are unlikely to disappear anytime soon starting with the oldest one of all: war is, in large part, a contest of logistics.
Precision strikes and drones may change how forces move, hide, and fight, but they do not eliminate the need to feed, fuel, repair, rotate, and resupply armies at scale. And because the wars that reshape the global order tend to be larger and longer, they demand more than tactical ingenuity; they require industrial depth.
Sustaining prolonged, high-intensity combat still depends on state-backed production capacity and resilient supply chains that can replace ammunition, drones, vehicles, spare parts, and trained personnel faster than they are consumed.
Another conventional constant Ukraine has underlined is societal stamina—the willingness of a society to absorb casualties, economic strain, and prolonged disruption without political collapse.
Modern technology can change the tempo of fighting, but it cannot erase the basic fact that long wars are ultimately sustained by public endurance and a shared belief that the stakes are existential.
Russia, whatever one thinks of its leadership, has shown a higher tolerance for pain in pursuit of geopolitical objectives that many inside the country have come to frame as fundamental to national security and status.
As Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi put it in 2023, Russia had “already lost at least 150,000 killed”—losses that “in any other country…would have stopped the war,” but “not in Russia.” Although the figure is likely exaggerated, this disparity matters because casualty tolerance shapes everything from manpower policy to operational risk-taking. The side that can replenish, rotate, and continue fighting under heavy losses can outlast an opponent even when battlefield conditions are tactically fluid.
Applying that same logistical lens to the ongoing regional war in West Asia will help clarify why Israel faces a structural strategic disadvantage. Israel can generate intense firepower quickly, but sustaining a prolonged regional war is ultimately an industrial and supply-chain problem—and its manufacturing and logistics base is heavily dependent on distant external backers.
In practice, that means high-tempo operations draw down stocks that cannot be replenished domestically at the rate a long war demands. Resupply must travel through long, politically contingent supply routes, and any disruption—whether production bottlenecks, shipping constraints, or shifts in western political appetite—becomes a direct constraint on battlefield options.
This matters because Israel is operating in a region of large, mobilizable societies and deep social hostility, where adversaries can absorb punishment, regenerate manpower, and continue contesting the fight even after severe losses. In that kind of environment, the side that can reliably replace munitions, platforms, spares, and trained crews over months—not just weeks—tends to shape the war’s ceiling. Israel’s ceiling is inseparable from American and European industrial output and sustained political will.
In the end, the central lesson of Ukraine is that future wars will be decided by the marriage of adaptation and endurance.
The tactical edge will belong to those who assume constant surveillance, disperse intelligently, move cheaply, and build scalable counter-drone and precision-fire “kill chains” faster than their opponent can respond. But tactics alone will not carry a long fight: the winners will still be the actors with industrial depth, resilient logistics, and societies prepared to absorb sustained pressure without strategic paralysis.
As the west-centric era fades and conflicts intensify, militaries that treat Ukraine as a living laboratory—learning principles rather than copying templates—will enter the coming wars with fewer illusions and more usable readiness. Those that cling to prestige platforms, predictable doctrine, and information-war slogans will discover, yet again, that reality is the most unforgiving battlefield.
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