Why Military Tech Obsession Keeps Losing Wars — SkimNews
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- The article warns of a 'technology trap' in which policymakers develop misplaced certainty about how innovations will reshape warfare while neglecting the unchanging human fundamentals — captured by the questions "who kills, who dies, and who decides" — a myopia the piece links to dreadful outcomes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and Gaza.
- Modern military technologies carry unusually low barriers to entry, being cheap to produce with knowledge that has been democratized and globalized, which the source says puts today's adversaries on "more equal battlefields" than in past eras of expensive, specialized platforms.
- The war in Ukraine has produced what the article calls "World War I meets World War III", combining sophisticated Russian ballistic missiles and precision-guided glide bombs with cheap tactics — including bombs dropped from drones carried aloft by simple balloons — while fishermen's nets draped over the city of Izium rank among the most effective antidrone defenses.
- The 2018 National Defense Strategy, drafted under Elbridge Colby, who now serves as undersecretary of defense, predicted that a few high-end capabilities — advanced computing, AI, robotics, hypersonics, biotechnology — would "ensure we will be able to fight and win the wars of the future," a bet the article says was undercut by cheap Iranian drones assaulting soft targets in Gulf Arab states since February.
- Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed before the 2022 full-scale invasion that more than 70 percent of Russia's military had advanced weapons, reflecting a decade-long reform effort; the article says that technological confidence conferred little advantage within weeks of the invasion.
- The Trump administration's 2026 war on Iran launched without a clearly articulated goal, instead offering shifting justifications in what the source describes as a hope that "technological wizardry would make it possible to achieve everything on a long wish list"; the Iranian regime withstood the onslaught and closed the Strait of Hormuz, despite Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's post-2025-strike declaration that U.S. capabilities were "nearly unlimited."
Why it matters: The 2018 National Defense Strategy's wager on a handful of high-end capabilities — drafted under current Undersecretary Elbridge Colby — has been visibly falsified by cheap drones and fishermen's nets on modern battlefields. For U.S. defense planners, the operationally relevant lesson is to stop chasing the shiniest equipment and instead articulate clear political objectives before committing forces, precisely what the Trump administration omitted before its 2026 Iran campaign.
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