The dizzying pace of military technology and tactical innovation that we are experiencing at present is outstripping the ability of the public – and even specialist – debate to recognise the full implications of these developments for policy, politics and even the future shape of the State itself. From the Ukraine conflict to those around Israel and Iran and to the military competition in the Indo-Pacific, war – fighting it or preparing for it – bears increasingly heavily on global society as we move towards the 2030s.
The effects of this now-persistent and escalating concern with and practice of high-intensity warfare are cumulative. At some point, they are bound to break the most fundamental certitudes about how the modern world works. In some places, like Ukraine, this is already happening. As the William Gibson quip goes, the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.
War has always been the prime mover of History, altering borders, shaping nations, changing cultures, fuelling art and philosophy, generating new theories and social – including international – arrangements, and of course catalysing technological progress. This core natural function was suspended in the wake of the Second World War, when the “postwar system” gave rise to the UN-centred “international community of nations” and essentially brought great warfare cycles to a halt.
There were still some border changes over the ensuing decades arising from the dismantling of former colonial empires, but most of them were peaceful. Wars as such never disappeared, of course (and never will), but even the more bloody of them such as Korea or Vietnam were relatively contained and marginal to the global experience and to the more fundamental question of global stability during the Cold War. The workings of the world were not changed by them to any significant degree, nor were the basic principles of domestic politics and governance arrangements truly altered despite surface political turbulence such as in the US around Vietnam.
The evolution of society, defence, technology and so on, since 1945, was rather gradual and driven by system-wide forces, than hugely accelerated by any particular spurts of extreme war-related exertions. No war since WWII can be said to have seen the kind of tech development experienced during that global conflict which began with rather basic aeroplanes and tanks and ended with jet fighters, cruise missiles and nuclear weapons.
But now it is different. Not only are we back to a situation of multi-region war and warlike mobilisation (if we include the Indo-Pacific), with new, modern layers of “hybrid warfare” (including cyber and informational), that has implications for the entire world and constitutes a de facto form of “Global War”. But the Ukraine conflict has by now lasted longer than any single campaign in either WWI or WWII (except, technically, the purely-naval Battle of the Atlantic 1939-45) and is generating incredibly fast and complex advancements in weaponry and operational concepts at a time of a fourth Industrial Revolution led by AI, robotics and other game-changing technologies. We must therefore expect, in the coming years, either a complete breakdown of our “classic” theoretical frameworks for understanding “modern” military affairs – in their widest sense, including the role of the State – or, at any rate, an organic and perhaps haphazard recasting of these fundamentals along new guidelines.
That the traditional model of Defence is effectively bankrupt, at least in Western democracies, can hardly be disputed. Suspicions in this regard have been in the air for many years – certainly since 2022 when Putin’s invasion laid bare, by contrast, the sheer inadequacy of Western arsenals, combat capability and defence industrial base – not to mention manpower. Especially in Europe, despite vast nominal sums spent on “defence”, the capability outputs were disproportionately low.
The confirmation of these suspicions has come, alas, by way of the recent humiliation experienced by the British Armed Forces in the early stages of the Iran war – in particular the Royal Navy’s “Cyprus debacle” when not a single destroyer was available to be despatched to defend sovereign UK bases there from Iranian drone attacks. This failure has prompted greater debate in Britain on the state of the nation’s defences, with the lead military author of the country’s most recent Strategic Defence Review, General Barrons, admitting that the entire British Army could now barely “seize a small market town on a good day.” Meanwhile, again, the Royal Navy – for the first time now commanded not by an admiral but by a general of the Royal Marines – struggles to keep more than one destroyer at sea at any one time.
What is most shocking, and what constitutes the ultimate evidence of strategic and financial bankruptcy of the traditional defence model is that the UK military is suffering from these crippling shortcomings despite the fact that it is lavished with the sixth largest defence budget in the world – over £60 billion (€69 billion) per year. Naturally, the UK defence community is united in the cry for more money, and of course that much more money would probably yield some extra frontline military capability. But it likely won’t be nearly enough to make a real difference, certainly not in proportion to the costs.
The real issue is not the political inability to cut welfare in order to top up Defence. The core problem is that we are operating with a concept of “national” (i.e. fully State-funded) Defence that is simply unsustainable, both financially and from the point of view of skills, management and delivery, not to mention technology and innovation. Increasingly more solutions to defence problems – not just in terms of mil-tech R&D but also in terms of actual battlefield operations – are now to be found in the private sector.
There is nothing new or even anomalous in this situation, at the scale of History. National defence is only as old as the nation-state, which is a relatively recent invention. Before that much of a monarch’s – or merchant Republic’s – military power included hired swords (including specialist troops like crossbowmen) alongside feudal vassals and levies. At sea, insufficient naval forces would sometimes be augmented by private ships outfitted for war – privateers – operating under letters of marque from their governments, until well into the 19th century.
We are already well advanced on the way back to these old, pre-“national” practices. Over the past 20-30 years the role of PMCs (private military companies) has evolved from a focus on general base/convoy security and logistics in the Iraqi and Afghan campaigns – with Blackwater the classic example – to increasingly sophisticated tasks stretching ever further into combat support and even frontline activities. Non-Western PMCs, like the former Wagner Group and now its successor Africa Corps, already operate openly like private mercenary armies from the early modern age.
PMCs already handle many specialised, high-skilled modern warfare roles for Western states (including the UK and US), and the trend is accelerating. In Ukraine, private companies and PMC-style entities operate FPV, reconnaissance, and strike drones at scale and the government now allows critical infrastructure firms to form their own armed air-defence groups “outside the classic [Ukrainian] Armed Forces”.
Elsewhere, and already going on for many years now, other Western PMCs have contracted for drone operation, maintenance, and counter-drone systems in training and some operational support roles, as well as air-to-air refuelling. In the cyber domain this has long become routine, including for offensive cyber operations under defence ministries and intelligence agencies. Some PMCs even offer extensive drone, Electronic Warfare and airborne ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) packages that augment the national military’s capabilities in the field. Lines are becoming very blurred in the space domain as well, with private space companies integrated into military kill-chains.
Military operations in Ukraine represent the very cutting edge of warfare; some of the tactics, technology and skills in use there on a daily basis are far beyond not just the practice but even the doctrine and understanding of Western militaries. The most effective drone units function as multi-skilled teams comprising drone operators, technicians and programmers able to leverage AI tools and open-source information to improve their own local team’s targeting data and tactics, and often even to improve the very weapons and technology they are using – in effect behaving like branded mini-companies in the commercial sense, but with a lethal purpose.
This kind of experience and knowledge is acquired only on the battlefield in contact with the enemy. Western militaries have no way to incorporate it at scale and bring their own forces to that standard in peacetime, no matter how closely they observe the “lessons of Ukraine”. The only option to fill this gap in the coming years, after the Ukrainian war will have ended, might be to bring the expertise of future Ukrainian veterans into our militaries via the various PMCs that will begin to hire them on the open market.
As noted, it is already the case that for high-skilled, technology-heavy roles, Western armed forces use PMCs extensively and are deliberately expanding that model. These are not “mercenaries storming beaches” – they are contractors flying ISR planes, operating drone swarms, running cyber effects, refuelling fighters, and providing satellite bandwidth or space situational awareness. Ironically, the future of “national armies” might see regular troops, trained in the ethos of their country’s military traditions, increasingly reserved for more low-end, riskier “grunt” tasks, with “premium” privateers in the more sophisticated, cleverer roles. This, of course, would not be a socially and culturally-sustainable proposition over the long run.
Perhaps the better way to deal with this future is to get ahead of it and seek to shape it by looking afresh at some of our core, classical assumptions about the “who’s” and “how’s” of national Defence, and turning more intently towards private solutions to this problem. One can only imagine the level of actual future-looking frontline combat capability that a country like Britain could generate via a new crop of PMCs at the expense of a mere quarter of what it spends annually on maintaining its current Defence establishment with such modest results. Shifting £15 billion per year from the Defence budget into a new private military sector operating with commercial skills, logic, flexibility, and innovation alongside (not “integrated with”) government, would be transformative for the country’s military power and especially its readiness for future warfare. The UK is just one example, eloquent for the vast failures of its current defence model which cannot be hidden any longer; but the point would apply to any country going forward.
The idea that democratic states, at least, can continue to provide for the defence and national security of their peoples against the ever-expanding range of threats from seabed to space in the 21st century by using institutional models and approaches designed in the 19th century and the budget structures of the late 20th century is a dangerous illusion. The State can no longer attract enough good talent, and it cannot manage effectively enough, and innovate fast enough under government-led structures – certainly not in Defence, and increasingly not in other areas as well.
The current policy mantra – or hope – is to try to “integrate” private solutions with government capability or processes, to graft commercial approaches onto the old models, to increase collaboration with the private sector and so on. This is a losing proposition, certainly in Defence: It can work to some extent, but ultimately the dead hand of the state, the bureaucracy and the (wrong) incentives – simply, the “model” itself – will grind down most such initiatives. More truly radical thinking is required while we still have the luxury to choose our path forward. Time is running out.
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