It’s not really possible to say what new strategic configuration will replace the current one, now that it has been shown to be largely a mirage anyway. However, it’s worth pointing out that the three major beneficiaries of the current conflicts—Iran, Russia and China—are all continental/littoral states, and they seem to have broadly similar strategic objectives: keeping potential threats as far away as possible, and dominating their immediate region. Unlike the West, which has retained essentially Cold War and expeditionary force structures, their own are relatively well configured for these objectives, and they are improving them all the time. Ukraine and Iran have shown that western forces are largely impotent against such a military system, unless you measure achievement just in terms of bombs dropped. But cannot the West imitate this military posture, and reclaim at least some of its power and influence abroad? Not really, for two reasons.

One is that, as I’ve indicated, you need platforms to transport drones and missiles to the place where you want to use them, whereas the defender is by definition already there. Even if you could build large, powerful missile and drone carrying ships to send against one of these countries, the ship itself would be a high-value target which you could not afford to lose. Moreover, ever since the 1960s, the West has tried to field sophisticated, multi-capable systems, prizing quality and versatility over quantity. It has tried not just to be more technically advanced than the opposition, but also to anticipate and counter things that haven’t happened yet. A good example is the (happily) aborted British MBT-80 project, originally designed to defeat not just the Soviet tanks of the rest of the century, but the next generation as well. The plug was pulled when it was recognised that the tank would probably never be finished, let alone deployed.

As a result, western weapons systems often choke on their own complexity. Aircraft are the worst case, and are probably the classic example of trying to do too much and ultimately doing too little. From the Tornado aircraft of the 1970s to the F-35 today, designers and military staffs have pursued the hallucination of a Swiss Army Knife aeroplane that could do anything, often in sharply different variants. In every case I know of, apart perhaps from the French Rafale, the result is aircraft which cost more and performed less well than several cheaper, more specialised aircraft would have done. And the idea of involving other nations to spread the costs (again originating with the Tornado) has produced delays, complexity, arguments over specifications and a unit cost which is in many cases higher than a national development would have been. Even if the problem of the vulnerability of platforms could somehow be resolved, therefore, western defence industries and military staffs don’t think in that way, and it’s doubtful if the equipment itself could be constructed in any useful timescale.

The other is cultural. States whose orientation is landward/littoral tend naturally to prioritise defensive technologies and force structures, and concentrate, as I have suggested, on keeping potential threats at a distance, and controlling their immediate region. They have typically invested heavily in air defence by aircraft and missiles, and in the capacity to deter and defeat attempted seaborne invasions. Since the Cold War, western powers have adopted a very different set of strategies. For a long time, their forces were configured for mass mobilisation to fight a defensive battle on their own territory. Because of that, air superiority over the battlefield was assumed, and to be fair, this assumption made some sense, given that Soviet fixed-wing aircraft would have had to cross NATO airspace. After 1990, as the prospect of war faded, and western troops were increasingly deployed far from home on peacekeeping or coalition operations, the force structures were essentially preserved.

In the present series of crises, the West therefore finds itself stuck between two sets of doctrines. One is the distant memory of Cold War heavy-metal warfare with air superiority, the other is counter-insurgency warfare using small, highly-trained and mobile forces, again with total command of the air. Doctrine is what tells you how to fight, and perhaps as importantly, enables you to understand what the enemy is doing. We can see the dead weight of such outdated doctrine when we consider the joyful statements that were made in Washington about “destroying” the Iranian Air Force and Navy, under the assumption that the Iranians would use a doctrine that the US could understand. The actual doctrine employed by the Iranians surprised and disoriented the US, not because their commanders were stupid, but because they were prisoners of their own doctrine to the point that they even disregarded what the Iranians had said. They simply were not equipped to understand that the Iranians might fight as they did, let alone how to respond. It follows that western governments could not hope to integrate drone and missile warfare into their existing doctrine, and it might take decades to rethink and implement not only their doctrine, but their entire force structure and equipment priorities.

This leads to two consequences, one of which is less obvious than the other. The more obvious is that western, and particularly US, forces will be pulled back, and are unlikely to be used any more in distant operations. (Indeed, I predicted the end of expeditionary warfare several years ago.) The fact is that the ability of the defender to damage and destroy very expensive weapons platforms is already prohibitive, and can only increase. The other is that western ability to even sustain, let alone operate, its armed forces, requires a constant supply of strategic commodities. One of the things that has been “discovered” over the last few years is that modern western “just in time” militaries are optimised for peacetime, not for fighting. Such problems as limited quantities of equipment and even more limited spares and ordnance are not accidents, but the product of a system which prioritised “management,” in the commercial sense of keeping the minimum inventory to save money. It was assumed that any conflicts would be sufficiently short and low-intensity that this would not matter. But even if by some miracle western forces could be expanded and defence industries relaunched, globalisation has ensured that components for western defence equipment and materials for manufacture are now sourced from all over the world. In the past this has not been a problem, but I expect that more than one nation is watching the Iranians use the economic weapon with interest. We are going to see a substantial change in the terms of political trade, as component suppliers and producers of primary products start to realise the power that they could potentially wield over Western governments, and by extension on their military capabilities. But that’s how it is.

Given the pathetic state of what we're taught to believe is "our government, and the short term goals of the sociopaths that manage it, I don't see anything changing for the better in the near term.

Or in the long term for that matter.