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「戰爭」、「反戰」、與「和平」-- 開欄文
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瀏覽13,989 ｜回應31｜推薦1 |
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2023年我收到傅大為、盧倩儀、馮建三、和郭力昕等四位教授發起的《我們的反戰聲明》時，就想專闢一欄刊出該聲明，並收集網上以及我自己討論「戰爭」與「反戰」的文章。但是，由於這個題目很大，我一時三刻間寫不出一篇提綱挈領的「開欄文」；所以作罷。後來將該聲明和拙作《「我們的反戰聲明」爭議淺見》分別單獨刊出。
現在想想這其實不是個充分理由。最近讀到一篇介紹雷博教授著作的文章(本欄第三篇)，覺得有寫篇評論的必要(本欄第四篇)；寫作過程中，由於搜查相關資料，又看到史投克教授的大作(本欄下一篇)。我認為它值得介紹，就決定以這三篇文章為基礎而開此欄。
史投克教授的大作不但分析了「全面戰爭」這個「概念」，他借這個分析來強調：使用「明白清晰」的概念在建構理論和政策上非常重要。史投克教授在該文中並簡明的闡釋了韋伯「理想型」概念；軍事學之外，全文在「方法論」上也頗有參考價值。
我一向認為論述中所用詞彙和「概念」需要明白易懂，以及其「所指」應該確定而無岐義；我曾經說過和史投克教授同樣的話：
「如果一個詞彙或概念『無所不指』，則它實際上就會變得『無所指』」。
我不敢說和史投克教授「英雄所見略同」；或許，理性、務實的人在思考邏輯上都是同路人吧。
本文於 修改第 12 次
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「正義戰爭說」的討論 -- Richard Haass
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在很多場合下，「正義戰爭說」淪為「強權」的「羊頭」或遮羞布。我無意推測教宗李奧14強調這個議題的動機；不過，提出它至少有以下兩個正面作用：
1) 聚焦這個理論，藉釐清其意義和應用可以解消與破除它的「羊頭性」。
2) 提升這個理論的曝光度，從道德高度加強民眾對「軍事手段」的憎惡。
Questioning the Just War Doctrine
Richard Haass, 06/19/26
With war becoming more frequent and more lethal to civilians, Pope Leo XIV and the College of Cardinals are wading into the debate over its legitimacy. The best outcome of the “consistory” Leo is convening in in late June would be to authorize an overhaul of the just war doctrine for the modern era—and ask the necessary questions.
NEW YORK—Pope Leo XIV is convening an extraordinary “consistory”—a gathering of the College of Cardinals—in late June at the Vatican. One of the four scheduled sessions will be devoted to the “just war” doctrine.
This emphasis is hardly new. The Catholic Church has sought for nearly two millennia to provide guidance about when war is justified (jus ad bellum) and the right way to fight one (jus in bello). The goal was, and remains, to limit the frequency of warfare and its toll.
Leo has twice spoken on the subject in recent weeks. In Magnifica Humanitas, the encyclical on artificial intelligence that was released last month, the pope questioned the essence of just war theory. “Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated. Humanity possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness.”
Then, in early June, the pope returned to the theme, telling a group of journalists, “The notion of a just war no longer applies. The problem is that just war theory developed in centuries when no one could have imagined the weapons we have today or humanity’s capacity for destruction.”
These comments strongly suggest that Leo is seeking to limit the scope of just war to self-defense, such as the war Ukraine is fighting against Russia. I expect he has been heavily influenced by recent history. The 2003 US-led war against Iraq, Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, elements of Israel’s response in Gaza, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the US-Israeli war against Iran were all wars of choice that would not be considered “just” in design, execution, or both.
To be just, a war must be fought for a worthy cause, judged as likely to succeed, authorized by a legitimate authority, and undertaken only as a last resort. Just wars must be conducted in a manner that uses no more military force than is necessary (the proportionality standard) and respects the safety of noncombatants.
This guidance is meant to influence the thinking of the 1.4 billion Catholics around the world, individuals and leaders alike. But it is also meant to influence policy and policy debates more broadly.
It turns out that determining what should constitute a just war is easier said than done. It is widely agreed that preemptive military intervention against imminent attacks is covered under the definition of self-defense. More controversial are preventive attacks to avert gathering but not yet imminent threats. The fear is that a world where preventive wars were seen as legitimate would become a world of frequent conflict.
But what is to be done when the means of war are being produced or acquired by an enemy, and there can be no certainty of sufficient warning to act before those means are used? Some Americans argued this fear justified the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Many Israelis argued the same in the case of Iran last year and again in recent months.
So, what makes for a worthy cause? And how much risk should a country take in not resorting to force if the penalty for being wrong could mean thousands of its own citizens being killed?
Determining what constitutes a worthy cause can be difficult. At what point does stopping repression of a population (not to mention genocide) justify the proper use of military force? When does inaction become unjust?
Then there is the question of what constitutes a legitimate authority. The United Nations often fails to endorse or condemn wars, because one or more veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council blocks collective action. Russia and China, for example, refuse to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Years earlier, Russia prevented UN approval of military action against Serbia when there was evidence it was committing ethnic cleansing against Kosovar Albanians. Did the fact that NATO blessed the action make it any less legitimate?
Adding to the complexity is the reality that popular approval of a war does not make it legitimate—even when the country’s constitutional practices are followed. A leader calling for war may be acting out of domestic political or personal interest rather than principle.
Much of just war theory is a matter of judgment. I have no doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin expected success when he decided to attack Ukraine, as did US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when they went to war against Iran. Obviously, they were wrong.
But any leader about to initiate a war expects success. And wars are inherently uncertain, which makes this long-standing requirement close to meaningless.
Questions about how force should be used are equally complex. A new question concerns when and how to respond to potentially devastating attacks carried out through non-military means, such as cyberattacks or, in the future, AI-enabled attacks designed to cripple a society. What constitutes proportionality in such cases?
Likewise, just war theory emphasizes not attacking civilians. But what is to be done when countries or non-state actors (such as Hamas in Gaza) hide fighters and weapons in schools or hospitals? Leo has gone on record criticizing attacks on such sites, but to rule them out invites the use of civilian sites as military sanctuaries. This would be untenable, which again raises the question of what practical guidance the church is prepared to offer.
With war becoming more frequent and more lethal to civilians, it is understandable that Leo and the Cardinals are wading into the debate over its legitimacy. They will be frustrated, though, if they rely on the Church’s traditional criteria for useful guidance. The best outcome of the consistory would be to authorize an overhaul of the just war doctrine for the modern era—and to ask the necessary questions.
Richard Haass, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, senior counselor at Centerview Partners, and Distinguished University Scholar at New York University, previously served as Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department (2001-03), and was President George W. Bush's special envoy to Northern Ireland and Coordinator for the Future of Afghanistan. He is the author of The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens (Penguin Press, 2023) and the weekly Substack newsletter Home & Away. He’s ben writing for PS since 2000.
相關閱讀：
* The Intelligence That AI Is Missing, Jun 1, 2026, Anne-Marie Slaughter
* AI Must Not Encroach on Human Dignity, Jun 5, 2026, Michael R. Strain
* Why Is Europe’s Economy Falling Short?, Jun 10, 2026, Simon Johnson
* Where Is China’s Trillion-Dollar Trade Surplus Going?, Jun 9, 2026, Miao Yanliang
* After the Liberal Order, May 19, 2026, Carla Norrlöf
* Is the US Stock Market Too Big?
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《未來戰爭目前已經正在進行》讀後
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該文重點不在：無人機或人工智能有多厲害；而在於強調(請見本欄上一篇)：
1) 無人機或人工智能改變了戰爭的形式和型態。
2) 面對這種改變，國家領導階層必須重新評估和制訂與「軍事」相關政策；以及修正所有跟「軍事」相關的決策邏輯。
3) 面對這種改變，國家領導階層必須使用新的概念和思考方式來處理跟「軍事」相關事務。
附帶提一句，跟一般新聞報導相比較，下文「寫作風格」的程度要高一到兩個層次(1)。不仔細讀可能會有些「霧煞煞」。
附註：
1. 下文原載於《深思》網誌；作者嘎德爾先生為該網誌主編。該網誌名稱的原來意思是：「思考」、「思考對象」等。胡賽爾以它為現象學基本概念之一；做為該哲學學派術語，我會把它翻譯為「意向對象」。從以上簡單說明，我們或許可以多少了解嘎德爾先生的「寫作風格」。
相關報導/評論：
* 本欄2026/06/11、2026/04/29、2026/04/08、2026/03/02等各篇貼文，以及它們所附「參考報導」。
* 此欄相關貼文和所附「參考報導」。
* 此欄2026/02/14貼文。
本文於 修改第 1 次
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未來戰爭目前已經正在進行 -- Nathan Gardels
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The Warfare Of The Future Is Already Here
AI and drones are changing the scope, scale and speed of battle.
Nathan Gardels,, 06/17/26
When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 with a direct assault on Kyiv, the conventional odds were that Russia’s post-Cold War military prowess, replete with a world-class nuclear arsenal, would readily conquer its former Soviet republic and fold it back into the restored empire.
Four years on, the battle not only still rages but it has also changed the nature of warfare as the first conflict to use AI-assisted precision-guided drones. Though pounded regularly by Russia, not least with hypersonic missiles as well as waves of drones, Ukraine has achieved the once unimaginable. It has increasingly brought the war deep into the Russian homeland, most recently hitting St. Petersburg — 1,000 miles away from Kyiv — with a drone strike on an oil refinery and military base supporting Russia’s war effort.
Similarly, the most damage done to the integral infrastructure of the oil-and-gas-rich U.S.-allied Gulf States at the height of the hot war with Iran was inflicted by inexpensive drone swarms launched by the theocratic state.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has moved on from fostering AI development at the tech giant to founding companies that have become key innovators of battlefield drone warfare in defense of Ukraine. In an interview with Noema, he looks at the big picture of the technological shift in how war is waged. He calls the introduction of AI and drones into combat “the largest revolution in military affairs in history.”
From A War Of Platforms To A War Of Systems
As Schmidt sees it, the first thing to understand is that we are shifting from the conventional “war of platforms“ to a “war of systems.”
“The right unit of analysis,” he explains, “isn’t the drone or the missile or the launcher. It’s the integrated architecture that lets a military see, decide, communicate, strike, survive and update faster than your adversary. In the future, the front line will be a new form of the no-man’s land of World War I, as sensors and drones mean that anything that moves can be struck.
“Second, every weapon will be supported by AI in the system I mentioned. Third, and this is the part I think people are slow to appreciate: In future wars, the humans will go in last, not first. Today, the basic order is humans first, with the technology supporting them. In the next war, that principle inverts. You send the robots in first to absorb fire and clear the battlefield.”
I asked Schmidt about the role humans will still play in this future. Will they remain in the loop?
He noted, “In March of this year, 96% of Russian casualties were caused by Ukrainian drone units. The drone operator is now the highest-value target on the battlefield — Ukrainians prize killing a Russian drone operator even more than killing a tank. So the pressure to move the human farther from the battlefield is already very real.”
He continued: “The question then moves into what systems replace the human operator on the battlefield. The future will entail ‘humans on the loop’ of a distributed system, rather than always ‘in the loop’ — supervising, auditing and intervening when something looks wrong, but not necessarily authorizing each individual shot. This is really just the algorithmic form of the delegation down the chain of command that has marked militaries forever.”
One wonders if precision targeting by AI will make war “cleaner,” with less collateral damage, or just invite a broader scope of destruction.
“We are in an era of ‘precision mass’ in warfare,” Schmidt argues. “In conflict, you used to have to choose between mass and accuracy. Either you fired a great deal of artillery inaccurately, or you fired a small number of expensive precision-guided weapons accurately. What has changed in the last few years is that cheap drones, cheap GPS and cheap sensors have upended that trade-off.
“You can now field huge numbers of weapons that each hit exactly what they aim at. The war in Ukraine and against Iran have shown what this means. In Ukraine, FPV [First-Person View] drones in the hands of trained operators have produced minimal collateral damage in the engagements I’ve seen. The dumb war of mass artillery flattening a city block is far worse than a $500 drone going through a single window. This is the strongest case for the era of precision mass.”
AI In Nuclear Command & Control
In an earlier Noema interview with Schmidt, we discussed a 2023 visit he and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made to Beijing to persuade President Xi Jinping to reach an agreement with the U.S. on the role of AI in nuclear strike decisions. So I asked him when we spoke again recently, will the evolving logic of warfare that he has explained apply to nuclear strategy as well?
“Nuclear weapons are the one category where the cost of a mistake can be civilization-ending, and where the case for AI-driven speed is weakest. The whole logic of nuclear stability for 70 years has rested on a small number of human beings, in a small number of minutes, having the ability to question what a system is telling them and judge the steps that should be taken. The danger of taking the human out of the loop is not that the machine malfunctions in some science-fiction sense but that the machine functions exactly as designed, with bad data, and faster than anyone can stop it.”
In short, the only thing worse than a human with their finger on the atomic trigger is an AI quick on the draw based on faulty intelligence.
We’ve now seen how powerful frontier AI models like Anthropic’s Mythos can spot and exploit software vulnerabilities that humans can’t, opening the door to cyberattacks on critical infrastructure by bad actors. Such models could just as easily penetrate nuclear targeting systems and the intelligence they rely on.
Unfortunately, Schmidt agrees. “As AI advances and is incorporated into the intelligence process, it can challenge the longstanding foundations of nuclear deterrence.
“Nuclear strategy has always rested on the assumption of each side having second-strike capabilities. As AI gets better at finding the hidden submarines or mobile launchers, however, that premise disintegrates. Furthermore, the data centers and computer centers that train AI might look like targets in their own right. This is the conversation the United States, China and Russia ought to be having now, in the way the nuclear powers during the Cold War negotiated limits on testing and on certain delivery systems.”
The Wrong Kind Of Weapons For A New Kind of War
The experience of the war in Ukraine is upending the way the American military-industrial complex, and by extension the complexes of other great powers, have gone about procuring the means for warfare. So much in the pipeline of military budgets will be obsolete on the battlefield of the rapidly arriving future.
Schmidt puts it this way: “The arithmetic of warfare is fundamentally changing. The Russians are aiming to produce 1,000 Shahed drones a day to fire against Ukraine, while Lockheed Martin produced 600 Patriot interceptors last year. For all of what AI will do for warfare and the world, that gap has to be filled by investing in our industrial capacity and building the cheaper, abundant systems that have been shown to be so important by the war in Ukraine.
“American military doctrine is still organized around exquisite, expensive platforms designed for a kind of conflict that is no longer the one being fought. A great deal of current military spending is going to systems whose purpose, training pipelines and budgets are built on assumptions Ukraine has already disproven. The institutions have not yet acknowledged that the doctrines and resources no longer match the war they will have to fight.”
The great worry is that the transformation of warfare is happening so rapidly that those with the most extensive arsenals will become the most insecure about the capacity of their rivals to gain the advantage by adapting faster.
War most readily beckons when an imbalance of power, or its perception, arises. Any apparent advantage by others is inevitably regarded as concealing aggressive intentions. That results either in a debilitating arms race or, worse, a war of choice waged out of the fear that it will otherwise be too late.
本文於 修改第 2 次
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個案研究：戰爭對社會的影響 - Lauren Kent
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請參考：
* Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
Russia’s overwhelming manpower advantage against Ukraine is starting to wane
Lauren Kent, CNN, 06/14/26
What would you do with an $80,000 bonus, more than quadruple the amount of an average annual salary? Or with $140,000 in debt relief?
Those are the questions being posed to men in Russia, as the military advertises multi-million-ruble incentives to fight in Ukraine. Ads plastered on roadside billboards and embedded in young men's social media feeds are offering eye-watering sums – more than many people earn in years – alongside promises to become a "hero" or be fast-tracked to Russian citizenship.
And yet military recruitment was down by 20%vin the first quarter of this year compared to 2025, and there are signs it's still faltering, according to Russian economy expert Janis Kluge.
The Kremlin's strategy has long been to outlast Ukraine in an attritional war profiting from its immense population and large military industry that can sustain a slow, grinding campaign. And now, with the Ukraine war in its fifth year, President Vladimir Putin's war coffers are getting a much-needed boost thanks to the Iran war increasing oil prices.
The problem?
"Rubles don't fight wars," said Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). He noted that this is the first war in Russia's history in which the state is paying citizens to fight rather than forcing them – and that is leading to economic strain and manpower issues.
"There are signs that this incentive may no longer be working effectively, and that Russia has begun to lose more troops than it can recruit," Gould-Davies said in a recent report.
Analysts say Moscow is resorting to increasingly desperate measures to shore up its forces, and Putin will likely be forced to make more unpopular decisions this year if he wants to continue his invasion of Ukraine.
After all, if a potential military recruit was unwilling to take a hefty signing bonus last year, it is unclear what would make them change their mind now, especially given reports of poor treatment on the front lines and of soldiers bribing their officers to avoid being sent on certain-death ground missions.
Russia has already sent tens of thousands of former prisoners to the front lines, been reinforced by three separate waves of North Korean soldiers and incentivized immigrants to join its military. The government recently announced another recruitment drive, offering to pay off debts of up to $140,000 for men who sign up and might otherwise face penalties for defaulting.
And the conflict's drain on men of fighting age has had ramifications for the rest of the Russian economy, which is now dealing with a wider labor crisis.
"It's not just struggling to find people to go to the front… they're struggling to find people to employ," Gould-Davies told CNN.
For the defense industry specifically, there are signs that it's already operating at maximum capacity, with factories working around the clock. That means it's difficult for Russia to increase the military output any further, while the demand for factory workers places even more strain on the rest of the economy.
"The whole Russian economy is suffering from the most severe labor shortage in history,." Gould-Davies said.
Nearly 500,000 Russian soldiers have died in the war, according to some Western intelligence reports, and hundreds of thousands more have left the country to avoid being drafted. The resulting labor shortage is driving up wages, another source of inflation in the country.
"Labor is a scarcer input than physical capital or finance. It is also harder to increase," according to Gould-Davies. "With effort, it is possible to build a new factory or raise money. But the state cannot dictate the birth rate."
The labor shortage could compel the Kremlin to recruit more labor from India, North Korea and various African nations to ease pressures on both the civilian and military sectors.
More drastically, it could mean a second forced mobilization of troops, coupled with measures like curtailing the freedom of citizens to leave the country – particularly men of conscription age. That's something Putin has been keen to avoid, after the first "partial mobilization" proved hugely unpopular and caused many Russians to emigrate.
"The Kremlin will soon face a fundamental choice over whether to radically escalate its demands on Russia's economy and society or to scale back its war aims," Gould-Davies predicts.
War heightens economic strain
Some experts, including Maria Snegovaya at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, think the Kremlin can muddle through its recruitment issues by putting more pressure on the regions outside of major cities like Moscow, pushing students to sign military contracts and recruiting more foreign nationals. The fact that the defense sector is approaching maximum capacity also presents difficulties for Putin, but is "not catastrophic," Snegovaya said.
Economically, though, "the strain is becoming increasingly visible," Snegovaya told CNN. "This year in particular we see the economic costs finally imposing difficult tradeoffs on the Kremlin."
She noted that "the fiscal burden of sustaining the war effort" has increased, given that Russia's military personnel and recruitment costs account for tens of billions of dollars each year, amounting to 9.5% of total federal budget and 2% of the country's GDP by some estimates.
Russia is experiencing growth stagnation – even recession by some economists' estimates – as well as rampant business closures and declining consumer confidence, Snegovaya said.
Despite some wage growth, incomes haven't kept pace with persistent inflation. The official annual inflation rate as of June is 5.52%, according to Russian state media TASS. Ordinary Russian households face food prices that are up more than 18% compared to January 2024, sky-high utility bills, and a recent two-percentage-point hike in sales tax. Ukrainian strikes on Russia's critical infrastructure have also led to gasoline shortages in some areas and persistent airport delays.
Even though the overall rate of inflation has slowed again, Snegovaya said consumer sentiment on the issue remains negative.
"These trends could …weaken support for the war, potentially increasing social discontent," Snegovaya said. "However, the regime is boosting its repressive apparatus."
"The Kremlin has tended to double down on its goals rather than scale them back," the analyst warned.
Ukraine outpacing on innovation
Meanwhile, Ukraine's advancements in drone warfare and technology mean its military is inflicting far more casualties on Russia than earlier in the war.
"Ukrainian forces are achieving and out-innovating" on the battlefield, particularly when it comes to their use of tactical drones, according to analyst Kateryna Stepanenko at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
Earlier this year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that his forces had captured a Russian position using only drones and robots for the first time, and had conducted more than 22,000 unmanned ground missions using robots in just the first three months of 2026.
In May, Ukraine had a net territorial gain of nearly 100 square kilometers (39 square miles), making it the second month in a row that Russian forces experienced a net loss, according to Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi.
Russian casualty rates stand at around 30,000 to 35,000 a month, according to Western officials, although estimates vary. Syrskyi has claimed that in May, Ukraine's drone operators killed or wounded more soldiers than Russia could recruit.
And while Ukraine's war tech is improving, experts say the Russian army has become weaker as it sends larger numbers of former prisoners and untrained soldiers to the front.
Moscow's efforts to recruit students for its own expert drone units have been mired in distrust and setbacks, according to Stepanenko, after Russia's Ministry of Defense committed some drone operators to frontline ground assaults.
"That created a really-not-helpful PR campaign for the unmanned systems forces recruitment," Stepanenko said.
CNN's Anna Chernova contributed to this report.
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
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烏克蘭武器研發的能力與效率 - Verity Bowman
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請參考：
* Ukraine's Zelenskiy confirms drone strike on refining facilities in Russia's Tyumen region (06/21；Tyumen region在西伯利亞，距離烏克蘭2,000公里)
* Ukraine is putting weapons stations on ground robots to make 'small tanks' that hunt Russia's infiltration teams (06/19)
* Ukraine strikes Moscow oil refinery amid large-scale drone attack (06/19)
* The end to years of brutal fighting is in sight for some of Ukraine's battle-weary troops (服役4年以上之烏軍將依既定方案秋後退伍；06/18)
* Ukraine Retaliates With Fiery Hit on Moscow Oil Plant As G7 Meets (06/16)
* Ukraine's newest attack drones are delivering the kind of strikes that its HIMARS couldn't for years (HIMARS：海馬士多管火箭系統 ；06/16)
高科技新型武器將是現代/未來戰爭決勝因素之一。而人民的創新力則是決定這一類型武器效用的重大因素。
The Ukrainian weapons boom catching Putin off guard
How a nation under fire ditched defence bureaucracy for ‘if it works, just build it’ lethality
Verity Bowman, 06/09/26
In tiny workshops scattered across Ukraine, a war machine is being built at a pace that has left Nato's most powerful members standing still.
In May alone, Ukraine's ministry of defence certified 175 new weapons systems for operational use, nearly 93 per cent of them designed and built entirely within the country.
Germany, by comparison, certified fewer than 20 new systems in the whole of 2024 – its fastest year on record.
The United States fields between two and five genuinely new platforms per year, with procurement cycles averaging 10 years.
Four years ago, Ukraine was desperately importing whatever its allies would send. Today, it is certifying six new weapons systems every day.
"Put it all together, and you've got a defence procurement ecosystem that is completely unrecognisable compared with anywhere else in Europe," said Keir Giles, an associate fellow of Chatham House's Russia and Eurasia Programme and the author of Who Will Defend Europe.
The question is how a country under sustained bombardment managed to build this in four years.
The answer, according to Mr Giles, begins not with the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022 but in 2014, when Russia first seized Crimea and backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
"It's not from scratch," he said. "Some industries and innovations have obviously been kick-started by the war, but Ukraine had already spent eight years before the full-scale invasion developing these capabilities; there is a deep reservoir of experience, particularly in outsourcing to private industry, that Ukraine has built upon rather than invented."
What the full-scale invasion changed was the speed. Under the pressure of an existential threat, Ukraine stripped out bureaucracy that in other countries causes procurement to take years or decades.
It adopted a "fail fast" principle: if a weapon works, adopt it; if it doesn't, discard it, with far less cost and delay than a Western-style proving process would involve.
It pushed development down to individual battalions, which now update and modify their own equipment in the field.
"Ukraine's defence ecosystem is turbocharged by initiatives like the Brave1 military tech marketplace, where units purchase what they know works well," explained Robert Tollast, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. "Their will for survival and lethality drives efficiency."
The 175 new weapons range from interceptor drones and ground robots to ballistic missiles and armoured vehicles.
Among the newly certified drones, including the Tin, Tur, Mamba, Palii, and D'Artagnan, is the Lupynis-10-TFL-1. 視頻
It was developed by The Fourth Law, a "miltech" start-up founded in 2023 by Yaroslav Azhnyuk, whose previous company made remote-controlled pet cameras.
What makes it remarkable is what "first level of autonomy" means in practice.
For most of its flight, a human operator retains control. But in the final 500 metres, where Russian electronic warfare is most intense and jamming most likely to sever the pilot's connection, the drone's onboard AI takes over entirely, identifying and locking on to its target without human input.
The company says this increases mission success rates by two to five times, at an additional cost of just 10 to 20 per cent.
"In essence, this is an internal weapons market where every manufacturer and every idea has the opportunity to be realised, with the best and most effective designs ultimately remaining," said Dmytro Zhmailo, deputy head of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre.
Another crucial new drone is the Sichen, built for deep strikes at ranges of up to 870 miles, carrying an 88lb warhead.
0906 Sichen long-range strike drone 機型與規格
Its ability to navigate active electronic warfare enables Ukraine to carry out strikes within Russia despite Moscow's campaign of drone interference and hijackings.
Ground robots, including the Gnom, Primar-Killer, Vepr, Plyushch+ and Ratel X, which were all approved in May, are also key.
Most significant is the Ratel X, a low-profile combat robot capable of reconnaissance, mine-laying and casualty evacuation in the line of fire, as well as launching its own fibre-optic FPV attack drones directly from the battlefield.
Ukrainian forces have already captured a Russian position using only robots and UAVs.
Mr Zhmailo said the driving force behind Ukraine's ground robotics push was the emergence of so-called kill zones, which are sections of the front line up to 20km deep under constant fire from both sides, where sending in soldiers had become tantamount to sentencing them to death.
"In certain situations, robotic systems and drones make it possible to keep personnel away from the zone of direct fire contact, reducing the risk of injury or death, and thus minimising the loss of Ukraine's most valuable asset: its people."
The push for autonomy does not stop at the front line.
Ukraine has also quietly built a domestic missile programme from scratch, with the FP-7 ballistic missile with a 200km range already in active service.
The more powerful FP-9, with a reported range of 850km and an 800kg warhead capable of reaching Moscow, is expected to complete testing this summer.
And the FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile, with a range of 3,000km and a 1,150kg warhead, has already struck targets more than 1,500km inside Russia.
"Ukraine had little option but to develop its own alternatives, as we've seen with the long-range strikes into the heart of Russia using technologies that were developed in Ukraine, because the United States did not wish to allow Ukraine to strike into Russia," said Mr Giles.
1908 Flamingo (MP5) cruise missile 機型與規格
While Ukraine relies on smaller factories set up by former civilians, Russia's approach is the opposite: a state-controlled monopoly concentrated in facilities such as Alabuga, producing one weapon at a massive scale with no competition and no incentive to innovate.
It is dangerous in its raw volume, but brittle in its inability to adapt.
Mr Tollast argued that the comparison increasingly favours Ukraine, not just because of its dispersal model but because of its growing two-way pipeline with Western defence firms.
"Initially we learned a vast amount from Ukraine's innovation," he said, "but this is increasingly a two-way pipeline of talent and material."
The West, meanwhile, has been watching and largely failing to draw the right lessons.
"Of course, corners are being cut in Ukraine," said Mr Giles. "But the corners being cut are the ones that make British defence programmes take decades."
Ukraine's domestic defence production capacity has grown from $20bn (£15bn) in 2024 to $35bn (£26.2bn) in 2025, with output forecast to reach $50bn (£37.5bn) this year, a figure that would make it one of the largest defence producers in Europe.
The lesson for Europe, Mr Giles said, is that it should not wait until it faces the same existential pressure to reform its own procurement processes.
"Ukraine needs to win the war. And Europe needs Ukraine, because it has developed all of these technologies and capabilities."
Verity Bowman is The Telegraph’s Foreign and Global Health Security Reporter, covering conflict, human rights abuses, global development and international health issues, with a particular focus on Ukraine. See more
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本文於 修改第 7 次
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從歷史看俄軍潰敗的可能情境 - Brynn Tannehill
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What a Russian Army Collapse Might Look Like
The Ukrainians are trying to break the Russian military—and they just might do it.
Brynn Tannehill, 06/08/26
HEMINGWAY FAMOUSLY OBSERVED in his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises that one goes bankrupt "gradually and then suddenly." The same can be said of armies. Sometimes they're routed in great, decisive actions, like the French in 1940, but often their ability to fight is eroded slowly over time by many factors, so gradually as to be almost imperceptible, before reaching a tipping point where the illusion of strength shatters all at once.
The war in Ukraine—just counting the high-intensity phase of it since the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022—has been going on longer than World War I, and seems likely to surpass World War II in duration. Until this spring, the general consensus was that the war was in a perpetual stalemate of drones, trench warfare, and attrition that would go on, for all intents and purposes, forever. Many of those who subscribed to the theory of perpetual stalemate concluded that the only way for the war to end was for Ukraine to capitulate and cede all the territory it had lost (plus perhaps some more) to the Russians. Yet history teaches that as long as a country has the will to continue to fight, it will find a way to do so until it either loses the will or fighting becomes materially impossible.
For years, casual and expert observers alike assumed that if one of the armies in Ukraine were to collapse—to suddenly lose the wherewithal to fight—it would be the Ukrainians. But now it seems more likely to be the Russians. And that's no accident, as it appears the Ukrainians' theory of victory is not that they will drive the Russians from their land in great, sweeping offensives like those of late 2022 but that they will break the Russian army's back by attacking its logistics, its manpower, and its will to fight.
What if the fate of Ukraine isn't a perpetual attritional stalemate? What causes an army to collapse, and an invading tide to reverse itself? Here are four historical examples that might be instructive today.
The Russian Army in 1917
Russia suffered horrific casualties and numerous defeats during World War I, starting with the battle of Tannenberg in 1914. Russian peasant conscripts were poorly trained and poorly equipped, and the tsarist economy was not sufficiently industrialized to match that of Germany. Russian logistics, particularly railways, were ill equipped to move what troops and matériel they did have where they needed to be in a timely manner and in sufficient quantities.
About a year after the war began, with shocking defeats and even more shocking casualty lists, Tsar Nicholas II took personal command of the army, stocking his command staff with loyalists, cronies, and relatives. He embraced magical thinking about the mystical connection between the tsar and the people and believed that his personal command of the forces would lead to a boost in morale sufficient to ensure victory.
The decision backfired. The war continued to go poorly, the losses continued to mount, and there was no one for the people to blame but the tsar.
Nicholas was unsuited to supreme command during a modern war. Not only did he lack a mastery of industrial manufacturing, wartime economics, logistics, and strategy, but he chose underlings based more on their personal proximity to him and his court than their expertise. When his government was overthrown in a popular revolt in 1917, much of the army deserted.
The interim government that followed the Romanov dynasty was able to amass enough force to mount one last offensive—the so-called Kerensky Offensive in the summer of 1917—but when that failed, Russian soldiers lost all faith and quit fighting en masse.
The German Army in 1918
After Bolshevik Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in December 1917, surrendering huge swaths of land and people to the Germans and all but ending the war in the east, Germany raced somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 troops from the Eastern Front to the Western Front. Here they launched an offensive in hopes of finishing the war before American troops could make it across the Atlantic and augment the French and British military structure. The resulting spring offensive of 1918 was initially a success: German forces pushed close to Paris, roughly equaling their furthest advance of the war—but they outran their logistics and failed to break the French logistics before American forces arrived to help stabilize the lines and eventually push the front lines back toward the pre-war border. In the end, Germany suffered nearly a million irreplaceable casualties while leaving its army exhausted.
Behind the German lines, the economy was in tatters. The allied naval blockade of Germany had forced the introduction of ersatz ("substitute") goods, often of inferior quality, both for industrial inputs and individual consumption: synthetic rubber, coal-tar industrial lubricants, "coffee" made from acorns, "tea" made from catnip, paper instead of cotton, "eggs" made from corn, and so on. When German workers went on strike in early 1918, the high command ordered that strikers immediately be conscripted and sent to the front. That helped ameliorate neither overall morale nor the growing problem of hunger.
Exhausted and demoralized German troops faced hordes of fresh Americans who brought the industrial and agricultural capacity of the United States with them. After four fruitless years of fighting in France, German troops began surrendering at the Battle of Amiens in August 1918, believing that the war was lost, and the quickest way to end it and live was to capitulate.
The Japanese Burma Area Army in 1944
By the standards of World War II, Burma was a backwater, constantly starved of men and matériel. Political infighting between the United States, Great Britain, and Chinese Nationalists under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek left the northern region of Burma a mess that no one wanted responsibility for. The Japanese objective in the theater was to prevent the Allied forces—especially British Indian forces—from invading the Japanese-held territories in Southeast Asia, which they were unprepared to do, while the Allied objective was to prevent the Japanese from invading and conquering India, which they didn't intend to do either. Still, between 1941 and 1944, Japan steadily drove Commonwealth troops back toward the Indian border.
Then, in early 1944, Lt. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi, who believed he was destined to win the decisive campaign of the war, launched what may have been the most ill-considered offensive in history: Operation U-Go. He sent out 90,000 men to conduct a four-month long campaign—but with only twenty days of supplies on hand. He wrongly assumed they could simply live off the land as they advanced. These starving and diseased Japanese troops were decisively defeated at the Battles of Kohima and Imphal, where most of them died in wave after wave of doomed attacks. In the end, only 12,000 of these troops lived to see Japan again: a breathtaking 87 percent casualty rate. The Japanese Burma Area Army never recovered and spent the rest of the war retreating.
The failure of Japan in Burma was caused by poor leadership at all multiple levels: primarily Mutaguchi's arrogance and delusions of world-historical grandeur, but also the Japanese high command's lack of oversight and failure to rein in his foolhardy plans. At an operational level, failure to plan for adequate logistical support doomed U-Go as much as it's overly ambitious premise.
The South Vietnamese Army in 1975
As part of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, the United States withdrew its forces from South Vietnam. In December 1974, North Vietnam began sending troops into South Vietnam preparatory to the 1975 spring offensive. In March 1975, South Vietnamese leadership realized that they could not effectively hold the Central Highlands and ordered a withdrawal to a more defensible line farther south.
The result was a chaotic rout in which both civilians and military personnel clogged a solitary highway running south. Despite pleas from the South Vietnamese government, the United States refused to intervene. North Vietnamese troops retained the support of China and the Soviet Union.
Though South Vietnamese troops rallied somewhat, the capital of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) fell to North Vietnamese troops on April 30, 1975. The mayhem as the city fell produced images of desperate American and Vietnamese civilians boarding helicopters on the roof of the U.S. embassy to escape the onrushing Communist regime. Forty-six years later, a similar scene played out in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The collapse of South Vietnam was primarily due to severe equipment and fuel shortages following heavily slashed U.S. aid, cascading logistical failures, and the fatal blunder of their ill-conceived retreat from the Central Highlands. South Vietnamese political and military leadership suffered from deeply ingrained corruption, and its heavy reliance on American-style warfare became impossible to sustain without American logistics and firepower to back it up. Even the threat of spending years in brutal North Vietnamese re-education camps was not enough to compel South Vietnamese troops to fight to the last man in service of a despised, corrupt, unpopular regime.
LL OF THESE ARMIES STARTED OUT in positions of strength. Tsarist Russia had the largest standing army in Europe in 1917. Germany had numerical superiority and the best designed trench system on the Western Front in early 1918. Japan had more front-line troops in Burma at the end of 1943 than the British, and those troops were battle-hardened and well-trained compared to the Allied troops, who were ill-prepared for jungle warfare. South Vietnamese troops outnumbered their North Vietnamese counterparts four to one on paper, and were fighting to avoid ending up in concentration camps.
But the biggest army does not automatically win. All of these armies fell apart in a matter of months due to some combination of poor leadership, lack of logistic support, exhaustion, corrupt regimes, failed offensives, and broken morale.
None of these factors acts alone. Bad leadership can lead to bad logistics and failed offensives. Corrupt regimes can produce low morale and poor leaders. Lack of logistic support leads to cold, sick, starving, demoralized soldiers, and so on.
The conventional wisdom about the Russo–Ukrainian war has become that it is an attritional stalemate, where the front lines are unlikely to move again without some massive external force. This reading of the situation may be due in part to projection and extrapolation bias. Projection bias leads people to assume that the future will look exactly like today; extrapolation bias leads people to assume that if a trend has been going up (or down), it will continue to do so in a straight line indefinitely.
Russia displays many of the characteristics common to armies that fail. Poor leadership: Putin demands constant advances, while being fed lies by his underlings who are afraid of admitting failure. Corruption is endemic to every aspect of Russian life, and money in the military budget often doesn't end up where it needs to be. Even when it isn't diverted to vanity projects, it often is used in head-scratchingly ineffective ways, like the $50 million Oreshnik ballistic missile used to destroy a parking garage two weeks ago. Russia has also blown up the same McDonald's in Kyiv four times now, and it brings into question the effectiveness of their targeting strategy and munitions allocation.
Troop morale is terrible; commanders constantly extort money from their troops. Russian soldiers are punished with violence, rape, torture, starvation, and occasionally murder, with predictable effects on combat effectiveness. The Russian tactic of the past year of sending in small infiltration teams to constantly probe Ukrainian defenses has resulted in extremely high losses and minimal territorial gains. There is no real hope (or intention of) a combined-arms breakthrough. The Russian spring offensive of 2026 has failed, and those creeping gains have effectively flatlined.
There have been constant reports of troops being shot when they attempt to retreat. Now, despite massive economic incentives to sign a military contract, Russia is struggling to replace their losses. Additionally, Russian soldiers don't seem to be buying into the narrative that they're liberating Ukraine—which may make them wonder whether it's worth fighting in the first place.
Lastly, Russian logistics are suffering. After Russia mostly solved the HIMARS/GMLRS problem with better electronic warfare, their rear areas were generally safe from interdiction. Now, however, Ukrainian FPV drones are striking military transport vehicles 150 kilometers from the front. When the Russians send convoys at night to avoid Ukrainian drones, the Ukrainians simply use their drones to lay mines on the highways. The frequency of these strikes has been growing geometrically since January, and civilian fuel in Crimea is either rationed or gone completely. Russian "milbloggers" are starting to panic about the logistics of the Russian Army in southern and southeast Ukraine.
It is impossible to say if the Russian military will collapse; it has so far confounded all previous predictions that it would. However, many of the conditions for collapse have been in place for a long time, and the most important one (logistics) is now trending in the wrong direction.
It does seem, however, that military collapse is the Ukrainian theory of victory. They have publicly announced that their goal on the front lines is not to gain territory but to kill more soldiers than the Russians can replace, which is an attack against both Russian morale and the labor-starved Russian economy. Ukrainian long-range strikes against Russian energy infrastructure similarly attacks two of the factors that keep armies in the field: logistics and productive domestic economies. The more spectacular Ukrainian strikes—such as the recent strikes in the Moscow region and in St. Petersburg just as the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum was opening, are designed to weaken Russian morale and raise questions in the minds of Russian leaders, civilians, and soldiers about what the "special military operation" is really accomplishing. The Ukrainian assassination campaign against Russian general officers is similarly designed to erode morale, and to degrade leadership—though as always, the best guarantor of poor Russian leadership is Vladimir Putin's health.
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中國從伊朗戰爭長到的知識 -- Miles Bryan/Noel King
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請參考：
* Iran says US has responded to its latest peace proposal
What China is learning from the US war in Iran
Miles Bryan/Noel King, 05/01/26
Two months into the US-Iran war, the fighting has hardened into a standoff, with no end in sight. Both countries claim to have the upper hand, but there is only one clear winner so far — and it isn’t either of them.
“China’s watching this war very closely,” James Palmer, deputy editor of Foreign Policy and author of its China Brief newsletter, tells Today, Explained co-host Noel King.
Palmer talked with Noel about the lessons China is drawing from America’s military performance in Iran, why Trump’s treatment of US allies could prove costly in any future conflict in the Pacific, and why — despite all of that — China is still pushing hard for a ceasefire.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What does China have to do with America’s war in Iran?
China’s watching this war very closely. China’s always been interested in how America fights, going back to the first Gulf War, which caused Beijing to really rethink its military, rethink how far ahead the US was.
One of the things they’ve noticed this time is just how fast America’s burning through its munitions. They’re also looking at where does America go in terms of allies and who will stand [with] America when America goes into a really stupid war? China wants to know how this will affect any potential conflict with the US in the Asia Pacific in the future.
What is the relationship between Iran and China? They’re communicating. Are they friendly?
Yes, they’re very friendly. If you go to China, you’ll run into Iranians a surprising amount because there are a ton of exchange programs — including, for instance, pilot training. There’s an Iranian medical school at the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine for some reason.
It’s very odd because China is a communist state, and the Iranian regime has regularly murdered communists in the past. And equally, at least in theory, Iran is all about protecting Muslims. And China is the world’s greatest persecutor of Muslims: millions of Uyghurs arrested, imprisoned, put in camps, forced into labor.
But it’s a very practical relationship. They see themselves as having shared interests, both commercial and geopolitical. They see themselves as both opposed to the United States, and in particular, I think China sees Iran as a fellow victim of the current world order.
China is watching this war play out very carefully because it is trying to learn a couple of things, including what the US military can and presumably can’t do. What is it learning about our military strengths and weaknesses?
The main thing they’re looking at is really the question of production chains and the ability to replenish munitions, which seems to be even weaker than people thought. People have been warning about this for many years, but one of the American catastrophes of late has been to take these warnings and write a million think tank pieces about them and not actually do anything to fix it.
That’s in contrast with China. China had a bunch of strategic weaknesses in the 2010s, which it then went and fixed — domesticated its own supply chains, looked for new suppliers, all this kind of thing. And while we haven’t seen it stress-tested yet, it seems to be much more potentially capable of mass munitions production than the American system is. So while America has better weapons, China may have the ability to get those weapons out there more.
And you think of something like the Germans versus the Americans in World War II. The German tanks, the German planes were in many ways superior, but the Americans were putting 20 tanks on the battlefield for every German one. Industry is a force all its own. But even the quality of American weapons, I think, is coming into some doubt as a result of the Iran war because we’re seeing that the Iranians with their dug-in positions, with their preparation, even with their air defense being completely overwhelmed by American power, they’ve got surprising survivability: Much more, I think, has survived that American and the Israeli onslaught than first anticipated.
That’s partially because Iran’s a big place. It’s got a lot of places you can really dig stuff in. But it may also be that America has been overestimating its own capabilities even against a country that isn’t a peer opponent.
I hear you saying that China is paying attention to what the US can do militarily because it is thinking, what would we do? What would China do if the US attacks it in the way it attacked Iran?
I think it’s double-sided because on the one hand, China can imagine itself as being the victim of air power, the victim of this overwhelming force. And so it’s asking itself, could the Americans kill our leadership? And the answer to that is probably not, because Chinese air defense is a lot better than Iranian.
But it’s also looking at it and saying, well, what if we want to take Taiwan? What if we want to use our power and project force across the [Taiwan] Strait? Like the Iranians, the Taiwanese have had plenty of time to prepare. They dug in, they know who their opponent is, and they’re expecting it.
We’ve seen also that there’s this ability to threaten your [neighbors], even if you are being beaten by a stronger opponent. For all of America’s power, for all of America’s force, it’s not able to force the reopening of the Strait [of Hormuz]. It’s not able to keep those waters safe. And so China’s thinking, well, what will the Taiwanese be able to do in the [Taiwan] Strait? If we’re sending across a million men, how many of those ships are going to be safe? And maybe it’s less than they thought.
So China imagines itself as the US and it imagines itself as Iran. In that case, it’s thinking of Taiwan and what China might do to Taiwan. Let me ask you where the US plugs back into that, because I’ve been reading that the US has moved an aircraft carrier and expensive missile defense systems out of Asia and into the Middle East to kind of cope with Iran. Are we now at this huge disadvantage if China is to go after Taiwan?
Not really, because in any Taiwan scenario, we get tons of warning.
It requires amassing matériel, men, ships in a way that’s going to be extremely obvious. And there’s perhaps no part of the planet more closely watched than the Taiwan Strait. Aircraft carriers, mobile assets — you’re going to have probably enough warning to move them back. And we’ve got a ton of them in the Asia Pacific anyway, it is festooned with American bases.
What moving stuff out of the Asia Pacific is costing America is mostly political credibility. And the big example of this is THAAD, which is this very expensive, very technologically advanced missile defense system that we put in South Korea in the 2010s. China was really opposed to the deployment, and it punished South Korea very harshly for allowing the deployment of THAAD in South Korean territory.
Most notably, there was a complete boycott of the South Korean supermarket chain Lotte, which was trying to break into China and was basically driven out of China, as were a bunch of other South Korean businesses. South Korean pop stars were banned from entering the country for a while. They really paid a price.
Now they see the Americans treating them like shit in the way that Trump has treated all of America’s allies like shit. The US military says it hasn’t moved every part of that [system] out and that it’s just moved some components, but the damage has been done anyway. The South Korean press has widely reported it as THAAD itself being moved out and the reputational cost is already there.
Okay, you said it, not me: President Trump treats America’s allies like shit. And that raises some interesting questions here about diplomacy. President Trump has not been able to get America’s usual allies on board with the war, despite various pleas and whining and whatnot. What does it mean for China that America’s allies are like, Uh-uh guys, not this time?
America’s entire power projection in the Asia Pacific is very dependent on allies. Any conflict in the Taiwan Strait, you’re running a supply chain all the way up from Australia or from Japan. You’re dependent not only upon the big countries or relatively big countries, you are also dependent upon these little island states on the way, which have traditionally looked to America as a security patron.
All of this is dependent on goodwill and that goodwill is falling apart. As Trump has made the US increasingly a pariah state, it’s going to affect our readiness.
All right, so I think someone might be hearing us talk and thinking this war in Iran has been entirely upside for China. Is that the case?
Not really. It’s more of a lose-lose scenario. They’re getting the best they can out of it, but the closure of the Strait [of Hormuz] is still a big problem for them. And they’ve been working hard to try and get a ceasefire.
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「當代戰爭」形同經濟黑洞 -- Jason Ma
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請參考：
A $300,000 Ukrainian Drone Just Crippled a $200 Million Russian Tanker — It's Now a Drifting Time Bomb Headed Toward Libya's Coast
請參照本欄2026/03/31和2026/03/29兩篇貼文。
The ‘obscene economics’ of modern warfare show how the race to military supremacy is transforming, while U.S. rearmament relies on China
Jason Ma, 04/27/26
The Iran conflict has confirmed a transformation in the economics of warfare toward cheap, mass-produced weapons, forcing a wholesale rethinking of military procurement, according to a recent report.
While the U.S. and Israel have decimated Iran’s military, the Islamic republic still has enough combat power to inflict meaningful economic and physical damage, said Noah Ramos, chief innovation strategist at Alpine Macro, in a note earlier this month.
In particular, the regime has leveraged its Shahed drones, which cost only $20,000-50,000, forcing the U.S. and its allies to shoot them down with $4 million PAC-3 missiles or THAAD interceptors that cost $12 million-$15 million.
“Even with interception rates above 90%, the value of asset protection is diminished given the obscene economics,” Ramos wrote. “This imbalance has haunted Western military planners since the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
He explained that such lopsided attrition is the opposite of the West’s model of precision lethality and is a deliberate part of Iran’s strategy: mass losses are a feature not a flaw, because even the most advanced defenses can be overwhelmed with sufficient volume.
The cost asymmetry is worsened by severe production and supply-chain constraints. For example, no new THAAD interceptors have been delivered since August 2023, and the next batch is due in April 2027.
At the same time, the U.S. has rapidly drawn down stockpiles of its most expensive munitions during the Iran war. The Center for Strategic and International Studies put the tally at 45% of its Precision Strike Missiles, 50% of its THAAD interceptors, and almost half of its of PAC-3 missiles. CSIS estimated it would take one to four years to restock seven major munitions to prewar levels.
“The diminished munitions stockpiles have created a near-term risk,” the report said. “A war against a capable peer competitor like China will consume munitions at greater rates than in this war. Prewar inventories were already insufficient; the levels today will constrain U.S. operations should a future conflict arise.”
In fact, Alpine Macro’s Ramos pointed out that many critical components for a variety of U.S. munitions are deeply exposed to Chinese supply chains.
That includes the stealthy Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, the Tomahawk cruise missile, the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile, and the Joint Direct Attack Munition guidance kit.
The U.S. military’s reliance on Chinese suppliers “poses a grave threat given geopolitical fragmentation or a conflict over Taiwan,” Ramos warned.
Despite the emergence of mass-produced munitions, Ramos still expects legacy platforms like fighter jets, strategic bombers, precision missiles, and warships to continue enabling force projection.
Rather than displacing so-called “exquisite” weapons, the more expendable systems will sit along side them and even amplify them, he predicted.
Cheaper weapons can exploit specific vulnerabilities, prevent expensive assets from being depleted, and carry out riskier missions unsuitable for traditional platforms, Ramos suggested.
“Going forward, supremacy will belong to the force that deploys the right tool for the right task at the right cost, not the one that defaults to multi-billion dollar platforms for every engagement,” he added. “The Iran conflict is proving this in real time.”
The Pentagon also understands the new economics of warfare that bring to mind a quote attributed to Joseph Stalin during World War II as he weighed the Red Army’s numerical advantage against Nazi Germany’s superior weapons: “quantity has a quality all its own.”
Efforts at cheaper, mass-produced platforms are underway while upstart defense contractors like Anduril are developing manufacturing innovations to enable hyperscale production.
The U.S. has even incorporated a copycat version of the Shahed drone, using the American version against Iran during the war. Emil Michael, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, said at an industry conference last month that the Pentagon plans to go big with the LUCAS drone.
“After only a few years, we continue to refine that and make that something that we can mass produce at scale,” he said. “They’ve worked very well so far and it’s proven out to be a useful tool in the arsenal.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
相關閱讀
* Iran's top diplomat briefly returns to Pakistan but Trump says the sides can talk by phone
* Major Ally Swipes at ‘Humiliated’ Trump’s Woeful War Strategy
* Hormuz crisis spurs $24B Iraq trade corridor as Gulf routes shift
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改變戰爭方式的10項科學突破 —TIMES OF INDIA
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請至原網頁觀看相關照片或示意圖。「無人機」和「人工智能」也是時候上榜了。
10 scientific breakthroughs that rewrote the rules of war
TOI Science Desk, TIMESOFINDIA.COM, 04/15/26
The history of warfare has typically been depicted as the result of the combined efforts of accomplished generals and well-thought-out strategies, however it is often science that has provided the ‘force multiplier’ that could turn a (previously) successful general into a (newly) unsuccessful one and will change the rules of engagement, so that in an instant, what was once the effective means of war become outdated. Through a series of ten major advancements, ranging from the incredible weaponry powered by the ‘alchemy’ or ‘magical fire’ of Greek Fire to the new ability to navigate precisely via satellites. These technological leaps fundamentally redefine the battlefield, ensuring that tactical superiority remains inextricably linked to the relentless, often volatile progression of human scientific and engineering ingenuity.
the invention of gunpowder
Gunpowder was the result of an accidental discovery by Chinese alchemists working with Taoist principles. Gunpowder switched the basis for warfare from mechanical, on the use of bows and catapults to chemical, on the use of propulsion; when it was introduced into Europe, it made castles and plate armour used by knights no longer a viable means for holding or controlling land, thus concentrating power into the hands of those states that could afford to buy cannons and artillery.
Greek Fire in Byzantine Defense
Greek Fire was an advanced form of chemical warfare, which was most likely made from a mixture of petroleum and other materials that continued to burn on water. Developed in the seventh century, Greek Fire provided the Byzantine Empire with a significant naval advantage, enabling it to defend against the massive siege by the Arabs during the sieges of Constantinople and maintain its control of the Mediterranean for centuries.
The Development of Bronze Weapons
The transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age brought about advancements in weaponry with the introduction of weapons made of bronze (copper and tin) being stronger, longer-lasting, and more easily sharpened than weapons made of stone. The creation of swords and armour through the advancements in metallurgy led to the emergence of the organised professional infantry of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Printing Press and Military Communication
Gutenberg press changed the way armies operated, through the production of large quantities of standardized maps, manuals for drill procedures and, various tactical doctrine; this enabled armies with multiple division commanders in a country to all function under one set of command and operate in a way that mirrored the methods used by other divisions in the field, which was the basis for the Military Revolution.
Satellites and GPS Technology
The GPS (Global Positioning System) uses multiple satellites to determine a location, along with atomic clocks that give very precise measurements of time. This system was originally designed for military use. Precision-guided munitions will allow for surgical strikes with little chance of collateral damage and will provide ground troops with superior situational awareness.
The Atomic Bomb
Applying theoretical nuclear physics to build a bomb, the Manhattan Project made use of fission or splitting the atom, to create a weapon that would create an incredible amount of destruction when dropped on Japan. Because of the scale of the destruction at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ‘Total War,’ a concept that resulted from this type of destruction, was introduced. Because of this new concept of 'Total War,' military doctrine shifted from ‘active combat’ to ‘nuclear deterrence' and 'Mutually Assured Destruction.'
Radar Technology in World War II
Radar, or radio detection and ranging, is a system that uses electromagnetic energy to provide visibility to the user in situations where visibility would otherwise not be possible (such as in darkness or in a rainstorm). During World War II, the Chain Home radar network allowed the Royal Air Force (RAF) to conserve scarce resources by providing the RAF with the ability to detect German bombers before they reached Great Britain. This enabled the RAF to significantly alter its air defence strategies.
Chemical Warfare in World War I
The industrial development of chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas was the first time that the periodic table was used as a weapon of mass destruction. Chemical warfare killed many men, but, due to the psychological terror created by chemical weapons and the rapid scientific innovation required to protect soldiers from chemical weapons (gas masks) as well as the possibility of being exposed to chemical weapons in the future, history will reflect that the introduction of chemical warfare had a profound impact on the manner in which warfare occurred after World War I.
Machine Guns in World War I
Another major invention that changed warfare was the recoil-operated machine gun created by Hiram Maxim. This weapon allowed soldiers to shoot bullets and fire bullets with energy, causing the cartridge to be fired and thus allowing for the firing of another round into the weapon. The development of this weapon created a zone of death that supported defensive positions and helped perpetuate the horrible stalemate of trench warfare and the decline of cavalry as a viable offensive fighting force.
The Development of Rifled Barrels
Rifles work by spinning a projectile and providing a greater range of accuracy. Rifles also altered military tactics in the 19th century, whereby soldiers stopped fighting using bayonets and instead began shooting at each other from hundreds of feet away.
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教宗李奧重申反戰與呼籲和平 - Tom McArthur
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給他按個「讚」！另請參考：此欄2026/04/16貼文。
Pope criticises 'tyrants' who spend billions on wars after Trump spat
Tom McArthur, 04/16/26
What Trump and Pope Leo have said about each other 請至原網頁觀看視頻
Pope Leo has criticised leaders who spend billions on wars and said the world was "being ravaged by a handful of tyrants" in unusually forceful comments during a visit to Cameroon.
The pontiff blasted those he said had manipulated "the very name of God" for their own gain, while touring a region ravaged by a deadly insurgency.
The remarks come just days after a high-profile spat with US President Donald Trump, who posted a lengthy attack on the Pope, a vocal critic of the US-Israeli military operation in Iran.
The Pope had voiced his concern about Trump's threat that "a whole civilisation will die" if Iran did not agree to US demands to end the war and open the Strait of Hormuz.
Leo, who last year became the first US-born Pope, has previously also questioned the Trump administration's approach to immigration.
"Leo should get his act together as Pope," Trump wrote in a Truth Social post at the time.
The Pope told reporters at the start of his Africa tour that he did not want to get into a debate with Trump but would continue to promote peace.
Speaking in Cameroon, the Pope criticised leaders who "turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing and devastation, yet the resources needed for healing, education and restoration are nowhere to be found".
"The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet often a lifetime is not enough to rebuild," he said on Thursday.
The Pope also condemned "an endless cycle of destabilisation and death" in a "bloodstained" region of Cameroon that has been gripped by insurgency for nearly a decade.
"Those who rob your land of its resources generally invest much of the profit in weapons, thus perpetuating an endless cycle of destabilisation and death," he told those gathered at a cathedral in the north-western city of Bamenda - the centre of the violence that has left at least 6,000 people dead and displaced many more.
"Peace is not something we must invent: it is something we must embrace by accepting our neighbour as a brother and as our sister," the Pope said.
Separatist insurgents in Cameroon's two Anglophone regions have been fighting the predominantly Francophone government since 2017.
Following Leo's address, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, said that she stood with the Pope in his "courageous call for a kingdom of peace".
The war in Iran has increasingly placed the Pope and the Trump administration at odds.
Soon after the first US and Israeli attacks on Iran, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth recited a highly controversial prayer at a Pentagon worship service that talked of "overwhelming violence" and "justice executed swiftly and without remorse".
Then, during a Palm Sunday Mass in St Peter's Square, the Pope said the conflict between Iran, Israel and the US was "atrocious" and that Jesus could not be used to justify war.
"This is our God: Jesus, king of peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war," he told tens of thousands of worshippers gathered in Vatican City.
"He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them."
The pontiff also quoted the Bible passage Isaiah 1:15: "Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood."
Earlier this week, Trump launched a scathing attack on the Pope on social media, in which he described the leader of the Catholic Church as "WEAK on Crime and terrible for Foreign Policy" while portraying himself as a Jesus-like figure.
He later doubled-down on his criticism and refused to apologise – but deleted the AI-generated image of himself.
Asked about the US president's remarks as he arrived in Algiers, the Pope said he had "no fear" of the Trump administration and that he would continue to speak out against war.
The Catholic leader's wide-ranging Africa tour will include stops in 11 cities across four countries. It is his second major foreign visit since being elected to the papacy last year, and reflects the importance of Catholicism in Africa.
More than a fifth of the world's Catholics - some 288 million people - live in Africa, according to figures from 2024.
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