Americans generally feel safe from warfare. We are surrounded by oceans, bordered by friends, armed with a massive nuclear arsenal, and supported by a defense budget designed to preserve every conceivable advantage. Terrorism remains a threat as we pass the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, but it is hard for most Americans to imagine losing a major war.
Yet our ability to fight the next one is being shaped — and in some cases constrained — by what is happening today in Iran and Ukraine.
Iran presents the more obvious problem. The United States is consuming enormous quantities of sophisticated munitions in a war against a country that has proved difficult to subdue. Some of those weapons cannot quickly be replaced. Every interceptor or missile expended there therefore raises a question extending well beyond Iran: what happens if the United States faces another major conflict before its inventories are rebuilt?
Ukraine presents a different problem.
Iran is consuming the weapons of modern warfare. Ukraine and Russia may be inventing the weapons and tactics of the next one.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently offered a sobering assessment on Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim’s podcast The World. Despite Russia’s enormous losses, Schmidt argues that Russia is making technological advances that could eventually wear down Ukraine. Both sides are learning at extraordinary speed — developing drones that communicate with ground systems, increasingly sophisticated autonomous weapons, new defenses and new ways of overwhelming those defenses.
Ukraine continues to innovate, but Russia has an enormous advantage in size and resources. Ukraine, meanwhile, urgently needs additional Patriot missiles and billions more to sustain its drone programs.
Something larger is happening on those battlefields. Two countries are learning what happens when relatively inexpensive unmanned weapons can be produced in enormous quantities, coordinated electronically and improved almost continuously in response to what the enemy did yesterday.
It is even possible to imagine a strange new version of mutually assured destruction — not nuclear weapons launched by statesmen, but thousands of relatively inexpensive autonomous weapons launched by computers with extraordinary precision.
We should be studying this closely.
Instead, the United States is fighting another war while experiencing remarkable turnover among the people who might be expected to help us understand the next one. Senior military officers have been removed or sidelined, sometimes with little public explanation. President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have devoted considerable attention to cultural questions inside the military, including DEI, while Hegseth has also emphasized the appearance and design of ships.
Leadership matters.
At precisely the moment warfare is changing at extraordinary speed, the United States should be preserving expertise, studying Ukraine’s battlefield innovations and asking uncomfortable questions about whether our doctrines, weapons and industrial capacity are designed for the war that is coming rather than the wars we remember.
Instead, we risk hollowing out some of the institutional knowledge that should be going to school on the next war.
Help for Ukraine is therefore not merely charity or even alliance policy. There is a strategic exchange involved. Ukraine needs weapons and resources from Europe and, ideally, the United States. But Ukraine also possesses something we need: battlefield knowledge acquired under circumstances no American military exercise can reproduce.
The lessons Russia is learning are lessons it could one day use against NATO, against the United States, or even against China. The lessons Ukraine is learning could help us defend against them.
Failing to collaborate fully with Ukraine therefore carries a cost beyond Ukraine itself. We may be missing an extraordinary opportunity to understand how conventional warfare is being transformed while it is happening.
History is filled with armies that prepared brilliantly for the war they had already fought.
The United States still possesses extraordinary military advantages. But Iran is teaching us how quickly those advantages can be consumed, while Ukraine and Russia are demonstrating how quickly warfare itself can change.
The next war will not wait for our stockpiles to recover, our institutions to adjust, or our doctrines to catch up.
Someone is already learning how to fight it.