As El Niño risk returns, Panama is trying to secure the canal’s future. But the fight over the Rio Indio reservoir shows that global trade resilience may come at a local human cost.
The US-Iran memorandum may ease immediate pressure, but renewed uncertainty around the Strait of Hormuz and Israel-Hezbollah exchanges shows that resilience, not normalisation, is now the central issue.
Modern warfare is still too often described through the symbols of an earlier era. Public and policy debate alike remains drawn to carriers, stealth aircraft, long-range missiles, and the costly markers of great-power status. Those capabilities remain important, and in some theatres they remain indispensable. Yet they no longer define the character of war on their own. Recent conflicts have exposed a deeper shift in the way force is generated, applied, and sustained. Contemporary war is increasingly shaped not only by technological sophistication, but by persistence, adaptation, resilience, industrial depth, and the ability to impose disproportionate costs through systems that are often far cheaper than those used to defend against them.¹
This is not an argument against advanced military power. It is an argument against an outdated understanding of how advanced military power functions. The decisive issue is no longer simply who possesses the most sophisticated platforms at the highest level of performance. It is who can convert military capability into durable strategic effect across a battlespace that is wider, denser, more transparent, and more economically entangled than before. Prestige still matters. Peak capability still matters. But neither is sufficient if a force cannot sustain operations, replenish losses, protect infrastructure, preserve logistics, and continue functioning under repeated disruption. Modern war punishes fragility more quickly than older prestige-based frameworks tend to admit.²
The Cost-Exchange Revolution
The most important shift is in the relationship between cost and effect. For much of the modern period, states with pronounced technological superiority assumed that advantage would translate into operational dominance. That assumption has not disappeared, but it has become less secure. Relatively cheap systems, especially when deployed in quantity and tied into a broader architecture of surveillance, targeting, and disruption, can now generate strategically meaningful outcomes without matching an opponent symmetrically. Drones, loitering munitions, missile salvos, electronic warfare, cyber disruption, and maritime denial tools all illustrate the same principle. They impose not only physical damage but recurring burden. They force repeated defensive responses, consume high-value interceptors and specialist assets, stretch manpower and readiness, and raise the cost of maintaining continuity over time. In this environment, war becomes as much a contest over cost-exchange ratios and endurance as over the destructive quality of any single platform.³
That logic matters because it changes what military relevance looks like. A state or organised armed actor no longer needs to replicate a stronger opponent’s force structure in order to create serious pressure. It only needs enough capability to keep the stronger side defending expensively and continuously. Once that threshold is crossed, the battlefield stops rewarding prestige alone. It begins rewarding friction, repetition, and sustainability. A campaign does not need to collapse an enemy’s warfighting capacity outright in order to succeed strategically. It may instead erode readiness, shake confidence, divert resources, increase insurance and operating costs, and degrade political freedom of action over time.⁴
Ukraine and the Return of Punitive Attrition
Ukraine has demonstrated this with particular clarity. What stands out there is not merely the widespread use of drones, but the cumulative transformation of the battlefield through dense sensing, rapid targeting, first-person-view systems, one-way attack drones, and relentless contestation of the electromagnetic spectrum. The result is a more crowded and more punitive battlespace in which concealment is harder to preserve, manoeuvre is more exposed, and tactical mistakes are more rapidly punished. The effect is not to make conventional power irrelevant. Armour, artillery, air defence, and long-range strike remain essential. But they now operate in an environment in which visibility is persistent and adaptation cycles are compressed. A military built around a relatively small number of exquisite systems may still be dangerous, yet it becomes increasingly vulnerable if it cannot scale lower-cost capabilities, replace losses quickly, and modify doctrine in real time. Quantity has returned to war, but not in its older industrial form alone. It now works through the fusion of software, sensors, remote operations, and distributed attrition.⁵
This is one reason modern warfare looks less deferential to hierarchy than it once did. The battlefield no longer automatically favours the side with the most impressive inventory list. It favours the side that can learn faster, endure longer, and absorb the realities of a continuously observed and continuously contested environment. That is a more demanding standard than prestige language usually allows. It also helps explain why conventional superiority, though still important, now yields less certainty than it did in older models of conflict.⁶
The Gulf and the Logic of Continuous Burden
A similar pattern is visible in the Gulf, where recent conflict has shown that coercive effect no longer depends on achieving a dramatic battlefield breakthrough. Repeated lower-cost attacks can produce strategic pressure through disruption, uncertainty, and cumulative burden rather than decisive military collapse. The significance of this lies in what it reveals about contemporary power. A defender is no longer merely trying to defeat a single raid or repel one operational thrust. It is trying to preserve critical infrastructure, reassure markets and populations, maintain military readiness, and prevent the steady erosion of confidence and continuity under recurring stress. The defence problem is therefore systemic rather than episodic. Modern warfare increasingly rewards actors that can sustain disruption and widen the defender’s burden over time, even when they cannot dominate conventionally in a direct contest.⁷
This wider burden becomes especially clear in the defence of infrastructure. Contemporary conflict reaches well beyond front lines and immediate force-on-force engagements. Energy facilities, ports, logistics hubs, communications backbones, cloud architecture, transport corridors, and data centres now sit much closer to the centre of military competition than older doctrine often assumed. The strategic relevance of this is obvious. Modern states and modern militaries depend on highly interconnected systems. The more advanced and integrated those systems become, the more they present attractive targets for coercion. War has therefore expanded into the infrastructure that allows societies to function and military operations to remain sustainable. Dependence itself becomes a form of vulnerability.⁸
Why “Superpower” Explains Less
That is one reason why older language about “superpowers” explains less than it once did. Great powers still matter enormously. Naval power still matters. Air superiority still matters. Industrial depth still matters. But the ability to fight effectively in modern war no longer belongs exclusively to states that fit the older image of a singular superpower. Too many recent and past conflicts have demonstrated otherwise. A state does not need a carrier fleet or globally dominant air force in order to impose meaningful strategic costs. It needs enough surveillance, enough precision or pseudo-precision, enough resilience, enough production, and enough tolerance for attrition and disruption. It needs an ability to exploit the opponent’s dependence on continuity and to generate pressure at points where prestige platforms alone cannot easily solve the problem. Conversely, a formally superior military can still find itself constrained if stockpiles are thin, production is slow, logistics are overburdened, or obligations across multiple theatres begin to compete. Modern warfare is therefore less deferential to status than the rhetoric surrounding it often suggests.⁹
This distinction between visible power and usable power now matters more than before. Advanced militaries still possess extraordinary destructive capability, but the strategic question is increasingly whether that capability can be sustained, replenished, distributed, and translated into durable effect. The issue is no longer simply what a state can field at maximum intensity. It is what it can maintain under prolonged pressure while also supporting allies and preserving wider commitments. That is why industrial capacity, munitions production, repair infrastructure, sealift resilience, workforce depth, and supply-chain robustness now sit much closer to the centre of military power than prestige narratives are willing to admit. The visible symbols of power remain important, but the foundations beneath them matter more in a prolonged contest than many states had grown accustomed to believing.¹⁰
Sea Power, Friction, and the Return of the Mine
The maritime domain offers one of the clearest illustrations of this wider reality. Sea power is still too often reduced to fleets and hull counts, yet maritime effectiveness rests on a broader ecology of shipbuilding, repair, logistics, merchant shipping, mariner availability, infrastructure, and the capacity to keep trade moving under stress. This matters because maritime competition is no longer only about fleet engagements or symbolic presence. It is also about insurance, chokepoints, repair cycles, cargo continuity, escort burdens, and denial. A state may possess formidable naval assets and still struggle if the surrounding commercial and industrial system needed to sustain maritime competition is weak or overextended. In a crisis, the ability to preserve movement, restore damaged capacity, and manage commercial disruption can become as consequential as the ability to project combat power at sea.¹¹
Mine warfare captures this point especially well. Sea mines are old weapons, but their continuing relevance is precisely what makes them analytically valuable. Modern warfare is not simply a story of advanced systems displacing older ones. It is a hybrid environment in which comparatively simple and inexpensive tools can still generate disproportionate strategic effects when used intelligently. Mining can slow trade, unsettle insurers, alter routing decisions, complicate naval planning, and tie down highly sophisticated assets in slow, labour-intensive clearance operations. A relatively cheap denial weapon can therefore impose delay, uncertainty, and cost on a vastly more expensive system. This is not an anomaly within modern war. It is one of its clearest expressions. Strategic effect increasingly lies in the ability to create friction across an opponent’s wider system, not merely in the destruction of platforms on the battlefield.¹²
From Ukraine’s Wartime Lessons to Gulf Adaptation
One of the clearest signs that modern warfare is reshaping Gulf defence thinking is the emerging relevance of Ukrainian wartime experience to GCC security planning. Ukraine’s value lies not simply in the fact that it manufactures drones. It lies in the fact that it has spent years defending cities, infrastructure, military facilities, and wider national systems against sustained missile and drone attack under real combat conditions. That experience has direct value for Gulf states confronting a threat environment shaped by Iranian UAVs, cruise missiles, and the wider problem of cost-imposition through repeated lower-cost attack. The attraction is practical rather than abstract: layered defence, electronic-warfare integration, critical-infrastructure protection, lower-cost interception, rapid repair and recovery, and a culture of adaptation forged under constant pressure.¹³
That relevance is no longer theoretical. In March 2026, Ukraine concluded or advanced defence-cooperation arrangements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, while Ukrainian officials stated that experts had already been sent to Gulf states to share experience in countering drones and missiles and in protecting critical infrastructure. Ukrainian state reporting also presented this cooperation not as one-off assistance, but as a basis for technological partnerships, joint projects, and longer-term industrial collaboration. One of the most battle-tested laboratories of modern drone defence is now engaging directly with Gulf states that face a parallel threat environment.¹⁴
For the GCC, the value of such cooperation lies in adding a lower-cost, more adaptive layer beneath existing high-end architectures. It does not imply replacing Patriot, THAAD, or other advanced systems. It implies making them more sustainable by reducing the extent to which they alone bear the burden of countering mass lower-cost threats. The core lesson from Ukraine is not that old air defence has become irrelevant, but that it is too expensive and too finite to function effectively as the only answer to persistent drone and missile pressure.¹⁵
The UAE, Layered Defence, and the Push for Greater Sovereign Capacity
The UAE is not approaching the present threat environment from a standing start. Emirati and regional reporting in March 2026 described the country’s response to Iranian missile and UAV attacks as the successful use of a substantial layered air-defence architecture, while a contemporaneous regional analysis characterised the Emirati network as a six-layer structure designed to provide multiple interception opportunities across the threat envelope. In that sense, the UAE already operates a significant defensive architecture that has been tested under real pressure.¹⁶
The more important strategic point, however, is that the existence of a functioning shield does not remove the pressure to deepen local capacity. On the contrary, repeated attacks increase the incentive to make that shield more sustainable, more adaptable, and less dependent on expensive upper-tier interception alone. A layered architecture can perform effectively and still face enduring questions about replenishment, integration, local industrial participation, and the long-term affordability of defending against repeated lower-cost attacks. In the current strategic environment, operational success and industrial adaptation are not alternatives. They are complementary requirements.¹⁷
This is where the UAE’s defence-industrial trajectory matters. Through EDGE and its subsidiaries, Abu Dhabi is not merely buying protection; it is trying to expand its ability to develop, integrate, and industrialise more of the relevant building blocks at home. EDGE’s public portfolio points in that direction across several layers of the problem, including the SKYKNIGHT ground-based missile system for inner-layer air defence, the ALLAG-E low-altitude counter-drone interceptor, and SHADOW-3, which EDGE describes as a dual-mission portable VTOL drone able to function as either a counter-measure drone or a guided strike munition.¹⁸
The safer and stronger argument, therefore, is not that the UAE must build a layered shield from scratch. It already has one. The stronger argument is that the UAE is seeking to deepen sovereign capacity within and around that shield by expanding local competence in interceptors, counter-UAS systems, electronic warfare, integration, and other enabling capabilities. This is a more accurate reflection of the country’s current position and of the strategic logic now shaping defence adaptation in the Gulf.¹⁹
In that context, Ukrainian wartime experience and Emirati industrial ambition are potentially complementary. Ukraine offers combat-tested knowledge in defending against mass aerial attack and in adapting quickly to new threats. The UAE offers capital, integration pathways, industrial ambition, and a growing domestic base through which elements of those lessons can be absorbed and localised. The strategic opportunity lies not in copying Ukraine, but in combining Ukrainian wartime lessons with Emirati efforts to deepen local capacity around layered defence, counter-UAS operations, electronic warfare, and infrastructure protection. If pursued seriously, that would amount to something more important than procurement. It would represent the localisation of modern warfare lessons into a Gulf defence-industrial framework tailored to the region’s own infrastructure-heavy and economically exposed operating environment.²⁰
The System, Not the Symbol
The same logic helps explain the wider rise of uninhabited systems. Their importance lies not only in their strike role, but in their integration into surveillance, deterrence, and the broader architecture of modern military competition. Persistent ISR changes how states watch, signal, and prepare for war. It shortens the warning-to-engagement cycle, increases the exposure of forces in motion, and reinforces alliance structures by allowing information to be shared more quickly and widely. At the same time, the spread of armed and one-way attack systems allows cheaper platforms to perform functions once associated with far more expensive assets. This does not eliminate the value of high-end aviation or long-range strike. It does, however, make it harder to claim that warfare is still defined chiefly by the possession of a small number of exquisite systems. The operational centre of gravity increasingly lies in a force’s ability to sense, process, adapt, and distribute effect at scale.²¹
There is also an institutional dimension to this shift. Large and technologically sophisticated militaries face a challenge not just of procurement, but of pace. Systems that are commercially derived, rapidly iterated, expendable, and produced in quantity do not fit easily into bureaucratic structures built around long timelines, platform-centric acquisition, and relatively small inventories of exquisite capability. Yet current conflict suggests that effectiveness may depend less on whether a force can purchase the very best system in limited numbers, and more on whether it can absorb lessons, update doctrine, field scalable tools, and adapt faster than the threat. This is not an argument against excellence. It is an argument against rigidity. In a more distributed and more demanding strategic environment, the speed of adaptation becomes part of combat power itself.²²
Conclusion
Modern warfare is not the disappearance of expensive military technology. It is the end of the illusion that expensive military technology alone defines victory. It is not simply a contest over who possesses the most advanced platforms at the highest level of performance. It is increasingly a contest over who can integrate, sustain, replace, absorb, and adapt under pressure across a battlespace that is wider, more interconnected, and more economically exposed than before. Prestige still has value. Status still has value. Advanced systems still have value. But none of them substitutes for resilience. Recent conflict has made that unmistakably clear. Modern warfare is not a pageant of symbols. It is a test of systems.²³
For the broader pattern across UAV warfare, infrastructure targeting, stockpile strain, maritime mine clearance, Gulf air defence, Ukraine-Gulf cooperation, and UAE industrial adaptation, see notes 1–22 above.
Dean Mikkelsen is Founder and Editorial Director of Power & Corridors. Based in Abu Dhabi, he focuses on geopolitical risk, maritime security, trade corridors, energy, logistics and critical infrastructure.
As El Niño risk returns, Panama is trying to secure the canal’s future. But the fight over the Rio Indio reservoir shows that global trade resilience may come at a local human cost.
The US-Iran memorandum may ease immediate pressure, but renewed uncertainty around the Strait of Hormuz and Israel-Hezbollah exchanges shows that resilience, not normalisation, is now the central issue.
Gulf countries are accelerating investments in pipelines, railways, ports, and trade corridors as they seek to reduce their dependence on the Strait of Hormuz
