China, Russia and the race to a post-dollar world

Rana Foroohar in The FT

Markets often react strongly to geopolitical events, but then later shrug them off. Not this time. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a key economic turning point that will have many lasting consequences. Among them will be a quickening of the shift to a bipolar global financial system — one based on the dollar, the other on the renminbi. 

The process of financial decoupling between Russia and the west has, of course, been going on for some time. Western banks reduced their exposure to Russian financial institutions by 80 per cent following the country’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and their claims on the rest of Russia’s private sector have halved since then, according to a recent Capital Economics report. The new and more aggressive sanctions announced by the US will take that decoupling much further. 

It will also make Russia much more dependent on China, which will use the US and EU sanctions as an opportunity to pick up excess Russian oil and gas on the cheap. China is no fan of Vladimir Putin’s war. But it needs Russian commodities and arms, and sees the country as a key part of a new Beijing-led order, something Moscow is aware of. 

“China is our strategic cushion,” Sergei Karaganov, a political scientist at the Moscow-based Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, told Nikkei Asia recently. “We know that in any difficult situation, we can lean on it for military, political and economic support.” 

That does not mean China would break US or European sanctions to support Russia, but it could certainly allow Russian banks and companies more access to its own financial markets and institutions. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, the two countries announced a “friendship without limits”, one that will certainly include closer financial ties as Russia is shut out of western markets. This follows a 2019 agreement between Russia and China to settle all trade in their respective currencies rather than in dollars. The war in Ukraine will speed this up. Witness, in the past few days, China lifting an import ban on Russian wheat, as well as a new long-term Chinese gas deal with Gazprom. 

All of this supports China’s long-term goal of building a post-dollarised world, in which Russia would be one of many vassal states settling all transactions in renminbi. Getting there is not an easy process. The Chinese want to de-dollarise, but they also want complete control of their own financial system. That’s a difficult circle to square. One of the reasons that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency is that, in contrast, the US markets are so open and liquid. 

Still, the Chinese hope to use trade and the petropolitics of the moment to increase the renminbi’s share of global foreign exchange. One high-level western investor in China told me he expected that share would rise from 2 per cent to as high as 7 per cent in the next three to four years. That is, of course, still minuscule compared with the position of the dollar, which is 59 per cent. 

But the Chinese are playing a long game. Finance is a key pillar in the new Great Power competition with America; currency, capital flows and the Belt and Road Initiative trade pathway will all play a role in that. Beijing is slowly diversifying its foreign exchange reserves, as well as buying up a lot of gold. This can be seen as a kind of hedge on a post-dollar word (the assumption being that gold will rise as the dollar falls). 

New US limits on capital flows to China on national security grounds may speed up the financial decoupling process further. If US pension funds can’t flow into China, self-sufficiency in capital markets becomes ever more important. Beijing has been trying to bolster trust and transparency in its own system, not only to attract non-US foreign investment, but also to encourage an onshore investment boom in which huge amounts of Chinese savings would be funnelled into domestic capital markets. 

While sanctions against Russia herald more decoupling, it is also possible that the economic fallout from the war (lowered demand, even higher inflation) would push America and other nations into succumbing to pricing pressures that would favour Chinese goods. While there is likely to be a lot of political posturing on both sides of the aisle about standing up to Russia and China, it takes a long time to decouple supply chains. Policymakers in Washington have yet to get really serious about it. 

Beijing, on the other hand, is quite serious about the new world order that it is pursuing. In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former US national security adviser, wrote presciently that the most dangerous geopolitical scenario for the west would be a “grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran”. This would be led by Beijing and united not by ideology but by common grievances. “Averting this contingency, however remote it may be, will require a display of US geostrategic skill on [all] perimeters of Eurasia simultaneously,” he wrote. 

Financial markets are going to be a major field of battle. They will become a place to defend liberal values (for example, via sanctions against Russia) and renew old alliances. (Might the US and Europe come together to forge a strategy on both energy security and climate change?) They will also be a lot more sensitive to geopolitics than they have been in the past. 

The Truth About the War in Ukraine - NATO's Over, Russian Lives Don't Matter!

 

Why the Buddha would be frowning at Ukraine today

Shekhar Gupta in The Print


Strategic studies quiz: Why was the code to inform Indira Gandhi of the successful Pokhran-1 nuclear test ‘Buddha is smiling’? While you think about it, let’s switch to Ukraine.

By the time you are reading this, Kyiv would have capitulated. The question that’s been asked often in the past few days, and will continue to echo for decades to come is, would it have been so simple for Putin’s Russia to crush Zelenskyy’s Ukraine if it hadn’t given up its nuclear stockpile after the Budapest accord in 1994.

This was done in return for security guarantees by the US, Europe and Russia. One of the guarantors has now invaded Ukraine; one, Europe, is looking for a place to hide and ruing its possible loss of cheap gas; and the third, the US, is doing no more than pour tender love and care. Would Ukraine be such a pushover if it had that stockpile?

Now, let’s turn this question inwards at ourselves. Was India prescient or imprudent to not only build nuclear weapons but to declare itself a nuclear-armed state? Over the decades, this has seen a robust debate among four schools. One, the Homi Bhabha-era hawks who believed India should have built its nukes in the early sixties, even pre-empting China. Former foreign secretary Maharajakrishna Rasgotra had even stated in public interviews and seminars that President John F. Kennedy had offered to help India develop and detonate a device, but that Jawaharlal Nehru turned him down.

The second school is the opposite: Nuclear weapons are ugly, immoral, unusable, unnecessary and an affront to humanity. That school has faded lately, especially after Pokhran-2 in 1998. Some of it has morphed into a new thought process: Now that nuclearisation is a done deal, let’s work to keep it to minimum deterrence and be active and willing members of all global arrangements, including Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) of sorts.

The third believes that India was better served by nuclear ambiguity. That Indira Gandhi had already shown the world our capability in 1974 with Pokhran-1. The 1998 tests were unnecessary political chest-thumping that gave Pakistan the opportunity to test as well. As a result, South Asia had two self-declared nuclear weapon states.

The fourth is the team that won. That mere demonstration of capability in 1974 was not enough. It was self-inflicted double defeat. India exposed itself to sanctions, yet did not assert itself as a weapons power. To call this Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE) was pure hypocrisy that impressed none. Not even India’s public opinion at a juncture when Mrs Gandhi needed desperately to shore it up. It was essential to weaponise, thump our chests, throw the gauntlet at Pakistan.

The first school did not find much purchase in the fraught 1960s, and the second was rendered irrelevant after 1998. The third and fourth need to be debated, particularly with the Ukraine staring us in the face. Similar questions were also raised when the US invaded Iraq twice, the second time on the pretext that it had nukes. Would Bush senior or junior have risked invading Iraq if it actually had any weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)?

Never mind that it wouldn’t have the wherewithal to send them to Washington. But just the threat of a nuclear reprisal for the invasion against any of the US’s Middle-Eastern allies would have done. Ukraine now has become an enduring advertisement for the WMD-sovereignty link. It is making many nations, comfortable today in the aura of guarantees, uncomfortable. Surely, no country with the nukes now, or one that’s nearly there — North Korea, Israel, Iran or any other — will ever give these up. They will remember Ukraine. 

Did India gain or lose from opening its nuclear cupboard and exposing its wares to the world? The criticism is that it enabled Pakistan to find formal parity. The answer is, nobody had any doubt that Pakistan was already a nuclear weapon state. The Americans had given their last certificate of what was often called “nuclear virginity” to Pakistan in 1989, and refused to renew it.

In the 1990-91 stand-off, Pakistan had also employed the nuclear blackmail against India. It is something books have been written about (Bob Winderm and William Burrows, Critical Mass: The dangerous race for super weapons in a fragmenting world), then-CIA deputy chief Robert Gates has spoken about it, and investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has written a detailed piece too. I too have explained it in several of my writings since.

But, the Pakistani threat, which Robert Gates also brought to India from Islamabad on his conflict resolution visit, was that they will use the nukes in the beginning of the war. The reality dawned on V.P. Singh’s government that India did not have an immediately deliverable weapon in retaliation. Over the decades, proven capability had not been developed into a credible weapon and delivery systems.

That crisis passed, but this had ended any doubts across our political spectrum, with all its divisions, that India needed the weapons fast.

Eighteen March 1989 is a significant day in Indian strategic evolution. Intelligence reports were now confirming that Pakistan was indeed a screwdriver’s turn away from a deliverable bomb. On this day, the IAF was holding it customary firepower demonstration, this one involving 129 aircraft, at Tilpat, a firing range not far from Delhi. At the demonstration, Rajiv gestured to top civil servant Naresh Chandra to follow him into a tent. He was so secretive he even shook off a curious Rajesh Pilot, then a minister. There, he told Chandra of his concern and assigned him to head an elite group, mostly of scientists, to take India to full weaponisation. I wrote about it in some detail in these 2006 articles.

The group included top nuclear scientists R. Chidambaram, P.K. Iyengar, Anil Kakodkar, K. ‘Santy’ Santhanam, missile specialist A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and then-DRDO chief V.S. Arunachalam. They were to be funded mostly covertly out of a fund for “science and technology” under the Planning Commission. A lot of the operations were undercover and covert. Santhanam, for example, was given a discrete senior posting in RAW. Kakodkar later disclosed to me in this Walk the Talk on NDTV that he had to even travel overseas under assumed names and passports. 

That baton passed brilliantly between seven prime ministers across a decade of political instability. And in 1998, Pokhran-2 happened, followed by Pakistan’s tit-for-tat in Chagai. Two decades after that, where did the two new nuclear powers stand? India mostly accepted as a legitimate nuclear weapons power, admitted to most multilateral arrangements, rid of all the sanctions and an American strategic ally. And Pakistan? It wasn’t such a bad idea to open the cupboard then.

Finally, here’s why they said ‘Buddha is smiling’ for Pokhran-1. It seems that some time in the epoch of Buddha, the ancient kingdom of Magadh launched a war of conquest over its neighbour Vaishali. While Magadh was the usual monarchy that built a big army and collected the weapons for the assault, Vaishali was some kind of an anarchic street democracy where people spent all their time arguing over whether to fight, how to fight, who will fight.

Sure enough, Magadh annihilated and massacred poorly armed Vaishali. When the news got to a meditating Buddha, it seems, he frowned in disapproval. Meaning that to keep the peace, a kingdom has to be fully prepared for war, or it will meet Vaishali’s fate. Since 1964, India was the Vaishali to China’s Magadh. Now you know why Buddha would now be smiling? Or why he would be frowning at Ukraine’s fate?

Analysis of Ukraine Conflict (Urdu)

 

$30 Trillion Debt Gimmick

 

Boris Johnson claims the UK is rooting out dirty Russian money. That’s ludicrous

 Oliver Bullough in The Guardian

We were warned about Vladimir Putin – about his intentions, his nature, his mindset – and, because it was profitable for us, we ignored those warnings and welcomed his friends and their money. It is too late for us to erase our responsibility for helping Putin build his system. But we can still dismantle it and stop it coming back.

Russia is a mafia state, and its elite exists to enrich itself. Democracy is an existential threat to that theft, which is why Putin has crushed it at home and seeks to undermine it abroad. For decades, London has been the most important place not only for Russia’s criminal elite to launder its money, but also for it to stash its wealth. We have been the Kremlin’s bankers, and provided its elite with the financial skills it lacks. Its kleptocracy could not exist without our assistance. The best time to do something about this was 30 years ago – but the second best time is right now.

We journalists have long been writing about this, but it is not simply overheated rhetoric from overexcited hacks. Parliament’s intelligence and security committee wrote two years ago that our investigative agencies are underfunded, our economy is awash with dirty money, and oligarchs have bought influence at the very top of our society.

The committee heard evidence from senior law enforcement and security officials. It laid out detailed, careful suggestions for what Britain should do to limit the damage Putin has already done to our society. Instead of learning from the report and implementing its proposals, Boris Johnson delayed its publication until after the general election and then, when further delay became impossible, dismissed those who took its sober analysis seriously as “Islingtonian remainers” seeking to delegitimise Brexit.

That is the crucial context for Johnson’s ludicrous claim this week to the House of Commons that no government could “conceivably be doing more to root out corrupt Russian money”. That is not only demonstrably untrue, it is an inversion of reality. On leaving the European Union, we were told that we could launch our own independent sanctions regime – and this week we saw the fruit of it: a response markedly weaker than those of Brussels and Washington.

The Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran, speaking with parliamentary privilege on Tuesday, listed the names of 35 alleged key Putin “enablers” whom the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny has asked to be sanctioned. Blocking the assets of everyone on that list and their close relatives would be a truly significant response from Johnson to the gravity of the situation. But it would still only be a start.

Relying solely on sanctions now is like stamping on a car’s accelerator when you’ve failed for years to maintain the engine, pump up the tyres or fill up the tank, yet still expect it to hit 95mph. Other announcements in the last couple of days have amounted to nothing more than painting on go-faster stripes. Tackling the UK’s role in enabling Putin’s kleptocracy, and containing the threat his allies pose to democracy here and elsewhere, will require far more than just banning golden visas or Kremlin TV stations.

For a start, we need to know who owns our country. Some 87,000 properties in England and Wales are owned via offshore companies – which prevents us seeing who their true owners are or if they were bought with criminal money. Companies House makes no checks on registrations, which is why UK shell structures have featured in most Russian money-laundering scandals. Imposing transparency on the ownership of dirty money in this way would strike at the heart of the London money-laundering machine. Governments have promised to do this “when parliamentary time allows” for years, yet the time has never been found, and instead they’ve listened to concerns from the City that such regulations would harm its competitiveness.

Above all, we need to fund our enforcement agencies as generously as oligarchs fund their lawyers: you can’t fight grand corruption on the cheap. Even good policies of recent years, such as the “unexplained wealth orders” of 2017, which were designed to tackle criminally owned assets hidden behind clever shell structures, have largely failed because investigators lack the funds to use them. We must spend what it takes to drive kleptocratic cash out of the country.

Johnson is not the first prime minister to fail to rise to the challenge – Tony Blair and David Cameron both schmoozed with Putin even when it was obvious what kind of a leader he was. And I don’t think Johnson is personally corrupt or tainted by Russian money; he’s lazy, flippant and unwilling to launch expensive, laborious initiatives that will bring results only long after he himself has left office and is unable to take the credit for them. It is time, however, for his colleagues to step up and force him into action. This is a serious moment, and it requires serious people willing to invest in the long-term security of our country and the future of democracy everywhere.

Deception and destruction can still blind the enemy

From The Economist

There are four ways for those who would hide to fight back against those trying to find them: destruction, deafening, disappearance and deception. Technological approaches to all of those options will be used to counter the advantages that bringing more sensors to the battlespace offers. As with the sensors, what those technologies achieve will depend on the tactics used.

Destruction is straightforward: blow up the sensor. Missiles which home in on the emissions from radars are central to establishing air superiority; one of the benefits of stealth, be it that of an f-35 or a Harop drone, lies in getting close enough to do so reliably.

Radar has to reveal itself to work, though. Passive systems can be both trickier to sniff out and cheaper to replace. Theatre-level air-defence systems are not designed to spot small drones carrying high-resolution smartphone cameras, and would be an extraordinarily expensive way of blowing them up.

But the ease with which American drones wandered the skies above Iraq, Afghanistan and other post-9/11 war zones has left a mistaken impression about the survivability of uavs. Most Western armies have not had to worry about things attacking them from the sky since the Korean war ended in 1953. Now that they do, they are investing in short-range air defences. Azerbaijan’s success in Nagorno-Karabakh was in part down to the Armenians not being up to snuff in this regard. Armed forces without many drones—which is still most of them—will find their stocks quickly depleted if used against a seasoned, well-equipped force.

Stocks will surely increase if it becomes possible to field more drones for the same price. And low-tech drones which can be used as flying ieds will make things harder when fighting irregular forces. But anti-drone options should get better too. Stephen Biddle of Columbia University argues that the trends making drones more capable will make anti-drone systems better, too. Such systems actually have an innate advantage, he suggests; they look up into the sky, in which it is hard to hide, while drones look down at the ground, where shelter and camouflage are more easily come by. And small motors cannot lift much by way of armour.

Moving from cheap sensors to the most expensive, satellites are both particularly valuable in terms of surveillance and communication and very vulnerable. America, China, India and Russia, all of which would rely on satellites during a war, have all tested ground-launched anti-satellite missiles in the past two decades; some probably also have the ability to kill one satellite with another. The degree to which they are ready to gouge out each other’s eyes in the sky will be a crucial indicator of escalation should any of those countries start fighting each other. Destroying satellites used to detect missile launches could presage a pre-emptive nuclear strike—and for that very reason could bring one about.

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face

Satellites are also vulnerable to sensory overload, as are all sensors. Laser weapons which blind humans are outlawed by international agreement but those that blind cameras are not; nor are microwave beams which fry electronics. America says that Russia tries to dazzle its orbiting surveillance systems with lasers on a regular basis.

The ability to jam, overload or otherwise deafen the other side’s radar and radios is the province of electronic warfare (ew). It is a regular part of military life to probe your adversaries’ ew capabilities when you get a chance. The deployment of American and Russian forces close to each other in northern Syria provided just such an opportunity. “They are testing us every day,” General Raymond Thomas, then head of American special forces, complained in 2018, “knocking our communications down” and going so far as “disabling” America’s own ec-130 electronic-warfare planes.

In Green Dagger, an exercise held in California last October, an American Marine Corps regiment was tasked with seizing a town and two villages defended by an opposing force cobbled together from other American marines, British and Dutch commandos and Emirati special forces. It struggled to do so. When small teams of British commandos attacked the regiment’s rear areas, paralysing its advance, the marines were hard put to target them before they moved, says Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank in London. One reason was the commandos’ effective ew attacks on the marines’ command posts.

Just as what sees can be blinded and what hears, deafened, what tries to understand can be confused. Britain’s national cyber-strategy, published in December, explicitly says that one task of the country’s new National Cyber Force, a body staffed by spooks and soldiers, is to “disrupt online and communications systems”. Armies that once manoeuvred under air cover will now need to do so under “cyber-deception cover”, says Ed Stringer, a retired air marshal who led recent reforms in British military thinking. “There’s a point at which the screens of the opposition need to go a bit funny,” says Mr Stringer, “not so much that they immediately spot what you’re doing but enough to distract and confuse.” In time the lines between ew, cyber-offence and psychological operations seem set to blur.

The ability to degrade the other side’s sensors, interrupt its communications and mess with its head does not replace old-fashioned camouflage and newfangled stealth; they remain the bread and butter of a modern military. Tanks are covered in foliage; snipers wear ghillie suits. Warplanes use radiation-absorbent material and angled surfaces so as not to reflect radio waves back to the radar that sent them. Russia has platoons dedicated to spraying the air with aerosols designed to block ultraviolet, infrared and radar waves. During their recent border stand-off, India and China both employed camouflage designed to confuse sensors with a broader spectral range than the human eye.

According to Mr Biddle, over the past 30 years “cover and concealment”, along with other tactics, have routinely allowed forces facing American precision weapons to avoid major casualties. He points to the examples of al-Qaeda at the Battle of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan in 2001 and Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard in 2003, both of whom were overrun in close combat rather than through long-range strikes. Weapons get more lethal, he says, but their targets adapt.

Hiding is made easier by the fact that the seekers’ new capabilities, impressive as they may be, are constrained by the realities of budgets and logistics. Not everything armies want can be afforded; not everything they procure can be put into the field in a timely manner. In real operations, as opposed to PowerPoint presentations, sensor coverage is never unlimited.

“There is no way that we're going to be able to see everything, all of the time, everywhere,” says a British general. “It's just physically impossible. And therefore there will always be something that can happen without us seeing it.” In the Green Dagger exercise the attacking marine regiment lacked thermal-imaging equipment and did not have prompt access to satellite pictures. It was a handicap, but a realistic one. Rounding up commandos was not the regiment’s “main effort”, in military parlance. It might well not have been kitted out for it.

When hiding is hard, it helps to increase the number of things the enemy has to look at. “With modern sensors…it is really, really difficult to avoid being detected,” says Petter Bedoire, the chief technology officer for Saab, a Swedish arms company. “So instead you need to saturate your adversaries’ sensors and their situational awareness.” A system looking at more things will make more mistakes. Stretch it far enough and it could even collapse, as poorly configured servers do when hackers mount “denial of service” attacks designed to overwhelm them with internet traffic.

Dividing your forces is a good way to increase the cognitive load. A lot of small groups are harder to track and target than a few big ones, as the commandos in Green Dagger knew. What is more, if you take shots at one group you reveal some of your shooters to the rest. The less valuable each individual target is, the bigger an issue that becomes.

Decoys up the ante. During the first Gulf war Saddam Hussein unleashed his arsenal of Scud missiles on Bahrain, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The coalition Scud hunters responsible for finding the small (on the scale of a vast desert) mobile missile launchers he was using seemed to have all the technology they might wish for: satellites that could spot the thermal-infrared signature of a rocket launch, aircraft bristling with radar and special forces spread over tens of thousands of square kilometres acting as spotters. Nevertheless an official study published two years later concluded that there was no “indisputable” proof that America had struck any launchers at all “as opposed to high-fidelity decoys”.

One of the advantages data fusion offers seekers is that it demands more of decoys; in surveillance aircraft electronic emissions, radar returns and optical images can now be displayed on a single screen, highlighting any discrepancies between an object’s visual appearance and its electronic signature. But decoy-making has not stood still. Iraq’s fake Scuds looked like the real thing to un observers just 25 metres away; verisimilitude has improved “immensely” since then, particularly in the past decade, says Steen Bisgaard, the founder of GaardTech, an Australian company which builds replica vehicles to serve as both practice targets and decoys.

Mr Bisgaard says he can sell you a very convincing mobile simulacrum of a British Challenger II tank, one with a turret and guns that move, the heat signature of a massive diesel engine and a radio transmitter that works at military wavelengths, all for less than a 20th of the £5m a real tank would set you back. Shipped in a flat pack it can be assembled in an hour or so.

Seeing a tank suddenly appear somewhere, rather than driving there, would be something of a giveaway. But manoeuvre can become part of the mimicry. Rémy Hemez, a French army officer, imagines a future where armies deploy large “robotic decoy formations using ai to move along and create a diversion”. Simulating a build up like the one which Russia has emplaced on Ukraine’s border is still beyond anyone’s capabilities. But decoys and deception—in which Russia’s warriors are well versed—can be used to confuse.

Disappearance and deception often have synergy. Stealth technologies do not need to make an aircraft completely invisible. Just making its radar cross-section small enough that a cheap little decoy can mimic it is a real advantage. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to submarines. If you build lots of intercontinental-ballistic-missile silos but put icbms into only a few—a tactic China may be exploring—an enemy will have to use hundreds of its missiles to be sure of getting a dozen or so of yours.

Shooting at decoys is not just a waste of material. It also reveals where your shooters are. Silent Impact, a 155mm artillery shell produced by src, an American firm, can transmit electronic signals as if it were a radar or a weapons platform as it flies through the sky and settles to the ground under a parachute. Any enemy who takes the bait reveals the position of their guns.

The advent of ai should offer new ways of telling the real from the fake; but it could also offer new opportunities for deception. The things that make an ai say “Tank!” may be quite different to what humans think of as tankiness, thus unmasking decoys that fool humans. At the same time the ai may ignore features which humans consider blindingly obvious. Benjamin Jensen of American University tells the story of marines training against a high-end sentry camera equipped with object-recognition software. The first marines, who tried to sneak up by crawling low, were quickly detected. Then one of them grabbed a piece of tree bark, placed it in front of his face and walked right up to the camera unmolested. The system saw nothing out of the ordinary about an ambulatory plant.

The problem is that ais, and their masters, learn. In time they will rumble such hacks. Basing a subsequent all-out assault on Birnam Wood tactics would be to risk massacre. “You can always beat the algorithm once by radical improvisation,” says Mr Jensen. “But it's hard to know when that will happen.”

The advantages of staying put

Similar uncertainties will apply more widely. Everyone knows that sensors and autonomous platforms can get cheaper and cheaper, that computing at the edge can reduce strain on the capacity of data systems, and that all this can make kill chains shorter. But the rate of progress—both your progress, and your adversaries’—is hard to gauge. Who has the advantage will often not be known until the forces contest the battlespace.

The unpredictability extends beyond who will win particular fights. It spreads out to the way in which fighting will best be done. Over the past century military thinking has contrasted attrition, which wears down the opponent’s resources in a frontal slugfest, and manoeuvre, which seeks to use fast moving forces to disrupt an enemy’s decision-making, logistics and cohesion. Manoeuvre offers the possibility of victory without the wholesale destruction of the enemies’ forces, and in the West it has come to hold the upper hand, with attrition often seen as a throwback to a more primitive age.

That is a mistake, argues Franz-Stefan Gady of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank. Surviving in an increasingly transparent battlespace may well be possible. But it will take effort. Both attackers who want to take ground and defenders who wish to hold it will need to build “complex multiple defensive layers” around their positions, including air defences, electronic countermeasures and sensors of their own. Movement will still be necessary—but it will be dispersed. Consolidated manoeuvres big and sweeping enough to generate “shock and awe” will be slowed down by unwieldy aerial electromagnetic umbrellas and advertise themselves in advance, thereby producing juicy targets.

The message of Azerbaijan’s victory is not that blitzkrieg has been reborn and “the drone will always get through”. It is that preparation and appropriate tactics matter as much as ever, and you need to know what to prepare against. The new technologies of hide and seek will sometimes—if Mr Gady is right, often—favour the defence. A revolution in sensors, data and decision-making built to make targeting easier and kill chains quicker may yet result in a form of warfare that is slower, harder and messier.