Adaptation War
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
-
Revolution in military affairs
13 min read
The article explicitly references RMA theory and cites Williamson Murray and Alan Millett's foundational work on the concept, questioning whether the adaptation war constitutes a new RMA. Understanding this theoretical framework is essential for grasping the article's central thesis.
-
Military–industrial complex
12 min read
The article discusses '21st century manufacturing to support greater attrition in war' and how nations absorb lessons into their 'military and industrial systems.' Understanding the concept of military-industrial integration provides context for how states translate wartime learning into production capacity.
Cooperation among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea has been growing more rapidly in recent years, reinforcing threats from each of them individually while also posing new challenges to U.S. strength and power globally.
Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, March 2025.
Yesterday, my report on the new global Adaptation War was published by the Special Competitive Studies Project in Washington DC.
As the report describes, in the past three years, Ukraine and Russia have learned and adapted. Both sides have also learned to learn better and to absorb lessons into their military and industrial systems with increasing speed. But beyond this Ukraine adaptation battle, the learning and adaptation ecosystem spawned by the war in Ukraine has now metastasised into an international learning and adaptation competition.
The Ukraine Adaptation Battle is now a global Adaptation War.
A new adversary learning and adaptation bloc has emerged. While not a formal alliance, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have developed a mesh of different agreements and strategic partnerships that have allowed these authoritarian regimes to construct a connected knowledge market on 21st century strategic competition and conflict. Each of the contributors to this knowledge market can draw from it for their own purposes.
The aim of this report is to examine the components of this global Adaptation War.
It commences in Part I with an examination of adaptation and when adaptation occurs. There are three key areas explored in this section of the report:
Adaptation in peacetime.
Wartime adaptation.
Adaptation from peace to war.
Adaptation is not just a temporal issue. It occurs at different levels of war and national security endeavours. As I write in the report:
Adaptation is not a singular or holistic process that takes place at one level or in any single part of a military institution. In military organisations, there will be multiple instances of adaptation occurring at any single point in time, and these will be happening in different geographic areas as well as at different levels within the hierarchical construct of a military force.
As such, Part II of the report explores the three levels of adaptation – battlefield, strategic, and international - in the context of the Ukraine war. This section includes exemplar case studies, as well as exploring how the interaction between levels occurs.
But we should also note that learning and adaptation is hard. Not every institution has the requisite
...This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.