How Global Conflict Is Reshaping Defense, Industry, and Decision-Making

This is the first article in a Gold Institute strategic series examining how global conflict is reshaping security, defense, industry, technology, alliances, diplomacy, and decision making.

The next decade will be shaped by a new race for security, not only a race for military power, but a race for industrial capacity, economic resilience, critical materials, trusted supply chains, technological integration, information resilience, cognitive security, and decision advantage.

Europe is the clearest example of this change, but it is not alone. Across the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East, and in the broader allied world, governments are reaching the same conclusion: the assumptions that shaped the post-Cold War security order are no longer sufficient.

For decades, many democratic nations operated under a familiar set of assumptions. Large-scale war in Europe was considered unlikely. Globalization was expected to reduce the incentives for major-power conflict. Defense industrial capacity could be reduced because future wars were assumed to be shorter, more precise, and technologically managed. Supply chains could be optimized for efficiency rather than resilience. The United States would remain the central security guarantor in Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East.

Those assumptions have weakened.

Russia’s war against Ukraine, China’s pressure across the Indo-Pacific, instability in the Middle East, the proliferation of drones and missiles, cyber threats, fragile supply chains, and uncertainty over the ability of the United States to support multiple theaters simultaneously are forcing governments to rethink defense.

The result is not simply higher defense spending. It is a broader strategic awakening.

NATO’s shift toward a much higher defense-investment benchmark reflects the scale of the change. The old two-percent debate is no longer enough. Allied governments are now being pushed to think about defense requirements, infrastructure, industry, resilience, and long-term readiness in a more integrated way.

Global military spending is moving in the same direction. But money alone will not solve the problem. The central question is not only whether governments can spend more. The real question is whether they can build the readiness, production capacity, technological integration, economic durability, and decision speed required to deter, survive, and prevail in a more dangerous world.

Modern warfare is no longer simply a contest between militaries. It has become a competition between entire national systems.

Military power still matters. Firepower still matters. Air superiority, missile defense, intelligence, logistics, and industrial capacity still matter. But no single element is decisive on its own. The decisive advantage increasingly belongs to countries and coalitions that integrate these elements faster and operate more effectively as a system.

Current conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East show that national security now depends on the interaction of military forces, intelligence networks, defense industries, technology ecosystems, civilian infrastructure, energy systems, information environments, and political leadership.

A country’s ability to fight and endure is shaped not only by what happens at the front line, but by the strength and integration of the entire national security ecosystem behind it.

This changes how governments should think about alliances.

In the twentieth century, alliances were often built around geography, formal commitments, and shared political interests. In the twenty-first century, alliances will increasingly be measured by operational coordination: shared planning, shared intelligence, compatible systems, industrial cooperation, trusted supply chains, technology partnerships, and the ability to coordinate under pressure.

Political alignment is important, but it is not enough.

When a crisis begins, it is too late to build trust, integrate systems, establish intelligence-sharing mechanisms, or create emergency industrial capacity. Successful coalitions prepare before the crisis. They integrate planning, operations, intelligence, technology, logistics, industry, and decision making in advance.

Russia’s war in Ukraine shows why these matters.

The war exposed the return of industrial warfare on European soil. It showed that artillery, ammunition, drones, electronic warfare, air defense, logistics, manpower, and repair capacity remain decisive. It also showed that the side that adapts faster — technologically, industrially, and organizationally, can offset traditional military disadvantages.

The war has also demonstrated how rapidly the character of conflict can change. What began primarily as a war of ground maneuver, armor, artillery, and territorial defense has increasingly become a laboratory for drone warfare, long-range strike, electronic warfare, and rapid battlefield adaptation. Ukraine’s use of drones has not only shaped the front line; it has also allowed Kyiv to extend pressure into Russian territory, striking military infrastructure, energy facilities, logistics networks, and other strategic assets. This is one of the clearest examples of how relatively low-cost technologies, when combined with intelligence, innovation, and operational adaptation, can change the balance of pressure in a prolonged war.

Europe’s current defense transformation reveals this new reality. Air and missile defense, artillery, ammunition, drones, cyber, electronic warfare, AI, military mobility, space, and critical infrastructure protection are no longer narrow military issues. They are becoming core elements of European statecraft.

Yet Europe’s challenge is not simply financial.

Money is necessary, but not sufficient.

The deeper problem is fragmentation. European defense remains divided by national procurement systems, divergent industrial interests, uneven military readiness, incompatible platforms, slow acquisition cycles, workforce shortages, and political constraints. Europe has world-class defense companies and advanced technologies, but it commonly lacks the scale, speed, and integration needed for sustained high-intensity conflict.

Europe’s defense gap is therefore not simply a shortage of equipment. There is a shortage of integrated readiness.

The same lesson applies beyond Europe.

In the Indo-Pacific, China’s military modernization, maritime pressure, missile forces, cyber capabilities, and economic leverage are driving Japan, Australia, South Korea, the Philippines, and other partners to rethink deterrence, supply chains, defense production, and alliance integration.

In the Middle East, missile and drone warfare, proxy networks, cyber operations, maritime disruption, energy pressure, and information operations show how regional conflicts can quickly become multi-domain stress tests. The conflicts involving Iran demonstrated that range changes the structure of war, not only its distance. Long-range missiles, drones, and strike capabilities expand the battlespace, compress decision timelines, and turn what may appear to be a bilateral confrontation into a regional systems challenge.

The Middle East also shows a growing cost problem. Low-cost drones, rockets, and one-way attack systems can force defenders to use expensive interceptors or maintain high readiness levels for extended periods. Even a successful defense can become economically stressful if defenders must spend far more than attackers for every engagement.

This creates demand for cheaper interceptors, directed energy, electronic warfare, autonomous detection, passive defense, and AI-enabled prioritization.

Economic security is now part of national security.

A country may have advanced defense platforms, but without semiconductors, rare earth elements, energetics, batteries, fuel, microelectronics, steel, titanium, machine tools, software, and trained workers, those platforms cannot be produced, sustained, repaired, or replaced at scale.

Critical raw materials are especially important. Materials required for the green, digital, defense, and space sectors are strategic assets. Supply chains are no longer a background economic issue. They are part of the security equation.

Deterrence is not only built in military headquarters. It is built in factories, ports, mines, data centers, laboratories, shipyards, energy networks, and supply chains.

The information and cognitive domains are also becoming central to modern security.

Adversaries increasingly use disinformation, propaganda, cyber activity, fake personas, manipulated media, bot networks, social platforms, leaks, and influence operations to shape political environments before, during, and after military crises. Their goal is not always to convince the public of one alternative truth. Often, it is to create confusion, reduce trust, divide societies, slow decision-making, weaken alliances, and make democratic governments hesitate.

This means that defense modernization must include more than platforms, ammunition, cyber, AI, and industrial capacity. It must also include the ability to understand, protect, and operate in the information and cognitive domains.

The challenge is not only to collect more information. Modern governments already collect enormous amounts of data: intelligence reporting, open-source information, social media signals, cyber indicators, satellite imagery, diplomatic reporting, financial data, logistics data, and public sentiment indicators.

The real challenge is turning information into insight.

Information often sits in separate systems, agencies, formats, and classification environments. Decision-makers receive too much information, too late, and missing sufficient context. The future advantage will belong to governments that can collect, fuse, analyze, and present information in ways that support faster, better decisions.

This requires four capabilities.

First, collection: the ability to acquire relevant data from classified, commercial, open-source, cyber, social, economic, and operational environments.

Second, fusion: the ability to connect different types of information into one coherent picture.

Third, analysis: the ability to understand patterns and to identify anomalies, risks, opportunities, and adversary behavior.

Fourth, predictive insight: the ability to move from describing what happened to anticipating what may happen next.

AI can help, but only when connected to trusted data, human expertise, clear governance, and operational decision-making. AI should not be treated as a narrow software tool. It should be treated as part of the national security strategic infrastructure.

The future advantage in conflict will belong not only to the side with better weapons, but to the side with better prediction, faster fusion, and more effective decision support.

The next decade will therefore test whether democratic nations can move fast enough.

They must rebuild readiness, expand production, secure critical materials, protect supply chains, integrate AI and data, defend the information environment, strengthen alliances, and prepare societies for sustained strategic pressure.

The articles that follow will examine how this race is unfolding across Europe, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, smaller countries, economic and security systems, alliance networks, and the United States. Each arena is different, but the underlying strategic requirement is increasingly similar: the ability to integrate military power, industrial capacity, economic resilience, technology, intelligence, diplomacy, and decision-making processes into one coherent system.

The future will not be shaped only by those who spend more. It will be shaped by those who integrate better.

The decisive advantage will belong to countries and coalitions capable of connecting military power, economic resilience, industrial capacity, technology, intelligence, information awareness, and political will into one coherent system.

That is the new race for security.

Omer Haim is a Distinguished Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C. based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Brig.-Gen. Ernest C. “Ernie” Audino, U.S. Army (Ret.) and appeared in the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. Defensible Borders Are an American Interest)

Strategic depth is not a slogan. It is a function of time and distance that enhances a nation’s geographic defensibility, and it does so in two concrete ways. It provides adequate reaction time between sensing a threat and acting on it. And it provides sufficient land area to deploy and array friendly forces before committing them to combat. Every serious military planner understands this. Few American politicians do.

October 7, 2023, forced the question back into the open. Without the high ground of Judea, Samaria, and the Golan Heights, Israel is incredibly narrow—too narrow to permit the swift internal deployment of overwhelming combat power against any compelling external threat. This is not a recent insight or an Israeli talking point. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff reached exactly this conclusion in their own analysis in the late 1960s, when modern Israel was barely two decades old. Their judgment has only been reinforced by the technological developments of the intervening half-century. The terrestrial range of the weapons commonly employed today is far greater than it was 20 years ago, let alone 60. Once-adequate strategic depth is no longer adequate.

Consider the area south of the Litani River since the IDF’s unilateral withdrawal in 2000. The river’s furthest point from the Israeli border is less than 30 kilometers. That is not a vast theater. It is a thin strip of land. Yet in the 23 years between withdrawal and the October 7 war, that strip became saturated with Hizbullah missiles, artillery, mortars, anti-tank guided missiles, rockets, and drones. The terrain, combined with modern technology, enabled deeper, more accurate strikes into Israel proper than had been possible previously. Every weapon was emplaced for one purpose: to kill Israeli civilians.

Three conclusions follow, and they are not difficult. First, it is unacceptable that non-combatants should be targeted by these weapons. Second, it is unacceptable that the Lebanese government has been unable to disarm Hizbullah. Third, it is a fantasy to think Hizbullah will disarm itself. Given these realities, re-securing this area as a buffer is therefore imperative—not optional, not negotiable, and not subject to revision by a foreign chancellery whose own borders are not exposed to a single Hizbullah rocket. Similarly, the same logic applies on the Syrian side of the Golan, where the lessons of 2000 in Lebanon and 2005 in Gaza were paid for in Israeli lives and should not have to be paid again.

American opposition to Israel’s IDF presence in Lebanon and Syria is, at root, ideological, not experiential. Most U.S. politicians lack military experience and do not understand battlefield realities. They are politicians, not colonels. They first weigh every issue in terms of political coin, whether it will gain or cost a vote, and they are uniquely vulnerable to their preferred sources of information on warfighting, because they lack the relevant experience to critically assess what they are told. Lacking relevant experience, they’re vulnerable to their preferred sources, shaped by decades of orchestrated false narratives about the Israeli-Palestinian arena, Iran, and the broader Middle East. The result is that passions masquerade as reason—and they do not or cannot acknowledge it. Advocates of defensible borders face less an analytical challenge than an engagement challenge: figuring out how to reach politicians on the terrain of American interests, where their passions already lie.

With this in mind, the most effective way to convey to U.S. lawmakers the necessity of military buffer zones and demilitarization on Israel’s exterior borders is not to appeal to American mercy. Instead, it appeals to American self-interest. President Trump’s “America First” framing may be labeled arrogant by his political rivals, but it is eminently rational. The essence of rational behavior is acting in one’s own interest. As unseemly as that may sound in polite company, it is how the world goes round, and it is how alliances are sustained when the rhetoric of shared values runs thin.

A related factor complicates the conversation: isolationist sentiment now occupies much of the Republican coalition and, in the Beltway, inhibits discussion of allies’ security needs. Even isolationists rarely admit they’d want as many strong friends as possible in a fight—not senior citizens, but buddies with the power and will to knock someone out. That is Israel. As General George Marshall said: You don’t want to fight unless you must, but if you do, you don’t want to fight alone or for long.

From an American viewpoint, Israel is on the front lines against global Islamist terror, providing a buffer. Israel’s need to counter threats daily has fostered valuable experience, technology, and intelligence networks. Their lessons benefit U.S. security as well.

A similar dynamic plays out in the United States’ own backyard, making the case for defensible borders relevant beyond Israel. The United States faces the same enemy, albeit from a greater distance, conducting distributed operations on non-contiguous terrain in our own hemisphere. Venezuela is the clearest illustration. Until the recent capture of Nicolas Maduro, Iran’s presence there was pervasive and deliberate. Since at least 2010, Tehran has maintained a growing complement of Quds Force and Hizbullah assets on Venezuelan soil. In 2022, Tehran and Caracas began coordinating with Moscow and Beijing to establish an Iranian naval base on the Venezuelan coast. In 2023, the commander of the Iranian Navy publicly announced the regime’s intention to deploy and maintain assets at the Panama Canal. For several years, Iran supplied Venezuela with drone components and assembly lines, eventually opening a dedicated factory producing three variants of the Shahed loitering attack drone—the same family of drones supplied to Venezuelan forces and to other Latin American militant groups. Shortly before Maduro fell, the two regimes had agreed to deepen nuclear cooperation.

The threat in the Western Hemisphere is not isolated. The tri-border area where Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet has become a narco-terror hub, and it should surprise no one that Quds Force and Hizbullah operatives are on the ground there to exploit those networks in service of Iranian interests. The same Quds personnel missioned to train, equip, and cadre terror forces in the Middle East are the same personnel missioned to do the same in Latin America, and, almost certainly, inside the United States itself. The enemy employs hybrid capabilities by design, operating in the gray zone between war and peace, between combat and crime. That ambiguity confuses lawmakers and warfighters alike and inhibits effective response. Because Tehran calculates each hybrid action to remain just below the threshold that might trigger a decisive American reply, the temptation in Washington is to deny that this is a new character of war at all.

President Trump is finally doing something about this. Re-invigorating the Monroe Doctrine and toppling Maduro were the first steps. Cuba is likely next. The second- and third-order effects for global adversaries, Iran above all, who have been quietly setting up shop near our southern border while American eyes were closed, will be considerable. Stay tuned.

What happens in Tehran does not stay in Tehran. Modern, global Islamist terrorism was born there in 1979. Islamist terrorism existed before the Islamic Revolution, but the example set by Khomeini’s seizure of power, combined with the regime’s explicit doctrine of exporting jihad, inspired and underwrote campaigns of terror worldwide. Tehran is now the global patron and center of gravity for these movements. Their dependency on that patron is also their vulnerability.

Eliminating the center of gravity makes its operations—including those in Latin America—untenable. Israel’s proximity, will, and capability make it indispensable for any effort to destroy that center. Whenever Americans choose to target Iran’s regime, Israeli participation will be essential. The reverse is also true: a secure Israel within defensible borders is the platform from which this work continues.

Defensible borders, buffer zones, and demilitarization on Israel’s northern and southern frontiers are not maximalist demands. They are the minimum required for a small state to survive in a hostile neighborhood, and the precondition for any lasting peace. The military center of gravity in any democracy is almost always the support of its domestic population. If Americans want a willing and capable ally in Israel—and it is increasingly clear that many of our European allies are no longer willing or capable—if we want a partner who can go shoulder-to-shoulder with us and deliver a punch, we need to understand that sufficient strategic depth is necessary to secure the Israeli population. That is not charity. It is American interest, plainly stated.

Ernie Audino is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C. based foreign policy and defense think tank.