If Ukraine today is Asia tomorrow, there is real work to be done

“Ukraine today is Asia tomorrow.” Asian strategists and policymakers have been guided by that homily for over four years. A chat this week with an old friend who has been working on the frontlines of the conflict in Ukraine gave me the opportunity to figure out more specifically what that means for security policy. And it’s worrisome.

Robert Potter focuses on cybersecurity, having founded several companies, advised governments around the world and is on the board of Cyber Diia, a Ukrainian nonprofit that works to strengthen the country’s digital resilience and cybersecurity. That work has exposed him to all facets of digital conflict, from stealing national infrastructure to combating mis-, dis- and malinformation. He spends about half his time in Ukraine and recently embedded with Ukrainian Marines and drone teams across the frontline. (He is also a senior adjunct fellow at Pacific Forum, where I work.)

A thousand cuts

His first lesson is to prepare for a world of financial attrition in the battlespace. Conflict is being extended and endurance is the coin of the realm. Conflict does not mean high-end, kinetic warfare. Rather, adversaries are increasingly inclined to hybrid engagement that is harder to attribute, difficult to defend against and leaves plenty of room for escalation. It is death by a thousand cuts, sapping will and slowly, inexorably degrading capability and draining resources.

The U.S. and its allies, warned Potter, are not prepared for this. They have developed exquisite, increasingly complex and sophisticated weapons that are being used against cheap munitions. “We always move up on the cost curve,” said Potter, but “the skill is in going down.”

The U.S. is getting a bitter taste of this new world in the Middle East, as its inventories of Patriot missiles are being depleted to fend off drone attacks. “You can kill anything with a Patriot,” he explained, “but you will bankrupt yourself. There just aren’t enough missiles.”

Some counter that a better, cheaper tactic is shooting down drones with machine guns mounted on fighter jets. Unfortunately, those plans will be thwarted by the same economics. An hour of maintenance for an F-35 still outstrips the cost of the weapon it is shooting down; operating costs of other fighters are just as high. “We have to reduce the marginal cost of equipment and move down the cost curve.”

That will be a challenge for Japan. To his credit, Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi acknowledged this new reality in the introduction to Japan’s new defense white paper, writing that the world must prepare for “‘new ways of warfare,’ such as mass employment of unmanned assets.” According to the white paper, Japan will be buying “a large number of low-cost UAVs, USVs and UUVs with an aim to establish the Synchronized, Hybrid, Integrated and Enhanced Littoral Defense (SHIELD) with unmanned assets within FY2027.”

Unfortunately, it still prioritizes big-ticket items such as missile defense and offensive strike capabilities. As the Japanese government struggles to finance its expanded defense budget, a reassessment is likely to follow and emphasis should shift to maximum effectiveness for minimum cost to get more bang for the yen.

This demands a rethink of procurement. “Don’t buy drones the same way you procure warships,” said Potter. “Treat those platforms as ammunition. They don’t need to be integrated into larger systems; just send them to the troops to use.”

This leads to a second lesson: Create room for soldiers to innovate. Potter concedes that this isn’t new: “It’s always been the case that as soon as a soldier gets to the battlefield, more experienced fighters tell them to ‘get rid of this or that.’ The kit is always modified.”

The same thinking, along with a readiness to improvise and experiment, is key to battlefield success. In Ukraine, Potter has seen tactics shift in six-month cycles. Drones are continually being improved to counter warfighting developments. The first, simple drones were defeated by electronic jamming, which forced a move to fiber-optic guided devices. That in turn stimulated a shift to interceptor drones.

“We were talking about ubiquitous surveillance — battlefield awareness — but that is already a year out of date. Slow reconnaissance drones are now the first casualty in any clash,” Potter said.

“We have to learn fast. The 2025 drones are wrong for 2026.”

A third lesson is that regional governments need to prepare to defend against drone platforms. Rather than focusing on fifth-generation fighter jets and hypersonic missiles, planners should be worried about Shaheds, unmanned aerial vehicles designed and produced by Iran at an estimated cost between $20,000 to $50,000 apiece. Russia has made extensive use of Shaheds in Ukraine.

“Shaheds are ubiquitous,” said Potter. “They are slower than other weapons but they can be used at scale.”

Potter hypothesized that proxy groups could launch them from Mexico against the United States, but he is more concerned about the threat they pose to Japan. With a range of 1,100 km, Japan has to worry about deployment of those weapons from hostile territory. “U.S. bases could be under attack. No U.S. partner has been spared in the Middle East, and most of what you are seeing there you will see in Asia. Targets are targets.”

More worrisome is the prospect of drone attacks against South China Sea shipping as Iran is doing in the Strait of Hormuz or like the Houthis in the Red Sea. “The South China Sea could be a festival of explosions with one-way drones. Everything is within the scope of existing weapons even without modifications.”

I can’t see it. To my thinking, open, kinetic attacks seem unimaginable. But, Potter pointed out, so too was an actual invasion of Ukraine. Unmanned vehicles are semideniable and there are plenty of places within the region from which they can be launched. “Proxy conflicts are attractive spots on the lower rungs of the escalation ladder.”

China’s proxies

A final lesson puts those pieces together: China is a far more formidable adversary and the possibility of conflict is higher than planners likely anticipate. “China’s industrial capacity is logarithmically higher than that of Russia. Moscow can’t make enough missiles to win the war. There is no reason to think that is the case with China. In fact, Beijing has sufficient industrial power to make weapons decisive.”

Moreover, China has proxies. It’s a controversial claim, but Potter argues that “at the moment Russia’s behavior is indistinguishable from that of a Chinese proxy. While it has invaded Ukraine for its own reasons and logic, those actions are, over the long-term, beneficial to China.” And when the war is over, it will be the weaker of the two partners, harboring “delusions of independence.”

North Korea too will bristle at being called a Chinese proxy, but there are ways that Pyongyang could be incentivized to act to advance Chinese interests. And, warns Potter, Myanmar could be a forward base for attacks on South China Sea targets — again if provided sufficient incentive.

That feels like hyperbole. But much that seemed unimaginable a few years ago is now the fodder of daily headlines. This is a new era with new threats. The more I think about it, the more I have to concede that the greatest mistake is assuming that dangers and developments elsewhere in the world are somehow impossible here.

Brad Glosserman, a senior adviser at Pacific Forum, is the author of “Peak Japan.” His latest book, written with David Lee, “Tech-Gemony,” on the geopolitics of high-tech, is out now from Hurst Publishers.