In 2020, a war in the Caucasus, invisible to most Americans, killed some 6,000 people, wounded tens of thousands, and displaced many others. From September to November, an intense series of battles between invading Azerbaijani forces and Armenia, in the mountains of the long-disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, pulled in fighter jets from Turkey and missile defense systems from Russia. The fighting also veered dangerously close to a critical new oil pipeline between Russia and Europe. When it was over, several thousand Russian troops were keeping a complicated truce, and governments around the world started learning difficult lessons. This May, Israel and Hamas engaged in a widely scrutinized and intense 20-day campaign. Hamas launched thousands of missiles into Israel, subjecting the Iron Dome missile defense architecture to a severe stress test, while Israel used precision airstrikes, guided by, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) says, significant advances in data science, imagery and geographical intelligence, and technical collection.
These short conflicts offer some provisional lessons about the future of combat, particularly in the use of air power—F-16 fighters on loan to Azerbaijan from Turkey, a new drone fleet against an Armenian military more constrained by gravity, and Israel’s claim to have used artificial intelligence to drive targeting.
