By Robbin Laird
The fundamental assumptions underpinning Western defense planning are collapsing.
For generations, democratic nations operated under the comfortable presumption that major conflicts would arrive with ample warning, years, perhaps a decade, to mobilize industrial capacity, train forces, and prepare society for war.
This strategic cushion has evaporated. The “fight tonight” paradigm represents not merely a shift in military doctrine, but a wholesale transformation of how democracies must conceive of national security, industrial policy, and even the cognitive capabilities of their citizens. The implications extend far beyond military planning rooms into the very fabric of modern society.
Professor Justin Bronk’s stark warning that Western democracies may have only two to five years to prepare for potential major conflict marks a dramatic departure from historical norms. This compression of strategic time stems primarily from the exponential military expansion of the People’s Republic of China, combined with increasingly aggressive actions that signal malign intent. The construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea, explicit support for Russian military operations, and the rapid modernization of Chinese forces create a threat environment fundamentally different from the relatively stable post-Cold War period.
The implications of this temporal compression are staggering. Defense institutions built around five-to-ten-year planning cycles must now operate on timelines measured in months or years. Budget cycles, procurement processes, training programs, and force structure decisions all predicated on leisurely timelines become obsolete. More troubling still is the interconnected nature of modern strategic threats. A Chinese move against Taiwan would inevitably draw American forces from Europe, potentially creating opportunities for Russian aggression against NATO. Conversely, a major European conflict could embolden Chinese action in the Indo-Pacific. These are no longer isolated regional scenarios but interconnected global risks that could cascade rapidly, overwhelming response capabilities.
This reality forces an uncomfortable reckoning: military forces must be prepared to fight with what they have today, not what they plan to acquire tomorrow. The notion of a grace period for mobilization has become dangerously obsolete. Every capability gap, every procurement delay, every training shortfall represents not a future problem to be addressed, but a present vulnerability that could prove decisive in the opening hours of conflict.
Perhaps nowhere is the changed character of modern warfare more evident than in the brutal mathematics of air defense. The Ukrainian conflict has laid bare a fundamental asymmetry: defenders armed with expensive, technologically sophisticated systems face adversaries who can achieve strategic effects through mass employment of cheap, expendable platforms. The specific numbers are sobering. A $1.8 million interceptor missile engaging a $7,000 Shaheed drone represents not merely an unfavorable cost ratio, but a pathway to strategic defeat through financial exhaustion.
This economic reality creates an existential challenge for Western defense budgets. Adversaries have discovered that they need not match Western technological sophistication to achieve battlefield success. Instead, they can exploit the defender’s reliance on high-end systems by simply overwhelming them with volume. In a sustained conflict, the defender confronts a grim calculus: missiles and money will be exhausted long before the attacker runs out of cheap drones, loitering munitions, or cruise missiles. Victory through attrition becomes mathematically certain for the side that can sustain cheaper attacks.
Technologies like the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System offer a glimpse of potential solutions. By converting existing stockpiles of unguided Hydra rockets into laser-guided interceptors at a cost of $20,000 to $35,000 per shot, such systems begin to address the cost curve problem. Yet even these more affordable solutions cannot protect everything. The hard lesson from Israel and Ukraine is that comprehensive territorial defense is economically unsustainable. Nations must make stark choices about what to defend and what to abandon to enemy strikes.
The concept of “campaign critical assets” emerges from this reality. Major air bases, key ports, command and control nodes, and critical logistics hubs warrant protection by expensive systems like Patriot and THAAD batteries. Large civilian population centers, despite the obvious humanitarian concerns, generally do not determine military outcomes and thus cannot justify the expenditure of scarce interceptors. This triage approach represents a painful departure from idealized notions of comprehensive defense, but the alternative—attempting to defend everything—guarantees exhaustion of defensive capabilities within days or weeks of sustained attack.
The ability to fight tonight is meaningless without the capacity to fight tomorrow night, next week, and next month. This endurance depends entirely on industrial base resilience—a capability that has eroded dramatically in recent decades. Air Vice Marshal Rob Robinning’s observation that forces must be ready for sustained operations places the spotlight squarely on industrial mobilization, or rather, the current lack thereof. Matt Jones from BAE Systems articulates the central dilemma: waiting for crisis to justify investment leaves militaries with money but no time. Industrial capacity cannot be conjured overnight; factories, supply chains, and skilled workforces require years or even decades to establish.
Contemporary defense industrial models rely on assumptions of stable, peacetime conditions and globalized supply chains optimized for efficiency rather than resilience. These just-in-time approaches, while economically rational in peacetime, collapse catastrophically under wartime stress. When critical components are manufactured on distant continents or depend on parts from multiple countries, the entire production chain becomes vulnerable to interdiction, sanctions, or simple chaos. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a preview of this fragility in civilian sectors; the defense implications are far more severe.
True industrial resilience requires what some analysts call “sovereign capability”—not merely the ability to assemble systems domestically, but the deep engineering knowledge, specialized skills, and decades of accumulated expertise necessary to design, innovate, repair, and sustain complex military systems under pressure. This represents the submerged portion of the industrial iceberg, invisible in peacetime but absolutely critical during conflict. Building this capability is generational work that cannot be accelerated through emergency spending.
The workforce dimension adds another layer of complexity. Mike Pryor’s example of Boeing Defense Australia employing 900 active reservists illustrates a circular dilemma: these skilled workers are essential to defense production, yet their military obligations require them to deploy during crises, precisely when their industrial expertise becomes most critical. The specific case of the Wedgetail training system is instructive—if those reservists deploy, the ability to train new Wedgetail crews simply collapses. Nations face impossible choices between sending skilled individuals to frontlines or retaining them in supporting roles that enable the broader war effort.
Lieutenant General Susan Coyle’s emphasis on non-kinetic effects, space operations, cyber warfare, electronic warfare, and information operations, highlights another dimension of modern conflict that defies traditional planning assumptions. Dominance in these domains could prove decisive before conventional forces even engage.
Yet there exists a troubling mismatch between the pace of conflict and the speed of cyber operations. Developing and embedding sophisticated cyber weapons capable of, for example, disabling enemy air defense networks requires eighteen months to three years.
If strategic warning time has compressed to two years, many cyber capabilities designed for a hypothetical future conflict may be obsolete or incomplete when actual hostilities commence. This temporal mismatch forces a different approach to innovation and capability development. Lieutenant General Simon Stewart’s call to shift from platform-centric thinking to threat-informed approaches reflects this new reality. Rather than spending a decade designing the perfect single-purpose system, military organizations must develop rapid, iterative processes that can quickly combine and recombine existing capabilities to meet emerging threats.
The Australian MQ-28 Ghost Bat program exemplifies this philosophy, serving as a platform for immediate experimentation with multi-domain concepts. The key lesson from Ukraine reinforces this approach: operator experience drives innovation more effectively than engineering specifications. Getting prototypes into users’ hands quickly, learning what works and what fails in realistic conditions, and rapidly iterating based on feedback proves far more effective than traditional lengthy development cycles. This demands institutional cultures comfortable with experimentation, acceptable risk-taking, and rapid adaptation rather than perfection.
Air Marshal Stephen Chappell’s observation that advanced economies are “aviation nations” but “no way stitched up” for defense purposes reveals a massive untapped resource. Nations possess enormous civilian aviation capabilities, commercial airlines, maintenance facilities, logistics networks, skilled personnel, that could theoretically surge to support military operations during crises. Yet the mechanisms to rapidly pivot these civilian capabilities to defense needs largely do not exist.
Consider the resources available: major commercial carriers operate sophisticated maintenance and logistics operations, regional airlines provide distributed infrastructure, and civilian aviation employs thousands of pilots, engineers, and technicians with transferable skills. These represent strategic assets that remain largely disconnected from defense planning. Chappell’s proposal for structures like a National Aerospace Enterprise suggests creating coordinating mechanisms that could quickly harness civilian capacity when required.
The integration challenge extends beyond aviation. In every advanced economy, civilian sectors possess capabilities directly relevant to defense—manufacturing capacity, logistics expertise, engineering talent, communications infrastructure. The question is not whether these resources exist, but whether mechanisms are in place to rapidly mobilize them. Historical examples of wartime industrial mobilization offer lessons, but modern economies are far more complex and specialized. Creating frameworks that can smoothly transition civilian capabilities to defense purposes without waiting for crisis requires peacetime investment in planning, relationships, and infrastructure that currently receives insufficient attention.
Perhaps the most profound challenge identified in contemporary strategic analysis concerns not weapons systems or industrial capacity, but human cognition itself. John Blackburn’s research on what he terms the “pandemic of the mind” describes a systematic erosion of critical thinking in democratic societies, driven largely by technological dependencies and changing patterns of information consumption. Social media, algorithmic content curation, and the constant stimulation of digital environments train populations for quick reactions rather than sustained analysis or deep thought.
The statistics are alarming. Studies suggest declining literacy rates in some populations, with estimates that 40 percent or more struggle to engage with complex written material—precisely the type of content necessary to understand sophisticated strategic challenges. Artificial intelligence arrives in this deteriorating cognitive environment, potentially accelerating rather than reversing these trends. The distinction between augmented intelligence and artificial intelligence becomes critical here.
Augmented intelligence treats AI as a tool that enhances human capability while preserving human agency and judgment. Like having a brilliant but inexperienced assistant, such systems can analyze vast datasets, identify patterns, and accelerate certain tasks while humans retain direction, ethical oversight, and critical judgment. This approach actively prevents cognitive atrophy by requiring continued human engagement and thought. It represents AI in service to human flourishing and capability.
True artificial intelligence, systems that think independently and potentially exceed human cognitive capabilities across all domains—represents a fundamentally different trajectory. Researchers like Tom Hanson suggest this path leads toward transhumanism, where human and machine cognition merge through technologies like neural interfaces. Hanson’s timeline of ten to twenty years for widespread adoption places humanity in a critical bridge phase where choices made today will determine whether AI enhances or replaces human judgment.
The strategic imperative for democratic societies is preserving and strengthening human cognitive capabilities as the foundation for everything else, security, prosperity, and the wisdom to make sound decisions about powerful technologies. This is not about resisting technological progress, but about recognizing that human minds capable of critical reasoning, ethical judgment, and complex analysis remain the essential defense. In an era of AI-enabled information warfare, populations unable to think critically become strategic vulnerabilities, susceptible to manipulation, unable to distinguish truth from fabrication, and incapable of making informed democratic choices.
The fight tonight paradigm offers little middle ground. As multiple analysts conclude, the choice facing democracies is stark: adapt or accept vulnerability. The comfortable assumptions of the post-Cold War era—ample warning time, technological superiority compensating for numerical disadvantages, just-in-time efficiency, and the separation of civilian and military spheres—have collapsed. The threats are neither hypothetical nor distant; they exist now, manifested in military buildups, aggressive actions, and the demonstrated willingness of authoritarian powers to use force.
Adaptation requires simultaneous action across multiple domains. Militarily, forces must achieve genuine readiness with existing capabilities while developing rapid, threat-informed approaches to innovation. Economically, the cost curves of modern warfare demand affordable mass alongside high-end capabilities, with realistic triage about what can be defended. Industrially, nations must rebuild resilient defense industrial bases with sovereign capabilities and deep expertise, accepting that this work requires generational commitment rather than crisis spending.
The workforce dimension requires creative solutions to resolve the circular dilemma of skilled personnel needed simultaneously in uniform and in industry. Civil-military integration must move from theoretical possibility to practical reality, creating mechanisms that can rapidly harness civilian capabilities during crises. In the cyber and non-kinetic domains, iterative development and operator-driven innovation must replace lengthy acquisition cycles.
Most fundamentally, societies must invest in human cognitive capabilities as the foundation for all other forms of national strength. In an era of AI-enabled information warfare, critical thinking is not a luxury but a strategic necessity. The question posed at the conclusion of contemporary strategic analysis remains unanswered: What is the true long-term cost if nations focus exclusively on acquiring new weapons systems while neglecting continuous investment in industrial workforces and, most critically, in maintaining populations capable of sustained critical thought?
The fight tonight paradigm demands recognition that preparation is not a future activity but a present imperative. Every day of delay, every postponed investment, every capability gap left unfilled represents not a problem for tomorrow’s planners but a vulnerability in forces that may be called to fight this very night.
The compressed timelines, economic realities, industrial fragilities, and cognitive challenges are not predictions of a possible future—they describe the present strategic environment.
Adaptation cannot be deferred; the choice is now, and the consequences of failing to choose are becoming clearer with each passing day.