December 4, 2025: What will future wars be like? Two current conflicts, in Ukraine and the Middle East provide some proven and valuable insights into the future of war. In the Middle East, the primary power is Israel. The founding of Israel triggered attacks by all the Arab neighbors. Israel defeated this onslaught, which was repeated unsuccessfully in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006 and again in 2023. The current war is with Hamas, a radical faction of the Moslem Brotherhood that has few friends in the Arab world. One by one Israel’s Arab neighbors have made peace, which all found to be mutually beneficial. Israel won because they had more Cohesion, Fortitude And Unity than their opponents.

In the Ukraine War, Russia had less Cohesion Fortitude And Unity than Ukraine and made a big difference. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine has been a disaster for Russia, because Russian troops ran into unexpected and very effective Ukrainian resistance. Russia lost more troops in less than a year of fighting in Ukraine than they did during eight years of fighting in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Russia did have one success because of the Ukraine War, but that occurred in Russia, not Ukraine. Back in Russia, many people opposed the war. While the Russian government portrayed the fighting in Ukraine as an effort to keep NATO from harming Russia, it was obvious that no one was invading or attacking Russia and that it was Russians that invaded Ukraine. Like the Germans who invaded Russia in 1941, where they were on the defensive by 1944. the Russians invading Ukraine were soon on the defensive and could be driven out in another year or so.

Fourteen months after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainians were attacking and driving the Russian forces out. This was bad news for the Russian government, which was receiving growing criticism from its citizens about not merely the war’s cost, but the need for it at all. The government responded to the internal criticism and did so more effectively than their military efforts in Ukraine. Russia declared criticism of the Russian war effort in Ukraine illegal. Arrests were made and some critics went on trial. This discouraged some Russian critics but emboldened others. This sort of thing was uncommon in Russia.

Russia has been a police state since police states were invented. In addition to the secret police, its government also intercepted and read mail and overheard radio and telephone conversations. Russia mobilized support inside Russia for detecting anonymous critics and threatening them with arrest if they did not curb their criticism.

This criticism made it obvious that the Russian government was losing the support of its own people, including a growing number of senior officers who spoke out, usually via encrypted messages on Telegram, a popular cell phone app in Russia and Ukraine. Early on many of these Russian Telegram based military bloggers supported the invasion and were supplied with information by the Russian government, including opportunities to spend some time with the troops inside Ukraine. After a few months the Russian mil-bloggers were no longer reporting the official Russian version of events in Ukraine, but what was being reported by Russian veterans of the fighting.

A major reason why the Russian military effort in Ukraine failed was that the morale of most Russians was low while Ukrainians were more motivated to fight and do it more effectively. In some ways, this was a curious situation. Troops on both sides are ethnic Russian. While Ukrainians use their own version, or dialect of Russian, this does not prevent Russians and Ukrainians from carrying on discussions with each other. The situation is similar in other cultures. English is widely spoken worldwide, but there are dozens of dialects and when people speaking different dialects meet, the conversation is conducted on a very basic level because a dialect means unique versions of common words, like money, crime, girls and boys.

Troops from both sides being able to talk to each other diminished the usual wartime efforts to portray enemy troops as some kind of alien monster. Russian troops in Ukraine were treated poorly by their leaders. Initially Russian soldiers were sent to Ukraine without knowing they were no longer in Russia and in a neighboring country where invaders were being fiercely and successfully resisted. Many junior Russian officers weren’t told the truth. When it became obvious to the surviving Russian troops what was going on, morale and willingness to fight declined sharply. Ukrainian troops were better off when it came to morale, although most were not happy about finding themselves armed and fighting Russians. The initial Ukrainian defenders were active duty troops belonging to the army or newly created national guard. These men, and some women, paid attention to their training and had better morale, cohesion and effectiveness in combat.

Most Russian troops had little training. The main exceptions were the few special operations or airborne units. The combination of low morale and little training resulted in soldiers who were reluctant to fight and prone to flee. The only reliable combat troops were the small number of special operations, airborne or mercenary Wagner Group personnel available.

The Ukrainian approach was different. An effort was made, and often carried out, to see that all Ukrainian combat troops were properly trained and equipped. It was difficult to take the time to train new troops when more fighters were desperately needed on the front lines. The Ukrainians made an effort, and often succeeded in overcoming this problem by doing most of the training during the winter or any other time where there was a lull in the fighting. A lot of training was done outside Ukraine, usually in NATO countries.

The events in Russia and Ukraine create another question. Why do some parts of the world seem to defy efforts to achieve any degree of unity and peace? Not just for years or decades but for generations or as long as anyone can remember. The worst of these nations like Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia seem to actively avoid peace, prosperity and unity and finding solutions for their problems seems futile. But when you step back and take a closer look you find that all these countries have lots in common, aside from being failed states. All are largely Moslem and all have serious problems with governing themselves. This spotlights the fact that Moslems in general, and Arabs in particular, have developed a peculiar relationship with democracy in an attempt to cure these longstanding problems. The list of failed states grows longer if you include those who, on paper, maintain their unity but are chronically chaotic and unpleasant or worse to live in. These include Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, most African n

Many of the failed states were never unified nations with effective governments. Most African nations never existed as such in the past, but were created after a century or so of European colonial efforts that ended in the 1960s and 70s. The colonial powers left, usually willingly as they came to realize that these colonies were expensive to administer and would take a long time to develop prosperous enough economies to be self-sustaining. Unity was an even more difficult problem. When the Europeans left there were nearly a thousand different tribal/linguistic/cultural groups in sub-Saharan Africa. This plethora of cultural identities was the main reason there were few unified states, like ancient Ethiopia, in the region. There had been local kingdoms but they rarely lasted long because of the preference for kin-based government based on clans or tribes.

Nations with borders were considered a novel, and alien, idea. But the colonial period showed it could work, and since the 1960s several African states, like Botswana and the island state of Seychelles and Cape Verde, have remained unified, peaceful and prospering. Island states have an easier time of it in general and among those hundreds of separate cultures in Africa, there were many that absorbed the lessons of successful statehood their European colonizers offered. These were the groups that supplied many of the skilled workers, clerks and soldiers the colonial governments sought to recruit locally. But there were never enough of these bi-cultural locals to replace the colonial experts who tended to leave once independence was achieved. The Europeans were always considered outsiders no matter how much they absorbed the local culture and even married local women. Outsiders can overcome this. The Arab Moslem colonialists who preceded the Europeans by about a thousand years, coming overland from the north,

The failed Moslem states were another matter because they had a lot of cultural unity but forming effective prosperous and stable governments was another matter. Moslems tried and discarded socialist dictatorships modeled on the Nazis, not the hapless Bolsheviks after World War II. There followed a democracy movement that grew after the 1960s as many more Moslems were able to migrate to the West. Because of that millions of Moslems have come to understand democracy from personal experience. They did this either by moving to the West or being visited by family or friends who had and were eager to explain this curious but seemingly successful form of government in great detail.

As a result of this, opinion polls in Moslem countries have shown a growing approval of democracy, at least in theory. This was especially true in 2011 after the Arab Spring uprisings. But since 2011 that approval of democracy has dimmed a bit as Moslems unaccustomed to running a democracy found that doing so was not easy. A majority of Moslems still think democracy is the best form of government, but a quarter of Moslems also believe that democracy may be unsuitable for Moslem countries at this time. This disappoints and confuses many Moslems. They can see that democracy creates superior results where it has been established, but the process of getting democracy to work reliably is a lot harder and more difficult than many Moslems originally believed. This is largely because of some unique problems in Moslem states.

One of these intractable problems is opposition from some Islamic conservatives. This is made worse because many Arabs believe what Islamic terror groups preach; that the world should be ruled by an Islamic religious dictatorship and that this must be achieved by any means necessary. That includes using lethal force against non-Moslems and Moslems who don’t agree. This sort of thinking has been popular with Islamic conservatives since Islam first appeared in the sixth century. Since then, it has periodically flared up into major outbreaks of religiously inspired violence that seriously damages the nation it occurs in.

That’s not the only problem. Arabs, in particular, sustain these outbursts with their fondness for paranoid fantasies and an exaggerated sense of persecution and entitlement. For example, most Arabs believe that the September 11, 2001, attacks were not carried out by Arabs, but were a CIA scam, to provide an excuse for the West to make war on Islam. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. U.S. troops in Iraq were amazed at the number of fantastical beliefs that were accepted as reality there. For example, it is popular to believe that ISIL was created by Israel and the United States and that ISIL continues to survive because of continued support by Americans and Israelis.

Then there is the corruption and intense hatred. It’s a very volatile and unpredictable part of the world, and always has been. This has resulted in Arab states failing to achieve the same prosperity and other social, economic and educational achievements found in the rest of the world. In the first decade of the 21st century, it became popular to call many of Moslem countries that were having trouble establishing democracy failed states. This became the generic term for unstable countries that were prone to rebellion and civil disorder at the expense of everything else. What they all have in common is a lack of civil society, which means rule of, and respect for, law, and lots of corruption. The two sort of go together.