The future of war in Europe is already playing out in Iran, and we’re not ready for what’s coming |
Want to know what the future of war in Europe looks like? Keep an eye on Iran.
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The best way to illustrate the breakneck speed of battlefield technology is to follow the creation of a single low-cost drone: The FLM 136 (also known as the LUCAS which stands for Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System) is a US attack drone used for the first time when the United States struck Iran at the end of last month.
For Iran, the LUCAS will have been familiar. It is reverse-engineered from the country’s own notorious Shahed-136. That model, which has arguably entirely reoriented the economics of war, has been deployed across Ukraine to devastating effect after Iran supplied them in huge quantities to Russia.
Because of that, Ukraine has become remarkably proficient at drone defence, the world leader in the space in fact, an effort Front Ventures has been directly involved in.
During the course of the war, Ukraine has shot down around 44,000 Shaheds among tens of thousands of other missiles, drones and bombs.
That expertise means that Ukrainian drone interceptor units are now being deployed to the Middle East, where they’ve already begun bringing down drones.
The point of this explanation is to illustrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that what happens in conflict in one part of the world will inevitably inform the next conflict no matter where it happens.
Ideas, technology and even personnel deployed in one theatre are inevitably disseminated to others.
A lot of my work with Front Ventures concerns giving Ukraine what it needs to defend itself from incoming threats by supporting Ukrainian companies.
Our portfolio includes companies like Sky Hunter, which builds targeting systems and AeroMotors, which provides drone motors directly to the frontline, built in Europe, rather than China.
By observing Iran, we in Europe can predict and prepare what new developments might come to Ukraine and the wider continent next.
Here’s an example to illustrate how these things move in the other direction: In December 2011, a highly-classified American drone landed inside Iranian territory.
It was widely believed to be an RQ-170 Sentinel, one of the United States’ most advanced surveillance drones.
Its capture by the Iranians, from which it gained all sorts of information on manufacturing, materials, guidance systems and aerodynamics led to, as you may have guessed, the creation of the first models of Shahed drone.
To really make your head spin, the Shahed design was also likely heavily inspired by Israel’s Harpy surveillance drone, which is conjectured to have come to Iran after Israel sold them to China who reportedly then reverse-engineered them and could have passed that knowledge onto Iran.
The Shahed is the result of a global transfer of information, both willing and unwilling.
Because of my role I’m always tracking that transfer of knowledge and attempting to make predictions about what the future of warfare is.
With that in mind, here are the things I believe we can learn so far from the war in Iran.My remit being technology, I will refrain from going too deeply into the more macro-economic developments like the stranglehold on Strait of Hormuz and the use of energy as a bludgeon but rest assured these are indeed seismic changes.
Most starkly: The use of AI is something we’re seeing used in warfare at scale for the first time in Iran. In the first 24 hours of attacks on Iran, the US was able to hit an immense 1000 targets, thanks in part to its use of AI to pinpoint targets.
While it cannot be doubted that battlefield AI is effective, there are major questions around its fallibility and how it makes decisions. Even the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, whose Claude platform was reportedly used in the Iran strikes, has strongly resisted the use of autonomous AI in warfare.
In a lengthy essay on the topic he issued a chilling warning: ‘A swarm of millions or billions of fully automated armed drones, locally controlled by powerful AI and strategically coordinated across the world by an even more powerful AI, could be an unbeatable army’.
Another thing we’re seeing for the first time in this war that will now become more widespread on the battlefield is the return of land-based missile systems.
The US was previously a signatory to the INF treaty, until President Trump pulled out of it in 2019, which limited the range of land-based missiles to 310 miles.
With that block no longer in place, the US appears to be looking to develop Precision Strike Missiles (PrSMs) with a range of around 434 miles.More broadly, Iran is continuing a trend of a complete reorientation of the economics of war.
The utility of the Shahed is that even if it’s shot down it’s a strategic victory. The comparatively miniscule cost of between $20,000-50,000 against an air interceptor costing millions means that it’s a win as soon as it’s fired upon.
That was the case in Ukraine, but with the US debuting a Shahed-like drone we’re now seeing something new: The world’s biggest military superpower attempting to replicate something built effectively out of necessity, because Iran is a country afflicted with tight sanctions and trade restrictions.
The cost of a piece of military equipment is now arguably as important as the payload.
This also ties in to another iteration we’re seeing in this war used at an unprecedented scale: A brute force approach aimed not at confounding air defences, but simply overwhelming them.
Even the most sophisticated system like the Iron Dome can only bring down a certain amount of projectiles before it falters and Iran’s strategy is just that; to flood the skies with cheap drones and rockets.
The list goes on, from Iran’s lethal deployment of hypersonic missiles similar to Putin’s Oreshnik, to the United States’ new bunker-buster. What’s clear is that when a conflict flares up in one part of the world, those in every other part of the world are watching. Technological development is not confined to one region or landmass.
Jonas Malmgren is the CEO of defence-focused investor FrontVentures (www.frontventures.se). He is also a former technical officer in the Swedish Armed Forces.