November 16, 2025: The armed forces that perform most efficiently follow five steps: acquire combat experience, analyze it, propose recommendations, distribute the recommendations and lessons throughout the force, and, finally, apply what has been learned throughout the forces.

These methods have been augmented by Operations Research which is, arguably, the most important scientific development of the 20th century. OR, like the earlier Scientific Method, is basically a management technique. Management is also a 20th century concept that gets little respect. In some respects, OR is the combination of management principles and the Scientific Method. Without the breakthroughs in management techniques, the enormous scientific progress of the 20th century would not have been possible. Without OR, World War II and subsequent wars would have been messier, costlier and longer

All these changes indicated some fundamental shifts in how wars were found but, without a war between anyone using these modern weapons, it was hard to understand what had really changed. Then came the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. During that conflict the speed with which modern weapons and other systems could destroy the enemy and speed up combat shocked generals worldwide. At this point everyone began to ponder the impact of this transformation in the way wars were fought. The Russians concluded that speed in decision making would become decisive, as would the growing Western edge in precision weapons. The Russians proposed in the 1980s that computers be used more by commanders to speed up the planning and execution of battles. That took several more decades to become practical.

Meanwhile the destructive impact of all this new technology was, in part, explained in the 1960s by John Boyd, a U.S. Air Force officer. Boyd demonstrated how the speed of assessing a combat situation, developing a plan and executing was decisive in all forms of combat. Boyd came up with the OODA/ Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act loop, which could be applied to air, naval and ground combat. This made sense to World War II veterans who had witnessed the OODA loop in action. It resonated with the Russians as well because superior speed with OODA was a German specialty which the Russians never mastered as well as the Germans did during World War II. But by the 1980s some Russian theorists saw computers as a possible solution. Again, the West had a technological edge and from the end of the Cold War and into the 21st Century it was Westerners who made all this work in combat. The Ukraine War triggered by a 2022 Russian invasion produced multiple examples of OODA in action. The Ukrainians had an edge, especially because they took the lead in developing drone warfare.

The impact of high speed warfare was demonstrated after September 11, 2001, when American forces used computerized data mining and analysis to speed up their OODA during counter-terrorism operations in Iraq. The Sunni terrorists quickly learned that, if an American raid was accompanied by intelligence specialists carrying biometric tools and comm links to huge databases of information on known terrorists and their organizations, there would quickly be additional raids. A few new names found on one raid would spawn additional raids and within 24 hours large terrorist operations could be rolled up. Microsoft contributed by developing a thumb drive that could quickly extract useful data from a laptop while rough but effective machine translation of many Arabic documents could quickly provide more leads, locations and who or what to look for.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan produced even more adaptation of commercial tools and techniques and applied them to intelligence work and combat planning. Data mining and predictive analysis computing what the enemy would do next using their past and current patterns drives modern marketing and much else. The troops in Iraq and Afghanistan showed how it could be used to hunt down Islamic terrorists and destroy their networks.

In the works are revolutionary new robotics concepts and tools. Some of these new weapons don’t work out as planned. Autonomous combat robots in the form of self-guided torpedoes have been around since World War II. Torpedoes were first developed in the 1800s. They were crude but often effective. A wake homing torpedo was first developed by the Japanese in the 1920s and their Long Lance torpedo used that technology successfully during World War II. The U.S. Navy never developed a wake homing torpedo but did develop countermeasures. These countermeasures didn’t work. The United States developed a wake homing torpedo in 1944 but never used it and never developed another one. Despite the failed American wake homing development efforts, the Russians, Germans, Chinese and Turks developed wake homing torpedoes and equipped their naval forces with them.

The flood of new ideas that has accompanied new weapons and tech in general continues. Dramatic change in warfare from one decade to the next has become the norm in the last century. People are still having a hard time getting used to and handling this high rate of change. That, so far, has been the only constant.