Shashank Joshi
speaker
307 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 22 Jul
Shashank Joshi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Political scientists pointed out that yes, battlefield deaths might be going down, but that was because medicine had improved, armor had improved, evacuation had improved, and so soldiers who would previously have died now ended up wounded.
But on a bigger scale, I think there's just more evidence that war is really back.
If you look at the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, a monitoring group that recorded sixty-one active state-based conflicts in 2024, that was the highest level since records began in nineteen forty-six.
There were eleven full-fledged wars, that was the highest level since twenty sixteen.
The number of state-based conflicts has doubled.
When I take all of that together.
I think there's a paradox.
We see that
War is becoming harder to wage, the battlefield is becoming more lethal.
Armies are still at the early stages of trying to work out how they evade and defeat this blanket of sensors and drones and munitions that darken the skies above them.
And yet political leaders seem to be perennial optimists when it comes to the utility of war as an instrument of statecraft.
They all think they can win, they all think they can deliver the knockout blow, and there's lots of evidence to the contrary all around them.
I think
We have seen a succession of battlefields in which the impact of technology has become really clear.
That technology didn't appear on those battlefields.
It was evolving for years before.
But wars are always clarifying moments where you see these technological trends that have been developing for years and years and years burst forth in different and sometimes unexpected ways.
And for me, the thing that has stuck with me through various contexts.
conflict, some of the big ones, but also some of the ones you haven't heard of, you know, Nagorno Karabakh, has been the idea that the battlefield has become more and more transparent.
It means that there's stuff in the sky above you, whether that's satellites, but particularly drones, watching you all the time, watching every time you try and move, every time you try and attack.
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