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.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · New world of warcraft: how conflict has forever changed · 29 May 2026 podcast

And there is more stuff that can kill you.

Precision

Firepower, not just the smart bombs and big missiles of the first Gulf War of the 1990s, but small intelligent weapons with chips inside them all over the place, accessible to a much wider range of actors, whether that is the United States of America or whether that is the Houthi rebels in Yemen firing Iranian-made projectiles.

And that transparent battlefield where everything

is being watched where it's increasingly lethal and which armies struggle to move without being struck.

That I think is one of the single most important trends I've seen on the battlefield for many years.

I don't think you'll find a single answer to that question that's uncontested among the big armies of the world.

We all recognize that Ukraine has been incredibly innovative in how it's fought.

You know, it has no navy, but it's destroyed a big chunk of the Black Sea fleet.

We can see that it's staved off this much bigger Russian army, in part through very, very clever use of technology, creating this incredibly lethal kill zone in which it's very hard for the Russians to advance, and they've done

It with massive amounts of drone use, with electronic warfare, with new tactics.

They've made an unmanned ground systems branch of their army, things like fiber optic controlled drones, so types of weapons that are being revived from decades ago on the battlefield.

But if you talk to Western Armed Forces, they'll say, we need to learn that stuff, but we would fight differently.

We in NATO, for instance,

Would have air dominance over Russia.

We would have long range firepower in much greater quantities than Ukraine.

So that debate is the one that has shaped my time in this job, which is which are the right lessons to take from the Ukrainian battlefield and the other battlefields, and which ones would not apply elsewhere.

So, for example, drones highly effective in Ukraine, but if you want a drone that can operate over the

much bigger distance of the Pacific.

It has to be bigger, it's much more expensive.

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