Early in the Russia-Ukraine war, Ukrainian forces exhausted NATO’s annual peacetime production of 155-millimeter artillery shells within weeks (AVV Action 2023). This shortfall revealed a failure of strategic assumptions about modern war rather than battlefield strategy. Since the end of the Cold War, Western militaries have planned for short, precision-driven, and technologically decisive conflicts. Precision-guided munitions, networked command systems, cyber operations, and space intelligence promised swift, economically contained, and limited wars. The 1991 Gulf War seemed to validate this model, and two decades of counterterrorism operations reinforced the belief that mass mobilization, large stockpiles of weapons, and sustained industrial output belonged to a bygone era (Betz and Smith 2025).

That assumption is now under strain. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza, alongside rising Indo-Pacific tensions, point to a dual-industrial reality where technological sophistication and industrial endurance are inseparable. Precision weapons, drones, AI-enabled targeting, and sensor networks remain essential, but their battlefield effectiveness depends on the capacity to produce munitions at scales, repair equipment, and replace losses. Strategic advantage lies in resilience and the ability to endure disruption without losing coherence or credibility. This article argues that contemporary conflict requires a greater focus on regenerative power—the capacity of states and alliances to restore military effectiveness after sustaining losses—and that this capacity is becoming a critical foundation of deterrence.

This development challenges the linear “generations of warfare” narrative, which portrays military history as a progression from line and column tactics to industrial warfare, then to Cold War maneuver warfare, and finally to networked post-industrial conflict (Ameen 2024). The wars in Ukraine and Gaza cast doubt on this teleology. Rather than superseding earlier forms, contemporary wars combine mass, attrition, and industrial production with advanced digital technologies. Therefore, describing warfare as “post-industrial” risks complacency in procurement, logistics, and deterrence planning.

It also calls into question key assumptions of post-Cold War strategic thought. The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) literature suggested that information dominance and precision strikes would diminish the importance of mass and attrition (Tubbs 2002), while fourth-generation warfare theorists predicted a diffusion of power from industrial states to decentralized non-state networks (Lind, et al. 1989). Although these perspectives captured important technological developments, they underestimated the enduring significance of industrial capacity. Modern military technologies depend on complex production ecosystems, critical minerals, and resilient supply chains. The result is not the displacement of industrial warfare but its transformation.

Throughput Is Still Necessary

Throughput—the capacity to produce, repair, and replace materiel under sustained pressure—remains a necessary condition for success in high-intensity conflict. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, Ukraine’s high expenditure rates have exposed the limits of NATO’s peacetime industrial base. The rapid depletion of Western stockpiles forced NATO governments and industries to expand manufacturing capacity, invest in dormant plants, and increase labor (Pettyjohn and Dennis 2023). These steps resembled Cold War-era industrial contingency planning far more than post-2001 counterinsurgency models.

At peak periods, Ukrainian forces fired up to 7,000 Western-supplied artillery shells per day, far exceeding NATO planning assumptions (United States Studies Centre 2022). Air-defense shortages proved equally revealing. High unit costs and limited production capacity constrained advanced air-defense interceptors, while lower-cost Russian loitering munitions generated sustained operational pressure (Miller and Foy 2026).Meanwhile, repair cycles strained logistics. Ukrainian field workshops improvised repairs and cannibalized damaged systems to keep platforms operational, while modern Western platforms faced maintenance delays due to limited spare parts, specialized tooling, and long supply chains (Khrystoforov 2025).

Historical precedent confirms that endurance and industrial capacity matter as much as tactics. During World War II, U.S. industry produced nearly 300,000 military aircraft (PBS 2026), while the Soviet Union built over 100,000 tanks to maintain offensive operations (Connor 1987, 14). During the Cold War, NATO and Warsaw Pact defense planning emphasized collective defense, reserves, and mobilization to underwrite stability through sustained deterrence (NATO 1991).

The contemporary implication is that grand strategy in the twenty-first century depends less on deploying forces than on organizing the industrial ecosystems that sustain them. Semiconductor subsidies, critical-mineral investments, workforce development, and supply-chain diversification determine military readiness, alliance resilience, and deterrence credibility. Ukraine has become the first industrial stress test of the century, exposing the strategic costs of taking industrial resilience for granted. War has therefore not become post-industrial but dual-industrial (Raufoglu 2026).

Precision Deepens Dependence

High-technology weapons amplify industrial demands rather than reducing them. Precision-guided munitions, drones, and autonomous systems depend on microelectronics, optical components, and rare-earth elements concentrated in a few production hubs (Hudson and Beaver 2024). Advanced radars require gallium; autonomous platforms need neodymium or dysprosium (King 2025). A semiconductor shortage can halt missile production (Gould 2022), and a disrupted magnet supply can ground unmanned fleets (King 2025). In modern industrial war mass and precision operate as a tightly coupled system. Sophistication increases effectiveness but deepens vulnerability to supply-chain disruptions.

Ukraine revealed three structural weaknesses across NATO: limited stockpiles, industrial inertia following decades of consolidation, and a shrinking skilled workforce (Aries, et al. 2023). Conversely, despite sanctions, Russia adapted by dispersing production across civilian sectors and prioritizing wartime manufacturing (Kolyandr 2025). The lesson is clear: technological superiority alone does not ensure operational resilience or strategic stability.

This dynamic requires a fundamental reassessment of structural realist metrics of “latent power.” Although offensive realism theory promoted by John Mearsheimer tends to value a state’s latent military potential by aggregate wealth and population, assuming that these resources easily convert into kinetic capability (Mearsheimer 2001, 47), the modern dual-industrial reality operates in a highly specialized global economy where GDP is not inherently fungible. Modern supply chains and extreme component specialization mean that raw economic size or industrial output cannot be easily converted into high-tech military production without control of critical chokepoints. A financialized economy with a multi-trillion-dollar GDP cannot rapidly translate wealth into artillery shells or microelectronics if it lacks domestic machine-tool infrastructure, chemical processing plants, and a specialized manufacturing workforce.

Assessments of power typically focus on existing inventories or force structures (Bowers and Stålhane Hiim 2026). Recent conflicts suggest the need for an additional category: regenerative power, or the ability of a state to restore military capability after sustaining losses. It encompasses industrial capacity, skilled labor, logistical resilience, and institutional adaptability (Singh Mann 2026). In prolonged competition, regenerative power determines whether military effectiveness can be sustained over time. These dependencies alter the temporal logic of war. High-intensity conflict is........

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