Wars remake war. New weaponry, new tactics, and new strategy time and again produce results no one predicted or thought possible.

Revolutionary France's levee en masse and Napoleon's bold attacks prevailed over staid 18th-century siege warfare and subdued all Europe. The aggressive assaults produced horrendous casualties but were unable to move the Western Front trenches more than a few meters in World War I.

Less than 20 years later, the European theater in World War II was the scene of blitzkrieg attacks—France, with Europe's largest army, was overrun in six weeks—followed by the heavily mechanized Allied forces moving forward as fast as logistics permitted.

The war in Ukraine seems to be remaking war once again. When Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops to march into Kyiv in February 2022, he expected they'd be welcomed, and U.S. intelligence assumed they'd encounter no serious resistance and called for evacuation.

Both nuclear superpowers assumed superior conventional forces would prevail. Volodymyr Zelensky's response — "I need ammunition, not a ride" — was considered naive, and the stalling of his 2023 counteroffensive was seen as proof Russia would win.

Successive U.S. presidents operated on that assumption. Joe Biden pressed Ukraine not to lob missiles into Russia for fear of a wider war. Donald Trump, in Anchorage in August 2025, pressed Ukraine not only to accept Russia's Donetsk advances but to yield more territory to them.

Both underestimated the ingenuity and morale that enabled Ukraine to turn relatively cheap and unsophisticated drones into war-winning weapons. As General David Petraeus explained in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, Ukraine "is imposing persistent strategic pressure on a much larger........

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