The Sword, the Shield and the Oracle The future of war on the 2035 horizon

By Guy-Philippe Goldstein, lecturer at the École de Guerre Économique, essayist and novelist

Thinking about the future of war means understanding whether the coming technological decade will arm the sword or the shield, the offense or the defense. On that question hinges the future price of aggression and that of the stability of borders. Who is going to win?

Today, advantage to the defense?

Seen from mid-2026, the shield prevails. Three years after its "special military operation," Russia remains bogged down before Ukraine; and the U.S. Navy and Air Force, the most powerful in the world, cannot guarantee the security of the Strait of Hormuz.¹

The piece behind this shift fits in one hand: the small drone. On the Ukrainian front, tactical drones inflict 60 to 70% of the destruction of Russian equipment — more than artillery, tanks and missiles combined.² Now produced in the seven-to-ten-million-unit range, at a few hundred dollars apiece, they are the Kalashnikov of the 21st century.³ Above all, below four thousand meters of altitude they have opened an "air littoral" through which heavy platforms can no longer pass: a zone of denial, and even of repulsion.⁴

…but tomorrow, the return of the offense?

Yet history endlessly replays the dialectic of the sword and the shield. The stalemate of the trenches was broken in 1918 by the combined action of the tank, the gun and the aircraft — the Amiens offensive, that "black day of the German Army" — which would mature into Blitzkrieg.⁵ Such reversals can be lightning-fast. In 1940, the Dowding system — radars, observers and networked decision-making — lifted British interception from one-third to more than 90% of enemy squadrons.⁶ Today, against drones, countermeasures are already emerging: Ukrainian Sting interceptors,⁷ the French Alta Ares dome,⁸ the DragonFire laser.⁹ The reversal could come faster than it did a century ago.

Above all, the offense has shown its new power. In Gaza, urban warfare did not turn into the feared Stalingrad: Israel went in, won and consolidated while losing fewer than three hundred soldiers.¹⁰ In Ukraine, robotic assaults seized positions without a single infantryman;¹¹ one hundred and seventeen thousand-dollar drones destroyed forty bombers as far away as Siberia, four thousand kilometers off.¹² And three times over — Lebanon 2024, Iran 2025 and 2026 — the triad of cyber, artificial intelligence (AI) and precision strike blinded defenses and decapitated entire general staffs, an unprecedented feat in modern history.¹³

Invariants, accelerations and ruptures

So who will have the advantage? Three factors are at work.

An invariant, first: understanding the adversary's political mainsprings remains decisive. Russia, believing it was "restoring order" as in Prague in 1968, underestimated a Ukrainian resilience forged by ten years of shocks since 2014.¹⁵ Israel, betting that eliminating some forty leaders would bring Tehran down, ran up against a system far more resilient than the demonstrations of late December 2025 had suggested. In both cases, misreading the adversary's will led to a catastrophic error.

Acceleration, next — that of experimental, iterative innovation. Ukraine and Israel turned their constraints into strengths: experimentation imposed by fire, a culture of speed in which the front-line officer becomes an engineer, a fabric of small firms rather than prime contractors.¹⁷ Far from the cost inflation of the defense giants — for the "cost of the target" has become the sinew of war: downing a thirty-five-thousand-dollar Shahed with a Patriot a hundred times more expensive quickly exhausts consumables that are too costly.¹⁸ Therein lies the Western blind spot: cycles too slow, systems too expensive and, in Europe, capital that shuns tech — defense tech included — as the Draghi report showed.¹⁹

The new age of the oracle

The technological rupture, finally: artificial intelligence, where innovation will concentrate. An omnipotent oracle, it makes the battlefield transparent, links the target to the effector, and can double the accuracy of a drone made impervious to jamming.²⁰ Already at the heart of the strike, generative AI will tomorrow place its power in every hand, from the soldier to the officer. It promises the "agentic" general staff that decides in a few seconds,²¹ anticipates the adversary's moves and models the enemy's political structures. Theories such as Bueno de Mesquita's "selectorate," on the true centers of gravity of enemy will, will become applicable in real time: the invariant mentioned above will at last be understood — and neutralizable.²²

This twofold movement — innovation running wild, AI everywhere — will transform war to the point of weakening conventional deterrence: any defensive advantage can be overturned by the next breakthrough. Peace will no longer rest on a shield, but on a tempo. To deter, from now on, will be to demonstrate relentlessly one's dominance in this race where innovation is wed to artificial intelligence.

1. Daniel Byman, « Iran's Strait of Hormuz Gambit and the Limits of U.S. Military Power », CSIS, 20 April 2026.

2. Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, « Tactical Developments During the Third Year of the Russo–Ukrainian War », RUSI, 14 February 2025 (tactical drones account for 60–70% of Russian systems damaged or destroyed).

3. Kateryna Hodunova, « Ukrainian manufacturers able to produce 4 million drones per year, Umerov says », The Kyiv Independent, 27 June 2025; 2026 target in « Ukraine Eyes Drone Production Topping 7 Million Units », Aviation Week.

4. Shashank Joshi, « The dangerous delusion of modern warfare » (« Easier to start, harder to win »), The Economist, 28 May 2026 ("air littoral" concept below 4,000 m).

5. « Amiens », Canadian War Museum (combined-arms offensive of 8 August 1918); « Battle of Amiens », Encyclopædia Britannica ("black day of the German Army").

6. « How Hugh Dowding and the RAF won the Battle of Britain », Imperial War Museum (first integrated air-defense network: radars, observers, telephone, decision centers).

7. Jake Epstein, « A Ukrainian drone maker says its interceptor took down a Russian Shahed », Business Insider, 1 December 2025; « Ukraine's $1,000 interceptor drones the Pentagon wants to buy », Military Times, 11 March 2026.

8. Laurent Lagneau, « Le français Alta Ares a testé son drone intercepteur à turboréacteur Black Bird par grand froid », Zone Militaire (opex360), 11 February 2026 (claimed 70% kill rate; Sting interceptor by the Ukrainian Wild Hornets collective).

9. Seth J. Frantzman, « Israel's new laser system goes active », Breaking Defense, 29 December 2025 (Iron Beam, delivered late 2025); Rudy Ruitenberg, « UK Royal Navy to equip MBDA's drone-frying lasers by 2027 », Defense News, 20 November 2025 (DragonFire, embarked from 2027).

10. Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, « Tactical Lessons from Israel Defense Forces Operations in Gaza, 2023 », RUSI, 11 July 2024 (287 Israeli soldiers killed in action as of the time of writing).

11. « Ukraine military deploys dozens of ground robots, UAVs, FPV drones in historic combat operation in Kharkiv Oblast », Euromaidan Press, 17 December 2024 (13th Khartiia Brigade, near Hlyboke).

12. Kateryna Bondar, « How Ukraine's Operation "Spider's Web" Redefines Asymmetric Warfare », CSIS, 2 June 2025 (117 drones at $600–1,000, more than 40 aircraft, Belaya base over 4,000 km away).

13. « Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah », CNN, 28 September 2024; « Operation Rising Lion: The First 72 Hours », RUSI, June 2025, and FDD, 13 June 2025 (at least 20 senior commanders and scientists killed); « The US–Israel campaign in Iran », IISS, February 2026.

14. « Iran crypto exchange hit by hackers, $90 million destroyed », Reuters, 18 June 2025; « Suspected Israeli hackers claim to destroy data of Iran's Bank Sepah », Reuters, 17 June 2025 (Predatory Sparrow / Gonjeshke Darande group).

15. Mykola Bielieskov, « After four years of Russia's invasion, time to stop underestimating Ukraine », Atlantic Council, 20 February 2026 (Russian underestimation of Ukrainian resilience, post-2014 reforms).

16. Jon B. Alterman, « Why Decapitation Will Not Solve the United States' Iran Problem », CSIS, 3 March 2026 (citing A. B. Downes: more than 40% of externally imposed regime changes lead to civil war within ten years).

17. Kateryna Bondar, « How Ukraine Rebuilt Its Military Acquisition System Around Commercial Technology », CSIS, 13 January 2025; « Inside Ukraine's Battlefield Innovation Loop », War on the Rocks.

18. N. Hollenbeck, B. Jensen et al., « Calculating the Cost-Effectiveness of Russia's Drone Strikes », CSIS, 19 February 2025 (Shahed ≈ $35,000, Patriot PAC-3 interceptor > $3M, ≈ $350,000 per target hit).

19. « Time to Supercharge Europe's Innovation Ecosystem », War on the Rocks, July 2025 (European defense-technology investment gap).

20. « $100 AI Upgrade Gives Ukrainian FPV Drones Last-Meter Accuracy in Heavy Jamming », The Defense Post, 19 November 2025 (TFL-1 module; see also the Le Monde investigation of 14 November 2025).

21. Benjamin Jensen and Matthew Strohmeyer, « Rethinking the Napoleonic Staff: Agentic Warfare and the Future of Military Operations », CSIS, 17 July 2025.

22. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson and James D. Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival, MIT Press, 2003 ("selectorate" and "winning coalition" theory).