I'm John Batson with my colleague Gregory Copley of Defense and Foreign Affairs.

We go to the question of a cliche.

I love this cliche.

The generals always fight the last war.

Is that right and wrong at the same time, Gregory?

Well, it's becoming very interesting because it's obvious that people base their actions

and their future actions on their own experience, what they've done in the past,

what worked for them in the past, what scared them in the past, what didn't work for them

in the past, and so on.

So we all, if you like, fight yesterday's wars in our conduct of daily life and in our future

activities.

The key is how do you get over that?

And everyone's always trying to look at lessons of recent wars and then throw them into a think tank which says, well,

okay, how does this apply in light of probable new technologies and the like?

And lately, this whole pool is becoming more murky because the wars are rolling on and on. We're learning a lot of

new lessons as the technology rolls out. And as we see from, say, the Ukraine-Russia war,

there were a lot of old practices or, should we say, recent practices practices practices which worked very well in

the Gulf War and the like not working well in Russia-Ukraine we saw the increase in

drone warfare as it's called unmanned aerial vehicles unmanned maritime vehicles and the like

and then for a brief period we saw, well, that's going to be the wave of the future conflicts.

So everyone is busily focusing on UAVs and loitering munitions, drones, which basically

are on one-way missions to bomb a target.

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