In April 2022, I crossed into Ukraine amid President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call for foreign fighters. Three years later, the drone swarms and attrition I witnessed there foreshadow the nightmare Beijing could unleash across the Taiwan Strait.
Kyiv claimed 20,000 foreign volunteers had joined. The reality, from what I saw, was closer to a few thousand—still a notable force, though always secondary to the hundreds of thousands, now millions, of Ukrainians who have formed the war’s backbone.
When Russian columns retreated from the capital’s suburbs and Mariupol still held, I assumed the war would end by summer’s close.
Three and a half years later, that optimism feels naive. The illusions that once shaped Western security thinking have dissolved under sustained attrition. No observer of Taiwan can now dismiss Ukraine’s lessons as peripheral. Early 2022 hubris forecast Kyiv’s collapse within days; pundits, even veteran analysts, echoed it. Most were wrong.
So was the belief that sanctions would cripple Moscow. Within weeks, more than 1,000 companies exited Russia—Microsoft, Apple, McDonald’s, H&M and Mitsubishi among them. Visa and Mastercard halted operations. SWIFT access was cut. On paper, it signaled economic collapse. It didn’t happen: Moscow adapted swiftly and without sentiment.
Under Elvira Nabiullina, the disciplined technocrat who leads the Russian Central Bank, the Kremlin imposed capital controls and forced exporters to repatriate hard currency. Trade pivoted to the yuan and dirham. A sanctions-resistant war economy emerged, sustained by partners in the Global South and a brutal sort of ingenuity.
Russians paid through inflation: an iPhone here, a vacation deferred there. Yet summer trips to Turkey and winter escapes to Thailand persisted, even spiking amid mobilization rumors. From the Kremlin to the provinces, survival held.
Western forecasts of exhaustion never materialized. Men. Tanks. Shells. Missiles. Russia replenished them all—mobilizing, recruiting convicts, importing North Korean munitions and expanding domestic production with scavenged components.
Drone output surged. Each Geran-2, a $20,000 Russian copy of Iran’s Shahed, forced Ukraine to expend interceptors costing hundreds of times more. I once watched a Patriot battery fire a US$4 million missile to kill one.
It worked, but that was the point. Moscow’s logic was simple: drain Western arsenals one interception at a time, and bet that populist surges from Trump to Europe’s AfD would fracture resolve.
We mocked Russia’s early “cope cages,” crude metal grilles welded atop tanks to deflect anti-tank missiles. They seemed pathetic. Yet similar latticework now shields vehicles from drone-dropped grenades.
Improvisation has hardened into doctrine. In Donbas, I saw a $500 first-person view (FPV) drone gut a T-72. Multiply that by thousands and even China’s hypersonic carriers start to look like targets, not symbols. Russia’s armored stocks are thinning, but adaptation still outpaces depletion.
Lessons in adaptation
These tactical shifts have strategic weight. The next great-power war will not ignite in Europe; it will erupt across the Taiwan Strait. Beijing calls reunification historical justice. Taipei sees resistance as survival. The rest of us foresee catastrophe.
The core question is not China’s capacity to invade but Washington’s will to intervene. Moscow gambled on Western fatigue and lost. In the United States, that fatigue is tangible. Donald Trump and JD Vance promise to “end” the war through negotiation, prioritizing retrenchment over commitment.
Aid to Kyiv continues, but each package now rides on domestic bargains—border policy and electoral math. The rhetoric has cooled from moral conviction to political calculus. Many predicted support would vanish under a second Trump term.
It has not. Policymakers now grasp that Russia seeks no genuine peace. Washington’s “strategic ambiguity” is less doctrine than delay; Ukraine showed that ambiguity invites miscalculation.
Doctrine must evolve, though. The US military, shaped by 20th-century air dominance and rapid-decisive campaigns, now faces obsolescence. Ukraine exposed airpower’s limits against cheap drones launched from deep in enemy territory.
Naval drones have bloodied the Black Sea Fleet. Supercarriers—once emblems of mastery—face saturation by low-cost swarms. In most US–China war games, America loses unless it rewrites its playbook.
The Strait’s shadow
Beijing’s calculus is constrained. Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is the prize it covets yet cannot replicate. A kinetic assault could destroy the foundries it needs intact, forcing years of reconstruction.
Operationally, the People’s Liberation Army lacks combat experience; Russia’s missteps in Ukraine cost tens of thousands of lives. The likelier path is prolonged hybrid pressure: economic strangulation, gray-zone incursions, cyberattacks, incremental island seizures.
PLA aircraft crossed the median line 1,800 times in 2024 alone—each sortie testing response thresholds without firing a shot. Beijing may wait until Western cohesion frays, hoping to secure Taiwan with minimal resistance.
Should conflict escalate, the disruption would dwarf anything seen in Russia. China could throttle global supply chains, halt chip production and manipulate port access or maritime insurance to idle factories worldwide.
This is no hypothetical. Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril Industries, recently told the Financial Times that the United States “must relearn how to produce weapons at scale, fast and without foreign dependencies.”
His company is building facilities to churn out thousands of autonomous systems annually—a direct hedge against industrial sabotage. “If we cannot build fast, we cannot deter,” he warned. The next war will unfold not only across the strait but inside the idle factories of America itself.
Factories as frontlines
Reindustrialization alters deterrence. The ability to scale production quickly can blunt the weaponization of trade and logistics. Failure invites shortages, technological concessions or escalation that fractures markets and opens a second front in the global economy.
Taiwan’s fate will hinge on its own mobilization. Extending conscription to one year is a start; universal training and deeper stockpiles must follow.
In Ukraine, civilians became soldiers overnight. Taipei cannot assume the same resilience without preparation. If its citizens value sovereignty, they must prove it through readiness to fight. Otherwise, annexation could mirror Crimea—a swift fait accompli rationalized after the fact.
Should Taipei stand and Washington hold, the world will face a new and costly reality: wars of the future will be fought by economies, assembly lines and algorithms as much as by troops. The only question is whether the US will rearm its industries before Beijing tests the strait—or whether Ukraine’s slow grind will replay itself in Taiwan.
Benjamin Stuart Reed is a US military veteran of Iraq and a former security contractor who worked in Afghanistan. He later volunteered in Ukraine, where he served in frontline roles during the early phase of the war. A fluent speaker of several languages, he has lived abroad extensively, including four years in Thailand. He is represented by Writers House Literary Agency in New York for his forthcoming memoir, “War Tourist.”
