We need to brace for impact in a disrupted world
The Australian
By David Kilcullen*
11 January 2025
This year is starting as 2024 ended: in a tangle of overlapping conflicts. Four strategic trends are emerging – but there’s an important silver lining for Australians.
Four trends appear to be driving today’s surface chaos: a global transition to multipolarity; a collapse of confidence in elites, experts and institutions; a bottom-up technological transformation of warfare; and the resulting emergence of new domains, means and methods of conflict. This is not the only way to make sense of things, but it offers a baseline for understanding events in 2025.
Before examining each trend, it’s worth reviewing current conflicts.
Ukraine
Russian forces are advancing faster in Ukraine’s crucial Donbas region than at any time since 2022. Despite Kyiv’s drone and missile strikes into Russia and use of maritime drones (uncrewed surface vessels, or USVs) in the Black Sea, the war is going Moscow’s way.
Russian troops are pushing forward despite casualties of perhaps 1500 a day. Air and missile strikes are pummelling Ukraine’s power grid, population centres and industrial base.
Russian units are poised to capture Pokrovsk, the fall of which would dislocate Ukraine’s defensive front, opening the way for a Russian advance – though it’s unclear whether Moscow maintains sufficient strength to exploit a breakthrough.
In a war of attrition, population size, national mobilisation and industrial production are key. Despite its staggering losses, Russia’s military is almost 1.7 times larger than at the start of the war, while its military-industrial production has expanded, showing resilience and mobilisation capacity.
Even at the outset, Ukraine, with a prewar population of 41 million, was only one-quarter Russia’s size. It has since lost 20 per cent of that population through battle casualties and a refugee exodus.
All this means, even as Western weapons reach the frontlines and restrictions on their use are lifted, Ukraine lacks the mobilised manpower to fully use them. (Combat troops in Ukraine, like everywhere else, are overwhelmingly male.
In Ukraine’s case they are also often middle-aged because of the country’s inverted population pyramid.) Even the best defensive line cannot stop a determined attacker unless troops are present to hold positions.
For all Ukraine’s ingenuity in other areas, the lack of numbers – infantry to seize and hold ground, heavy weapons to support them – is its weakest link.
Kyiv’s 2024 invasion of Russia’s Kursk region, intended (according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky) to divert effort from the Donbas, has not slowed Russia’s advance. This week’s renewed offensive is unlikely to fare much better but may offer Zelensky a bargaining chip in peace talks.
These look increasingly likely: US president-elect Donald Trump has suggested he can “end the war in one day” through negotiation. Trump will be blamed if talks give Russian President Vladimir Putin most or all of his strategic goals.
But had Kamala Harris been elected president instead, she probably would have had to make a similar deal.
On the upside, the same battlefield arithmetic suggests Russia will need to spend time rebuilding, whatever the war’s outcome, leaving little capacity for further aggression in the short term. Putin may thus achieve a partial, pyrrhic victory in Ukraine. But the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus has unhinged Putin’s position in the Middle East.
Middle East
The sudden victory of Syria’s rebels, backed by Turkey (and assisted by Ukraine) and led by former al-Qa’ida faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, transformed the Middle East in mere weeks. The big winners, beyond HTS itself, are Israel and Turkey.
Israeli tanks sit 25km from Damascus. Israel has secured the entire Golan Heights, cut off Hezbollah from Iranian and Syrian support, and occupied the summit of Mount Hermon, dominating Syria’s frontier with Lebanon.
Israeli troops are pushing into Lebanon despite the ceasefire with Hezbollah, which looks increasingly shaky, even as Lebanon’s parliament chooses a new president, Joseph Aoun, likely to be more acceptable to Israel than some previous presidents.
Lebanon's parliament elected army chief Joseph Aoun head of state on Thursday, filling the vacant presidency with a general who enjoys U.S. approval and showing the diminished sway of the Iran-backed Hezbollah group after its devastating war with Israel.…
While fighting in Gaza continues, and despite Houthi missile launches from Yemen, Israel’s situation has improved enormously since last year.
Turkey is in position to consolidate regional influence through its relationship with HTS and via its proxy, the Syrian National Army. Turkish-backed troops are advancing in northern Syria, aiming to push back Kurdish fighters (including the Syrian Democratic Forces, trained and equipped by the US).
More broadly, Ankara’s longstanding ambition to extend its influence across former Ottoman dominions just took a step forward.
The big losers are Syria’s ethnic and religious minorities and Assad’s backers, Russia and Iran. Russia’s bases – Khmeimim and Tartous, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast – are at risk but Russian forces, committed in Ukraine, lack capacity to reinforce them. Satellite images suggest the Russians are evacuating troops, vehicles and aircraft from these bases, probably to Libya, indicating lack of confidence in their future.
Things are worse for Iran. Tehran’s ability to support its “axis of resistance” – Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen – relied on a friendly regime in Damascus, which is why Iran invested in propping up Assad during Syria’s civil war.
The Assad government, plus militias in Iraq, gave Iran a secure land corridor from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, 3000km. This enabled money, materiel, advisers and fighters to transit a vast area, letting Iran threaten Israel from several directions, target Iran’s regional rival Saudi Arabia, support its proxies and hold US assets at risk. All this is now under threat.
Iran’s remaining proxy, Yemen’s Houthi movement, continues to disrupt shipping through the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab, where ship transits – 13 per cent of global shipping – have dropped sharply since the Houthis began their campaign in October 2023, using drones, missiles, fast attack craft and USVs to target commercial vessels and the warships protecting them.
Egypt, which earns millions each month from ships transiting the Suez Canal, has lost fully 2 per cent of its GDP. The extra time and cost, roughly 10 days and $US1.5m ($2.4m) a voyage, to sail the long way around Africa rather than via Suez are straining global supply chains.
All this is intended to pressure Israel to back off its campaign against Hamas: Houthi leaders have said they will maintain the effort until an enduring ceasefire is in place. It also gives Iran another way to strike Israel from Yemen.
Western navies – including a US-led task group that recently shot down one of its own F/A-18 aircraft in a friendly-fire incident, and a European naval force that has been escorting ships since last February – have proven ineffective, with 87 commercial ships attacked by last November including two sunk, one captured and at least three crew members killed.
US, British and Israeli airstrikes in Yemen have failed to break the Houthi stranglehold on one of the world’s critical maritime transit points.
US-China rivalry
The multi-domain competition between mainland China and the US is accelerating.
Over Christmas, the Chinese navy launched its largest incursion into the Taiwan Strait in almost 30 years, putting 102 ships into the strait and astride Taiwan’s maritime approaches, while sending warships through the Miyako Strait between the Japanese islands of Okinawa and Miyako.
Beijing claimed it was responding to recent visits by Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te, also known as William Lai, to Hawaii and Guam. But its moves followed an increasingly aggressive series of blockades, missile launches and cross-strait incursions throughout 2024, designed to intimidate Taiwan, test allies’ resolve in supporting Taipei, and practice for war.
Beijing is being equally aggressive in the South China Sea, harassing and ramming vessels inside the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. Using artificially constructed islands as bases, China sent warships, submarines, undersea drones and warplanes, including nuclear-capable H-6K bombers, into disputed territory numerous times in 2024.
In December, it conducted what Beijing called a “combat readiness patrol” around the disputed Scarborough Shoal. All this destabilises a region that carries one-third of world shipping and 40 per cent of global petroleum traffic, including 65 per cent of China’s total trade and 42 per cent of Japan’s.
The Pacific is only one of several arenas of competition. In South Asia, China continues its confrontational approach to India across their Himalayan border. Beijing is building relations with the Taliban, seeking access to Afghan mineral deposits and to Bagram air base, abandoned by the US in 2021.
China also seeks a land corridor through Afghanistan to Iran, which would allow it to import oil (under its 25-year agreement with Tehran signed in 2021) overland, lessening dependence on seaborne imports vulnerable to US naval interdiction.
Chinese hackers’ penetration of US infrastructure – power, water, sanitation, ports, harbours, transportation, oil and gas – was recently revealed as dramatically more advanced than previously understood.
Likewise, China’s hacking of US government communications including mobile phones, email and text messaging, turned out to be significantly larger than thought, prompting the FBI to recommend all officials now use end-to-end encrypted messaging apps.
China continues developing hypersonic glide vehicles and militarised space systems, improving missile technology and expanding its nuclear arsenal. It flew two new sixth-generation fighter designs on Boxing Day and launched an advanced amphibious ship the following day.
The Chinese navy keeps two to three aircraft carriers at sea, giving Beijing the same number of “big deck” platforms in the western Pacific as Washington. A recent Pentagon assessment prompted one analyst to note that China was “conducting the largest military build-up seen since Nazi Germany in the 1930s”.
Resurgent terrorism
A final development is the resurgence of terrorism, jihadist or homegrown, in the US, Europe and elsewhere.
On New Year’s Day in New Orleans a US Army veteran inspired by Islamic State killed 14 and injured 35 in a ute ramming attack, dying in a shootout with police. He also placed radio-controlled explosives in coolers in crowded areas. The same day, a US soldier home on leave from Germany detonated a bomb in a Tesla Cybertruck at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, apparently also shooting himself, causing damage but no other casualties.
Ten days earlier, in the German town of Magdeburg, a Saudi immigrant and noted anti-Islam activist drove into a Christmas market crowd, killing six and injuring 299.
This string of attacks reflects a general increase in terrorism in the West throughout 2024, after several years of lower threat. It seems to be driven in part by rising anti-government extremism and partly by spillover from the Middle East, especially Gaza.
Low-tech attacks using vehicles or knives (as in the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Sydney in April) are prevalent, but attackers increasingly also use explosives. Most attackers are radicalised individuals rather than organised teams.
Some attacks resulted from homegrown radicalisation while others reflected attempts by terrorists to enter Western countries illegally, or (in Europe) issues in the integration of migrants from war-torn countries. Many such migrants arrived starting in 2015, at the height of the Syrian war.
In global terms, terrorism in the West was dwarfed by a substantial increase in Africa, which experienced deadly attacks in Somalia, Libya, the Sahel, West Africa and Mozambique. Many attacks were jihadist-inspired but others were driven by regional separatism, especially in Ethiopia and Sudan, two of the world’s deadliest yet least-reported conflicts.
As conflict in Africa spikes, some countries are rejecting co-operation with traditional Western partners, turning instead to Russia’s Africa Corps, formerly the Wagner Group, or others.
Underlying trends
All this is a lot to keep track of, to say the least. But today’s surface chaos seems to reflect four key strategic trends. The first is an accelerating transition to multipolarity. The unipolar US-led world order of the 1990s and early 2000s is a thing of the past, as shown by US defeat in Afghanistan, impending failure in Ukraine and waning influence in the Middle East, where the trillion-dollar US military cannot beat the Houthis.
But US rivals – Russia, Iran, China, North Korea – also are suffering defeats, as noted, so that rather than one dominant power replacing the US we see a world increasingly divided into competing blocs. Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are aligning, with Venezuela and Cuba tagging along.
The US and its allies (NATO, AUKUS and like-minded partners) remain relatively united, with neutral nations (Finland and Sweden) joining NATO in response to Russian aggression.
Turkey, India, Brazil and South Africa are pursuing their own interests, while key Asian countries such as Indonesia are re-emphasising non-alignment.
China, in particular, has severe structural economic and demographic problems; militarily, one think tank noted in June that “invading Taiwan or mounting a successful blockade would be the most complex military operation in modern history, and China’s military has not fought a major war in more than seven decades”. Thus, rather than China overtaking the US to impose a Beijing-centric world order, we are heading for a multipolar system similar to that of the 1930s.
A second trend is the worldwide collapse of confidence in elites, experts and institutions. In the West, this dates to the global financial crisis of 2008-09, accelerated by Brexit and the election of Trump in 2016, with political norms breached by Trump and his adversaries alike.
It accelerated through Covid-19 with lockdowns, travel bans and vaccine mandates, the subsequent inflation and cost-of-living crises, hyper-partisan polarisation and political violence in the US and Europe.
Lack of accountability for incompetence, mismanagement and corruption reinforced the trend. Current controversies over misinformation, media cover-ups, election integrity, border security, politicisation of once-impartial institutions, and migration (legal or otherwise) are its latest manifestation.
China’s “let it rot” movement and its Russian equivalent in which disaffected youth – particularly young men – act as saboteurs or opt out of traditional life pathways show this is not restricted to the West.
A third trend is the ongoing bottom-up technological transformation of warfare. From Ukraine to Gaza, Syria to Myanmar, in conflicts worldwide the common pattern is that small, smart, stealthy, multipurpose, fast, dispersed systems (weapons, tactics and organisations) are defeating large, slow, overt, single-purpose platforms.
From drones, USVs, subsea drones and loitering munitions to 3D-printed, crowd-sourced and crowd-funded weapons, to small teams operating in a dynamic self-organised swarm, traditional structures and legacy systems are being disrupted by bottom-up innovation.
This does not mean governments will stop putting most effort into large, expensive, conventional platforms. But it does mean (as with the Houthis defying US aircraft carriers, HTS routing the tank-equipped Syrian Arab Army, or Ukrainian drone operators driving the Russian navy out to sea) the small, smart, stealthy, networked, irregular – and perhaps AI-enabled – team has the advantage.
Finally, these trends are driving the emergence of new domains, means and methods of warfare. We have already discussed means and methods, but new domains – space warfare, supply-chain warfare, cognitive warfare, cyber-kinetic operations where attacks in cyberspace can have direct lethal effects and vice-versa – are emerging fast.
Conflict in the Arctic and Antarctic, in urban environments, over critical technologies and commodities, the weaponisation of energy, the disruption of global data infrastructure, and the manipulation of migration are all likely to play increasingly important roles into the future.
There is an important silver lining here for Australians. Despite the obvious risks – notably, the danger of catastrophic conflict between our principal trading partner and our major treaty ally – a multipolar system, where bottom-up innovation is increasingly decisive, favours innovative, dynamic middle powers such as Australia.
Much more than a unipolar system with one dominant player, a multipolar environment gives greater scope for diplomatic and military moves that advance our own interest.
Though it may not always feel like it, Australia’s institutions – and public confidence in them – are stable and strong by global standards.
A focus on resilience, mobilisation, innovation, self-reliance and independent capability will make Australia more valuable to allies, friends and neighbours, while equipping us for the volatile, uncertain and complex environment almost certain to continue this year.
* David Kilcullen served in the Australian Army from 1985 to 2007. He was a senior counter-insurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq in 2007-08, followed by special adviser for counter-insurgency to secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. He is the author of six books including most recently The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West and The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan.