[gumby]

Every war zone is a testing/advertising zone for weapons manufacturers. Think of the infamous (and hilarious, if it hadn’t meant loss of life) Exocet ad in Jane’s after the Falklands War.

And NATO’s role in the war is crucial, of course, as a supplier of materiel, but not as deep as the conspiracy theorists like to think. They did not launch this war and do not direct it.

Also, despite my comment being voted down, it’s not a joke that NATO was shocked by how Ukraine has fough, not just how well. Its influence is openly discussed in the US and a European press and can be seen, for example, in the rush to embrace low cost disposable drones.

But it’s more than that: Ukraine has been more nimble and creative than the stogy western militaries who stopped taking Russia’s military that seriously in the early 1990s. Russia has underperformed, but not by a lot. But Ukraine has taken a weak hand and, without a navy, bottled up the Russians in the Black Sea. They demonstrated and used a flexibility far from the capabilities of any of the western militaries at scale. NATO needs not just to embrace that (which will likely take a generation) but also be ready to fight an adversary that has a similar attitude.