Why peer war challenges technology-led doctrine

Western forces have had limited recent experience against peer opponents, leaving many assumptions tested chiefly through simulations and controlled exercises. For Britain, the 1982 Falklands War marks the last near-peer conflict cited here and shows how long that experience gap has become. Exercises impose orderly rules that an actual peer war may quickly overturn. Ukraine shows how drones can look revolutionary in a permissive setting and become less effective as air defences and operating conditions adapt. Commercial satellites help Ukraine partly because attacking or disabling them could widen the war, a restraint that cannot be assumed in every peer conflict.