Tariq Saeedi
As I follow the daily shifts in this conflict—new dimensions emerging almost overnight while others quietly fade—I find myself returning to a handful of thinkers who, decades ago, described exactly the kind of war we are now watching unfold.
They did not predict this specific crisis, of course. No serious futurist claims that kind of precision. Yet their analyses of how technology, society, and conflict evolve have proved remarkably prescient.
The planners of this campaign appear to have operated from an older playbook, one that assumed swift, decisive strikes would produce clear outcomes. The reality on the ground has followed a different script, one several futurists outlined long before the first missiles flew.
Alvin and Heidi Toffler laid the foundation in their 1993 book War and Anti-War. They argued that the way a civilization creates wealth shapes the way it wages war. Industrial-age (“Second Wave”) societies built mass armies and mass destruction; the emerging information-age (“Third Wave”) would favor de-massified, knowledge-driven, and highly asymmetrical forms of conflict.
High-tech platforms would increasingly face low-cost, adaptive tools. Centralized command would struggle against fluid, networked operations.
Victory would be harder to define because the battlefield itself would keep changing shape.
In the current fighting, the contrast is stark: expensive missile-defense systems designed for high-speed threats have spent days swatting at slow, noisy, inexpensive drones that cost a fraction as much to produce. The war has not followed a linear plan; it pulses and adapts, exactly as the Tofflers warned a Second Wave military might experience when confronted with Third Wave realities.
P.W. Singer took the argument further in Wired for War (2009). He described the robotics revolution already under way and foresaw that cheap, unmanned systems would lower the perceived cost of engagement while raising profound questions about escalation and control.
Drones, he noted, were becoming the “Model T” of a new era—simple at first, but capable of transforming entire doctrines. Singer observed that when one side can field swarms of inexpensive platforms against billion-dollar assets, the traditional calculus of deterrence shifts.
We have seen this dynamic play out in recent days: waves of basic drones have forced sophisticated defenses into constant reaction, while the economic and psychological effects ripple far beyond the immediate theater. The conflict feels cheaper to prolong than anyone anticipated, yet the human and strategic price keeps mounting.
John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, writing for RAND around the turn of the century, pushed the idea even deeper with their work on Swarming and the Future of Conflict. They described swarming not as chaos but as a deliberate doctrine: small, dispersed, networked units pulsing attacks from multiple directions, sustained by information rather than mass.
In the information age, they argued, this would become the natural evolution beyond industrial-era maneuver warfare. The Shahed drones—slow, loud, and inexpensive—have embodied that concept in practice. Their persistent, low-altitude flights have created precisely the kind of “sustainable pulsing” Arquilla and Ronfeldt envisioned, saturating defenses and forcing opponents to respond across wide areas. The tactic has not produced decisive breakthroughs, but it has steadily eroded assumptions about technological superiority.
These thinkers were not alarmists. They were observers of trends already visible in the 1990s and early 2000s.
What they shared was a warning that militaries organized for an earlier era would repeatedly be surprised by the speed, asymmetry, and fluidity of future fights. — The current campaign’s lack of clear objectives from the outset, the rapid appearance and disappearance of hoped-for alliances, the wild swings in oil markets driven more by perception than physical supply, and the resilience of an economy under sustained pressure—all of these patterns align with the mismatches the futurists described.
Looking back across this “War on Iran” series, it is hard not to see the same thread: an operation conceived in one era colliding with realities already taking shape in another. The futurists did not offer easy solutions or anti-war prescriptions; they simply mapped the terrain ahead.
Whether their insights will now inform a course correction remains an open question.
For the moment, the conflict continues to behave like the living mechanism they anticipated—one that generates new dimensions faster than any single plan can contain. The least we can do is acknowledge that the map they drew has turned out to be more accurate than the one the planners brought to the table. /// nCa, 14 March 2026