"War," said Queen Elizabeth I, "is expensive, and its outcomes are uncertain."
In 2025, Russian President Vladimir Putin would certainly echo that sentiment as his "quick" war enters its fourth ruinous year. Chinese Premier Xi Jing Ping might also quietly think it as he eyes the increasingly risky looking prospect of an amphibious invasion of Taiwan.
As the Pax Americana comes to an end, the world is re-arming apace. After the emergence of four near-peer superpowers (USA, China, Russia and India) along with the developing pragmatic/transactional/gunboat diplomacy of their related spheres of influence, it would appear that New Zealand will have no choice but to follow that trend.
New Zealand will start this process from an abysmal situation. The air force has no direct combat capability at all, and the navy has only an irrelevant token.
The army, joined end-to-end with its full-timers and reserves, can muster only a single under-strength and poorly equipped light infantry battalion. None of these formations is remotely configured or prepared for the direct defence of this nation, having been distracted and run down by domestic peaceniks and international busybodying over the last four decades.
Even were it to be fully concentrated in one place, the combat capacity of New Zealand’s entire military force on land, sea and air can be comfortably exceeded by just one Chinese type-75 assault ship (the name indicates the purpose).
There are already three such specialist vessels in service with the Chinese navy, with a further two under construction.
This country is thus utterly defenceless for all practical purposes in the face of such a credible aggressor. Consequently, we have no current bargaining chips to bring to the table of the new great game — the capacity to effectively defend oneself being the lowest stake that is recognised by the players who are already at the table.
Countries without such chips can be freely traded by the major players in the game. There are signs of a muddy recognition of this political reality in the Beehive, which has been quickened by recent developments in the Cook Islands and the Tasman.
New Zealand must therefore re-arm significantly . . . but how?
It is at this point that Queen Elizabeth I’s comment becomes pertinent. There have been no major peer-to-peer conflicts since the silicon revolution of the late 1980s.
Events over the last three years in Ukraine have demonstrated that the silicon chip, the lithium battery and the 3-D printer have revolutionised modern warfare. Military equipment and doctrine that had been ossified in 1945 format have now been put to the test in a very different technological world.
The result was a complete failure of the heavily equipped Russian forces to overcome their supposedly inferior Ukrainian opponents.
The big losers in this Ukrainian military revolution have been the big-ticket weapons systems that have historically dominated all the major powers’ military budget and development resources — tanks, ships and manned aircraft.
Manned aircraft have played little role in the conflict beyond long-range bombardment, and have had no role in their traditional aerial superiority role — a once sacred military objective that has now become strategically meaningless.
Without ever actually fighting one another, the big ships of the Ukrainian Navy have been completely wiped out, and those few of the Russian Navy that survive are now hiding in the furthest reaches of the Black Sea.
Modern main-battle tanks are the backbone of every modern army, but they have rarely if ever fought directly against one another in Ukraine as they are designed to do.
They have nevertheless been destroyed in very large numbers, along with their crews, by a range of other means — many by weapons that cost merely a fraction of 1% of the tank’s cost.
The whizz-bang heavy Western tanks, of which so much was expected, appear to be just as vulnerable to this style of lo-tech and hand-held elimination as their Russian counterparts and these "high value assets" are thus now hidden away in safe places far from the front, as are their Russian equivalents.
This begs the question as to whether these tanks are "high value", or actually assets at all.
These developments matter to New Zealand because the capacity to effectively defend ourselves may not be as unattainable as it seemed just three years ago. There is thus less room for defeatism.
Any amphibious enemy that seeks to attack these islands will have to come by sea, and they will have to come a very long way. This means that they will have to come in the very type of large-scale fighting platforms, big ships and big aircraft, that have shown themselves to be so vulnerable to smaller scale countermeasures in Ukraine since 2022.
The failure of big-ticket military systems means that New Zealand thus may be able to acquire the defensive capability that would allow it to bring meaningful chips to the table of the new great game.
However, it will take careful planning, significant expenditure and a complete reconfiguration of our military capacity to address a single defensive objective in order to do so. This will also involve some supporting economic and social reconfigurations.
Due to the ongoing nature of this military revolution, the wide uncertainty surrounding these reconfigurations will of course be high.
Today, only the Russian and Ukrainian armies know how to fight a modern war. Their experience therefore needs to be actively sought out and assimilated.
However, currently absolutely nobody knows how to conduct or defend an amphibious invasion, the riskiest military operation of all, in the presence of modern weaponry.
Nevertheless, we may not have to wait too long for a demonstration of the issues involved, as China continues to build fleets of Normandy-style landing ships, presumably to cross Taiwanese beaches.
The Chinese have incurred the expense, but this may not predicate the victory, as Elizabeth I observed.
However, the lessons to be learnt from the exercise, should ever it come to pass, will be of critical importance to this country.
• Robert Hamlin is a senior lecturer in the department of marketing at the University of Otago.
