A new era of warfare is quietly reshaping global power – and it is being driven not by billion-dollar weapons systems, but by cheap drones and structural vulnerabilities.
In this lecture, Professor Jiang Xueqin examines how low-cost technologies like Iran’s Shahed drones are exposing the economic and strategic weaknesses of traditional military doctrine. When a $50,000 drone can force a defender to fire multiple $1m missiles, the economics of war itself becomes inverted.
According to Jiang, this asymmetry reveals deeper problems inside modern defence bureaucracies, where legacy Cold War thinking, expensive weapons platforms and institutional incentives often produce systems designed more for prestige and spending than for resilience or adaptability on the battlefield.
But the military dimension is only the surface. Jiang argues that the real geopolitical struggle in West Asia may ultimately revolve around water scarcity and demographic pressure. With desalination infrastructure sustaining much of the Gulf’s population and economies, even limited strikes on critical water systems could trigger catastrophic regional consequences.
Iran itself faces severe environmental stress, which Jiang suggests could become a strategic pressure point exploited by rivals seeking to fracture the country along ethnic and regional lines.
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Against this backdrop, Iran’s counter-strategy, he argues, would rely on ideological mobilisation – attempting to unite Shia populations across the region and challenge the financial foundations of American influence in the Gulf.
The result is a volatile geopolitical chessboard where drones, water, financial markets and ideology intersect in ways that could reshape the balance of power across West Asia.
Produced by: Prof Jiang Media
AGENDA RAKYAT - Lima perkara utama
- Tegakkan maruah serta kualiti kehidupan rakyat
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