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In the early hours of January 3, 2026, the United States bombed Caracas and captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. U.S. President Donald Trump called the operation, which killed scores of Maduro’s security personnel, “brilliant.”

Soon after, the American AI company Anthropic said it was concerned that the U.S. government may have used its software in the Maduro raid in ways that violated its red lines—namely, that the software must not be used for mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.

Meanwhile, a range of new technology companies have entered the defense sector—notably Palantir and Anduril—with Palantir CEO Alex Karp saying these new intelligent weapons systems have “shifted the way in which war is fought.”

Have they—and if so, how?

Matthew Ford is an associate professor at the Swedish Defence University and the author of War in the Smartphone Age: Conflict, Connectivity and the Crises at Our Fingertips. Ford says new technology has changed modern warfare in two critical ways: It has radically sped up the process of target generation, making it possible for the U.S. to strike far more targets in far shorter time than before. And it has opened up new ways of collecting and processing intelligence—the effectiveness of which is now visible in Iran.

But Ford says Iran is also showing that new technology has real limitations. To hit targets, you need someone hitting them—which means legacy aircraft like the F-15 and the B-52. Modern warfare, Ford says, is principally characterized by the uneven combination of old and new technologies. And it’s often the cheap, mass-produced equipment that wins wars—not the latest ultra-sophisticated weapons systems. That’s something the Pentagon sometimes forgets—but Iran has remembered …

Gustav Jönsson: What kinds of weapons systems is the U.S. using now that it wasn’t before?

Matthew Ford: A lot of the platforms they’re currently deploying were designed in the 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s. It’s not like everything is new. They’re flying F-15 Eagles, for crying out loud. I keep seeing images of B-52s looking like they’re about to be sent to Iran. And they need those older platforms to deliver large quantities of ordnance. You could not deliver the levels of destruction the Americans are dealing out in Iran using only new systems. Just refueling, maintaining, and making sure the latest fighters are fit to fly costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. There’s always a balance of the old and the new.