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Most people still think of war as tanks, missiles, soldiers and now - drones.
Michael Yon thinks that’s the least interesting part.
In our latest conversation, he started listing the other forms of warfare he watches:
Water.
Food.
Migration.
Language.
Demographics.
Intoxicants.
Information.
Once you start looking at the world that way, a lot of things begin to look different.
Michael spent a long time explaining what he calls hydraulic warfare.
His example was Egypt.
Almost the entire country depends on the Nile. Most Egyptians live along it. Egypt’s food production depends on it.
Upstream, Ethiopia now controls the massive GERD dam on the Blue Nile.
Michael’s point was not that some particular attack is definitely coming. It was that control of water itself creates enormous strategic power.
“Every war is about routes, resources, and ideology.”
Then we moved to language.
Michael described language itself as something that can unite a country or break it apart.
Get everyone speaking the same language and it becomes a binding force.
Encourage groups to separate linguistically and you can push them in the opposite direction.
I had heard him talk about this before, but this time it clicked.
It’s the same basic idea behind migration warfare, demographic warfare and information warfare.
You don’t necessarily need an army.
You change the conditions people live under.
Michael calls information warfare the highest form of warfare.
And underneath that umbrella are things most people would never think of as weapons.
Music.
Education.
Media.
Language.
Drugs.
Culture.
“There are certain forms of warfare that are very subtle and very difficult to see.”
That may have been the most important point of the whole discussion.
The best weapon is probably the one the target doesn’t realize is being used.
Michael has spent decades traveling through conflict zones and studying this stuff firsthand. He’s been warning for years about famine, migration, strategic chokepoints and the Strait of Hormuz.
Some of those warnings no longer sound as strange as they did when he first made them.
By the end of the conversation, I realized we had barely scratched the surface.
I actually stopped Michael and started writing down the categories of warfare he was describing because I wanted to understand the framework better.
He immediately told me I was missing several.
That’s probably where we’ll start next time.
If you want to understand what Michael thinks is happening beneath the headlines — and what he believes comes next — watch the full episode.
The wars that matter most may not look like wars at all.
— Matt
