IT WAS ANOTHER another two-cover week. In Asia we looked at the decline of the Confucian family. Everywhere else we focused on the lessons that the world’s armies are taking from the war in Ukraine.

Russia’s invasion will shape the understanding of combat for decades to come. The war has shattered any illusions that modern conflict might be limited to counter-insurgency campaigns or evolve towards low-casualty struggles in cyberspace. Instead, it points to a new kind of high-intensity war that combines cutting-edge technology with shooting and killing on an industrial scale.

Our first idea combined armour and electrons, using a mouse-pointer to plug the barrel of a tank. In the second we geolocated the debris thrown up by a massive explosion. Ukraine’s killing fields show how warfare is becoming transparent, thanks to all-seeing sensors on satellites and fleets of drones. Cheap and ubiquitous, they yield data for processing by ever-improving algorithms that can pick out needles from haystacks. And yet, even in the age of artificial intelligence, war may still involve an immense physical mass of hundreds of thousands of humans, and millions of machines and munitions.

An alternative was to depict how hyper-transparency will pit seeking against hiding. Armies will strive to see before being seen. They will blind the enemy’s drones and reconnaissance satellites; and disrupt the transmission of data across the battlefield, using cyber-attacks, electronic warfare and old-fashioned explosives.

A design with a helmet covered in computer code said that, to be safe, troops will increasingly depend on megabytes as well as Kevlar. And another with a soldier’s goggles replaced by an iPhone showed how, even for the lowliest trenchnik, the smoke of the battlefield is mediated by a screen. Troops will have to develop new ways of fighting, relying on mobility, dispersal, concealment and deception. Big armies that fail to invest in new technologies or to develop new doctrines will be overwhelmed by smaller ones that do.

Despite its cutting-edge electronics, tomorrow’s battlefield will still feature the grime and gore that have been part of warfare ever since deploying advanced weapons technology meant swinging a heavier club. That was the message from two other images. One showed a yeti-like sniper peering into the future. Closer to the news was a photograph from Ukraine of a screen-warrior lurking in a dank bunker.

The title “Silicon Valley and the Somme”, which we put on that last image, got us thinking about using first-world-war battles to bring out the contrast between high-tech and mass casualties. In one design a digital flare burst over silhouetted troops traipsing along a ridge. In another a convoy of drones flew above the tree-stumps of Passchendaele.

For the final image we picked a shot from 1917, of men from the 1st Australian Division in Ypres. It is as if the men are trudging into the past, while the drones advance into the future. The Somme (fought in 1916) is less well remembered outside Britain, so we dropped the title words for something simple—though they still appear in the leader as a crosshead. With such a powerful cover, we wanted the image to get on with its work uninterrupted.

Leaders: A new era of high-tech war has begun
Special report: Lessons from Ukraine

Our second cover was about how, in China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, the commitment to conservative family life is collapsing. Last year China recorded its lowest-ever number of marriages, half as many as a decade ago. In Japan married couples with at least one child accounted for 42% of households in 1980 and single people for 20%. That has been turned on its head. In 2020 couples with children accounted for 25% of households and singletons for 38%. East Asia is unusual in that the taboo against having children outside marriage remains as rigid as ever. Across the OECD, 40% of births are outside wedlock. In Japan, South Korea and Taiwan less than 5% are.

We settled early on a style that nodded to anime. Much of the impetus for change is powered by the unequal treatment of East Asian women. In South Korea a married woman is referred to as Jip-saram, or “home person”, and her husband as Bakat-yangban, or “man outside”. East Asia has some of the world’s best-educated women, yet its overall record on female empowerment is poor and in some ways worsening. On the World Economic Forum’s gender-equality ranking of 153 countries, China—where women are said to “hold up half the sky”—slipped from 63rd in 2006 to 102nd in 2022. South Korea has the widest gender pay gap in the OECD.

We eventually settled on the design below. It was less whimsical than others and and had more visual focus. Millions of young people are opting for looser, often lonelier and—in the East Asian context—less male-dominated arrangements. The socioeconomic and demographic consequences will shape millions of lives.

Leaders: The new Asian family
Asia: East Asia’s new family portrait
China: Challenging the stigma associated with single mothers in China