Short Take: There Might Never be Another War like Ukraine
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Few weeks go by where I don’t read a piece on how Ukraine is the Future of warfare and armies and thinkers need to adjust to the reality that the warfare of the future will involve massive unaccountable amounts of artillery, trenches, conscription and grinding warfare.
While sometimes they point to relevant lessons: Yes the inability of the US to quickly reindustrialize and produce artillery shells at a rate comparable to Russia does speak to a profound rot in American governance, the military industrial complex, and American business regulation more generally,
Often times the conclusions drawn are dangerously delusional: A draft would be more likely to break the American nation than save it. As indeed conscription has resulted in Ukraine’s population collapsing with somewhere between 6 and 10 million Ukrainians (out of a pre-war 36 million) having fled the country, not to escape the mostly static war, but to escape the Totalitarian conditions the Zelensky regime has imposed in response to the war. (1.1 million of whom escaped INTO Russia, for any who deny this largely an ethnic conflict between Western and Russian Ukrainians, as it has been since 2014).
And the thing is all of these discussions rest on a assumption that seems ludicrous the second you stop and think about it: Ukraine is not the future of Warfare, these conditions will be almost impossible to ever create again.
Ukraine had a pre-war Nominal GDP of 199 billion USD. Officially this only declined to 160 billion in 2022 as a result of the war, but there’s good reason to think its actual internal private sector economy collapsed far further give it had collapsed from 177 billion in 2013 to 90 billion in 2015 as a result of the US backed Coup/Revolution.
Indeed given the population flight, conscription, and impositions on the populace, it is very likely a SUPER-MAJORITY of that 160 billion GDP in 2022, was actually the result of US and NATO pouring hundreds of billions into the country. Where it was either used or siphoned off as corruption.
Simply put Ukraine has received military, financial and other aid most like in excess of what it’s entire internal economy produced in the same period, and as of writing it’s still losing territory.
When commentators say this is a war between NATO and Russia they are almost entirely correct. If you combine all the economies that are funding, arming, or fighting on one side or the other of this war you get a majority of the entire global economy.
And they have used all that money to pay off the Ukranian regime to refuse any peace agreement, even ones their own negotiators had agreed to, and that were clearly in the best interest of the country… you know if you value hundreds of thousands of young men and not having your population collapse more than narrow stretches of land being bought up by Blackrock.
And then, because of the complex geostrategic relationship of all these alliances, on the Eastern european plains, one of the most expansive and open areas in the world, both sides (after spring 2022) have narrowly engaged on only the part of the frontier within the narrow bounds of the pre-war political limits of Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia alone have over 1.5x that much border between over again, not including Belarus an ally which Russia had previously used for staging its land invasion in spring 2022. But because Russia didn’t want to fully mobilize its population and thus needed to maintain the legal status of a “special military operation” and because Ukraine knew it would lose if it attacked Russia proper and thus forced that total national mobilization. Both sides just tacitly agreed to the smaller front.
So you have the resources of dozens of nations representing over half the world’s economy being poured into a country that can neither win nor negotiate, to fight its similar neighbor that also has to fight it out despite the cost due to the international strategic implications, both of whom are Slavic-white countries who both had strong reserves of nationalism and patriotism and avoided the kind of multi-culti mass-immigration that has zapped the willingness to fight for their country right out of every white man in the west, and because of a series of geostrategic accidents they spontaneously agreed to limit the fighting to stretch of land as narrow as that between the Swiss Border and the English Channel.
That’s a whole lot of conditions that will probably never hold again. Or at least certainly not for the next hundred years given the demographic crises everywhere and the pending death of the nation state.
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If the smaller state doesn’t have allies who can fund it to the tune 50+% its annual GDP it can’t happen.
If either country has endured mass immigration/multiculturalism and doesn’t have an eastern european level paradoxical ultra-nationalism for their decaying shithole country…it can’t happen.
If either country isn’t being bribed/backed into a corner to refuse all negotiation, it can’t happen.
And if either country would rather just expand the war geographically and not fight an attritional trench war, it can’t happen.
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Even DURING World War 1 the western front was the only place such elaborate trench lines were set up. Little comparable was occuring on the eastern front or in Arabia, and that was the age of marching armies and bolt action rifles that naturally favoured defensive fighting.
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Now obviously there are many lessons from Ukraine:
the fact neither side could achieve complete air superiority or air denial speaks to a changing balance of power between air defense and air power.
The mass deployment of spotter, dropper, and suicide FPV drones by the tens of thousands is almost certainly something that’s going to mark every battlefield and insurgency going forward.
That artillery remains king of the battlefield and the fact that a soldier’s job is to know how to minimize their risk to it is a universal Americans had straight up forgotten over decades of playing in the desert against collapsing regimes and insurgencies.
Likewise the increasing dominance of rocket artillery and various glide, cruise, and hypersonic missiles/bombs is a major evolution and seeing them deployed against each other is a major data point.
And of course finally this was the first PVP cellphone war where both sides could exploit information leak from the other in real time, and launch missile strikes based on facebook posts and SIM card data.
These are all major insights… But anyone saying what we see in Ukraine is the future of warfare or that this level of intensity in such narrow bands of terrain is to be expected going forth, really doesn’t understand how bizarre the Ukraine war is and how straight up unnatural this type of fighting is in general, and in this part of the world in particular.
Napoleon, Kutuzov, Hitler, and Stalin would all be shocked that the front could just stay fixed like this, on the Eurasian plain, for so long.
And indeed if you explained the demographic and financial realities of both sides it would be even more confusing. This is a weird weird war.
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Agreed & I'll add the Iranian attack on Israel is more likely to be the future of war.
Yes, Iran telegraphed their strike & the entire thing was a pantomime, sending drones that took 9 hours to reach Israel, laughable.
Now if Iran really wanted to hit Israel, they'd have smuggled hundreds of cheap Chinese drones into countries bordering Israel. Launched drones from multiple sites,launched Fu-Go ballon bombs, launched cruise missiles at the Iron Dome itself, within 20 minutes your overwhelmed by a thousand bogeys in th air. The moment air defenses are hit, targy airports, runways, etc.
The scary part is how cheap they're getting. Soon it'll be realistic to see thousand drone military fleets and the West is used to using expensive superior technical weaponry.
The moment it becomes apparent that rogue nation states and pirates can with ten thousand drones destroy a US Navy vessel actual choices will have to be made, we leave the sheltered world of Kumbaya behind
Even more than for military equipment Ukraine needs western funding to support the entirety of its government functions from paying the salaries of bureaucrats to paying pensions. Without western money Ukraine as a viable state entity would have collapsed more than a year ago.
It is interesting to note that during the initial mobile phase of the war in Feb/March 2022 Russian artillery usage was at its height at over 30k shells fired per day. Many days over 40k. And that with a TINY force of ~80-90k men (90 battalion equivalents) committed. Now Russia has around 450k men committed (400+ battalion equivalents) and seems to be topping out at about 20-25k arty rounds fired per day. The USA currently can produce about 35k rounds per month. Lesson: even with small, mobile armies committed peer combatants would still need massive industrial capabilities to sustain the artillery consumption of both shells and barrels. As far as I can determine the US is making almost zero spare artillery barrels.
I would also posit that complex intrenchments would still likely pertain in a peer conflict outside of the parameters pertaining in Ukraine. Simply put the ISR and strike capabilities of peer forces are simply too good. At the outset Ukraine had the advantage of the entirety of the western ISR capabilities: satellites, drones, sensors, etc. Even with their limited firepower they were able to inflict a fair amount of casualties on advancing Russian forces. Far less than was propagandized on the TV, but still a good amount. In the Ukrainian "counterattack" in the Kharkov region the Ukes took advantage of the extremely thin screen of poorly equipped LDNR/weirdo militias sponsored by Russian corporations that was used by Russia as an economy of force to advance rather rapidly. However, once Russia transferred actual Russian units and concentrated their ISR they were able to inflict massive casualties and damage on the densely-packed Uke units out in the open.
Now, with the current advancement of ISR and drone technology, nobody is safe out in the open. Russians stay safe (and well dispersed) in their trenches with a vast amount of non-to-sortof portable EW equipment that to a large degree prevents drones from snooping around and provides extremely limited targeting opportunities for Ukrainian strike complexes. Even where the Ukrainian front has almost totally crumbled to nothing (the Artemovks-Chasov Yar axis for example) Russia has to engage in massive planning and coordinating just to move very small (15 men and two to three vehicles) bodies of men and machines forward outside of the protective trench/EW sanctuary. One, because the EW necessary for survival in the open is not particularly mobile or reliable. The frequencies and devices used require an immense amount of planning to operate. Two, mines. Mines can be delivered quite rapidly by MLRS and this needs to be accounted for. Three, groupings must necessarily be very small and very fast moving because ISR will instantly see any large groupings starting to mass and strike complexes are so fast and accurate (and long range) that large groupings will incur prohibitive casualties even before they leave their safe-havens. Of necessity these tiny units do not have the "oomph" to penetrate very far and after seizing a small objective must rapidly construct a new trench/EW safe haven. Four, coordination of all the EW. strikes complexes, ISR, and movement for the assaulting forces is massively difficult, and the Russians have been doing it for two years now and are extremely good at it. Ukes (trained and largely commanded by NATO) have been doing it for two years and are not very good at it; see summer 2023 counter-oink, actions around Artemovsk after its liberation, etc.
All four of those conditions will still apply even on a front of 4000 miles length. Or 20,000 miles length. Thus, while I agree that a lot of the conditions in the SMO are unique, I don't think the character of the fighting really is. I think any peer conflict would likely be very similar. At least for a while. I think the racial characteristics of the Slav has made the war last far longer as the Slav seems to be far more hardy than his western counterpart. Its like the meme: Hard times create strong Slavs: strong Slavs create hard times: Hard times create strong Slavs. There is simply no way a western state could endure the casualties that Ukraine has suffered and not completely disintigrate politically and socially.