There is a famous line from a certain video game franchise.
"War... War never changes."
This, of course, is bullshit.
War changes all the time. In fact, war changes so frequently that it can, and often does, change several times over the course of just a single war. For all we know, it has changed again in the time it takes to finish this sentence. It is unrecognizable compared to what it was only a relatively short time ago.
Modern warfare is nothing like what you see in the movies... or at least not in the movies that have been made yet. For the generations of people who grew up under the threat of the cold war, or their children who just heard and learned about it, it is hard to imagine a conflict that doesn't rely entirely on the military strategy known as "combined arms warfare."
Combined arms, for those of you not familiar with the minutiae of military tactics, is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It is warfare, as it was fought in most wars from World War II onwards. It is the combined use of infantry, artillery, armored vehicles, tanks, aircraft, and - where possible- naval assets in a single operation. It was the infantry working to support huge tank formations on massive maneuvers, all of it under the cover of air support. Or it was tanks and artillery providing cover for an infantry advance on a target while aircraft attacked positions to the enemy's rear. It was massive amphibious landings like D-Day. It was using all of the armed forces available as a single military encounter, and it is what whole continents worth of military planners worked on for decades. The West's entire defensive strategy for Europe during the cold war was completely and solely based on the idea that they would be defending against waves of armored tank columns supported by hordes of infantry, massed artillery, and swarms of air superiority and ground attack aircraft. I'm sure the Russians had something similar with their own strategies.
Modern warfare has outgrown that.
It has outgrown it to the point that its implementation would be disastrous.
The war in Ukraine was proving that on an almost daily basis. Russia had invaded the sovereign nation with the mistaken belief that nothing had changed. They rolled on Kyiv, thinking that elite armored brigades would smash through the hastily mounted defenses while paratroopers and special forces dropped behind the lines to secure the airfields needed to land the rest of the army.
They got waffle stomped by weekend warriors, the Ukrainian equivalent of the National Guard.
But why?
Well, the answer is pretty simple. The technology of war has surpassed those tactics. Fifty years ago, the only way to combat an attack from the air was the mass deployment of anti-air batteries. Even when those flak cannons were upgraded to anti-air missile systems, they were still immobile, needed to be dragged around by a truck, and required half a dozen men to operate. Now, that can all be performed by a single man with a shoulder-mounted launcher. That launcher can be mass-produced and transported to the front in the trunk of a car... or just carried, and it takes about a day to train a soldier to use it effectively.
The same applies to shoulder-mounted anti-tank weaponry. A strong argument could be made that infantry-carried anti-tank weaponry has been around since the Second World War, but due to the way those weapons worked - hitting a tank directly on the front, back, or sides - tank designers were able to counter these with more efficient armor designs. Their success rate came down largely to luck. Modern Anti-tank missiles, however, are designed to be launched high, then come down at the tank from above. Not only are they infinitely more accurate and powerful, with vastly greater ranges, but they are hitting the tank where the armor is weakest. The fields of destroyed and abandoned Russian vehicles were more than enough proof of how effective that particular form of weaponry had become.
Artillery, for almost the entirety of its existence, needed to be positioned and used on mass to be anything close to effective on a large scale. Modern weapon platforms had an accuracy margin of error of half a meter.... Fifty centimeters... at the most extreme edge of their range. They didn't need to target a neighborhood to take out an enemy hiding in its buildings anymore; they could choose which window of a single building to send the rounds through.
Hell, even the classic aerial dogfights made famous in movies like
Top Gun
were a thing of the past. Modern stealth systems, over-the-horizon radars, and missiles that had a range of more than a few
hundred
miles meant that aircraft were engaging each other without their pilots ever even seeing each other. Survival against one of these missiles had become less about the skill of the pilot and more about the countermeasure systems and the stealth profile of the plane on the receiving end.
Even more prolific, however, was the fact that almost every Ukrainian civilian was in possession of a device that could take professional-grade photographs of Russian units and positions, complete with the exact global positioning coordinates of where it was taken. Basically, turning them into fully equipped OSI agents. Those pictures could be sent to Ukrainian command, and they could call in an airstrike to destroy that unit a few minutes after it had smiled for the camera. Mobile phones had changed war entirely. Individual calls could be tracked and traced, meaning that any soldier stupid enough to make one was basically telling the Ukrainians exactly where he was. On New Year's Eve, one Russian officer called home to wish his family a happy new year. Unfortunately for him and the five hundred or so other soldiers in the makeshift and hitherto secret base that he was calling from, the enemy was listening in. His call was cut short when a Ukrainian airstrike flattened the barracks and killed almost everyone inside.
The Russian army had been so shocked and overwhelmed by the utter ineffectiveness of their initial assault and so incapable of comprehending the realities of modern war they had regressed back to the use of trenches and dugouts. Because the simple truth of their new existence was that it was now too dangerous for them to be out in the open. Every soldier, every unit, everything wanting to survive was forced to dig in or find heavy cover. A tank was no longer a weapon of support for infantry; It was a priority target for weapons more than capable of blowing it the fuck up. Men moving through open terrain were just begging for the attention of the Ukrainian artillery gods, and even the lowest of simple soldiers could see that massed frontal assaults were tantamount to suicide, even if their officers had not the first idea of what other tactics to employ.
If they advanced, they were slaughtered. They couldn't really retreat either, not just because Daddy Putin threatened them with execution if they did, but because the Ukrainians had artillery shells and drone weapons that could be fired
over
the Russian lines, blow up in mid-air, and scatter a few dozen landmines each onto the ground behind them like a particularly lethal form of confetti. Even if they were to risk execution by retreating, the Russian soldiers had to literally cross a brand new minefield in order to get to safety.
So they dug trenches, in much the same way their great-grandfathers did, and just sat there waiting for the inevitable counterattack to come.
Until, of course, a hand-launched and remotely operated drone flew overhead and dropped a grenade on them.
In less than a year, Russia had lost more men than the Americans did over the entire course of the Vietnam War. The writing was already on the wall, and it had been written in the needlessly expended blood of tens of thousands of young men on both sides.
On the other hand, the "War never changes" sentiment could be referring to the motivations and power struggles of war never changing. But my plight was proving that revenge was as much of a reason to lay waste to an enemy as the thirst for greater political power. There were, however, plenty of constants that really did never change...
War is not pretty.
War is not glamorous.
But war had changed, even if only one side knew it.
And glory could never be won with the blood of a whole generation.
