But this, in fact, is what actual war looks like these days: Sometimes it’s a volley of 300 missiles and drones, and sometimes it is lean, targeted, and carried out covertly. Gone are the days of vast conquering armies and conventional military confrontations between two parties. So long as experts, the government, and the media worry only about a kind of war that is obsolete, it cannot see the war right in front of our faces.
Great article on the evolving face of warfare and how, as long-range and unmanned systems replace on-the-ground and manned conflict, people are assuaged into treating missiles and bombs being lobbed between countries as something “other” than war.
But this, in fact, is what actual war looks like these days: Sometimes it’s a volley of 300 missiles and drones, and sometimes it is lean, targeted, and carried out covertly. Gone are the days of vast conquering armies and conventional military confrontations between two parties.
So, like what’s happening in Ukraine right now?
I mean they use drones for some deep strikes causing minor damage but most of the actual advancement is made using artillery and boots on the ground.
Drones have extreme effect on the Ukrainian battle field as there is no secrecy anymore. Every inch of the front and the hinterland is permanently watched by both sides via drones. But yeah you are right the actual advancement is still made on the ground
Every inch of the front and the hinterland is permanently watched by both sides via drones.
Are you seriously claiming there are enough drones to have full surveillance not only over the entire front but also the lands around and far behind it?
Drones have had and have a significant impact. But they are not that numerous and covering - that’s not feasible nor even physically possible (resources + products + management). There’s no “permanent drone watch”.
Notably, drones are used for more than just observation. They are used for targeted strikes, dropping shells, or drone-suicide sabotage strikes.
As far as I understand it the Frontline is pretty saturated with drones. Heard it in a documentary that I cannot find, of course, but a quick search gave this article https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/14/ukraine-drones-russia-war-skies/:
The sheer number of drones means the battlefield is “almost transparent on both sides,” Nepal said, speaking from a makeshift base near the front line filled with parts for FPVs.
So yes seems to me as if it is a almost 24/7 thing. Maybe not over 100% of the Frontline, but at least in the most of it.
(I may have overestimated the meaning of hinterland… I meant like the 10km or so behind the front)
Drones are important sure. I am not sure how important. It is no surprise that Ukraine cannot do large scale combined arms maneuver warfare though. Neither Ukraine or Russia is trained in that and Ukraine does not have conventional air support to a large extent. I would not attribute it entirely to drones.
Everyone in the world (except for Russia, with their ‘special operation’ euphemism) recognizes the invasion of Ukraine as a war. People are still pretending that Israel bombing targets inside Iran and Iranian military units in other countries, and Iran launching a large-scale missile strike against Israel, isn’t a war. It’s no longer a proxy war, it’s a direct conflict, but because people are still stuck in exactly that mode of thinking- that ‘war’ means artillery and troops and taking ground- people are treating this as something else.
I don’t think the author is correct that war won’t still look like the WW1/2 paradigm of conflicts as well, but as of right now there are 16 countries involved in the Israel/Iran not-war:
Direct involvement:
- Israel
- Iran
- US
- UK
- Syria
- Iraq
- Jordan
- Yemen
- Lebanon
Logistical involvement (including intelligence sharing and air defense deployment):
- Kuwait
- UAE
- KSA
- Qatar
- Oman
- Djibouti
- Bahrain
I think the salient point is that the US’s insistence that they/we’re not yet in a war is a lie designed to both avoid blame being put where it belongs (Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, and the US’s involvement, that kicked this all off), and to temper calls for more action to stop the war, which will require stopping Israel in Gaza.
By calling for preventing a war, the US is attempting to blame future actions, whereas if they acknowledge we’re already in a war, they’d have to admit that it’s because of actions that already took place, and the US wants desperately to make Iran the bad guys here, and claim this has nothing to do with Israel doing war crimes both in Gaza and in Lebanon.
Yes, but a handful of conventional missiles going back and forth against symbolic targets is not a very useful definition of a war, much less a world war, if for no other reason than it is to broad to be useful. The on again/off again three way between India/China/Pakistan comes to mind, as might India and Canada if the definition goes much beyond that. The word war tends to imply that nations don’t have active trade between them for instance, and generally implies that at least one side is attempting to achieve some sort of military victory.
So you’re saying that people fighting with nail-studded sticks, or secretly assassinating internal political opponents in the other’s territory, is a similar level of conflict as flattening an embassy with a laser-guided bomb, or firing 300 drones and ballistic missiles, and then having a retaliatory strike on the location of another country’s nuclear program?
This strains my credulity, that you are suggesting this.
If China bombed a US embassy in Japan, the US fired 300 missiles at targets on China’s eastern seaboard (which were intercepted), and China retaliated by striking targets in San Diego… no one on earth would be denying that they were at war.
All of the above are cases of one nations government killing a handful of another’s people for minor political posturing, and are all far more similar in scale to each other than say the US-Vietnam, Ukrainian, or even the undeclared Falklands war.
If the ultimate goal of a war is to force one nation
or group to surrender to another through military might, then I don’t think anyone in Israel expected Iran to surrender to them after they ‘accidentally’ blew up an embassy, nor do I expect anyone in Iran to have expected Israel to send an offer of surrender after they launched a single wave of largely outdated missiles against a handful of airfields.In practice there are of course secondary effects, but the primary political motivation is internal, not external. Iran doesn’t expect Israel to surrender, but primarily wishes to reassure its public and keys to power that it can respond to military aggression. Israel does not wish Iran to surrender and end the ‘war’, it wishes to commit the US to giving it more resources while finding a situation in which it can play the victim.
So yes, I would say it is far more similar in scale, scope, and goal to assassinating a foreign citizen or sending a bunch of soldiers to beat another off ‘your’ land with nail studded sticks than it is sending tens of thousands of soldiers to occupy territory and replace the local government with your own.
If the ultimate goal of a war is to force one nation or group to surrender to another through military might
I don’t think it is the ultimate goal of war, that’s overly restricting the definition based on, as I said, this conception of war as only being these wide-ranging conflicts (really, what “total war” refers to). Many wars have been fought purely over control of land or resources, where surrender or government toppling was never the goal.
war, noun, ˈwȯr (1): a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations
Surrender of or the replacement of the government on that land or resources through military might either directly or indirectly is however the way control over those resources is achieved, and no, I am not just taking about total war, as one of my examples there was the Falkland’s war, which was not even close to a total war for either side.
Moreover your definition would seem not to apply to the current Iran- Israel conflict, as it is being discussed and decided on a case by case basis for both sides instead of an open and declared conflict.
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Gone are the days of vast conquering armies and conventional military confrontations between two parties. So long as experts, the government, and the media worry only about a kind of war that is obsolete, it cannot see the war right in front of our faces.
The article makes a good point about the global warfare already underway, but is it really the WWI/WWII template that distracts people from considering today’s global warfare as WWIII? During the Cold War we all came to imagine WWIII as a sudden and total nuclear devastation brought about by conflicting superpowers. When people express relief that WWIII didn’t yet happen, they may mean “at least we didn’t all get nuked.”
I think he is trying to say this is the way it is and implies that this is where it is going. I do not buy it. This may just be a run up. We have not seen major powers engage and I hope we do not. I also do not agree with his characterization of the Russia Ukraine conflict.
Agreed. Also, WW1 and WW2 were characterized by total war, where the economy shifts to a military economy and everything else becomes secondary. None of the major powers in the world are engaging in total war right now.
To me, it’s not WW3 until that happens. Hopefully, it never does.
Even then, nations had engaged in total war for thousands of years, a World war is a war involving total war and major combat all over the world with few truly neutral nations. Nato/Japan/Korea/India vs Russia/China engageing in total war would probably count, but any definition kind of needs to not include conflicts like Korea or any of the internal European ones to make sense.
Gone are the days of vast conquering armies and conventional military confrontations between two parties.
I’m sure they thought the same before the outbreak of WW2 as The-War-To-End-All-Wars had been so destructive.
I’ve heard other analysis that suggests the current state of play in the world resembles that in the run-up to WW1 and WW2. It would only take something like North Korea escalating aggression for the Trilateral Axis/Axis of Evil to become emboldened by the hope that the US is too distracted elsewhere and they could make their play for Taiwan, the Baltic states and/or Israel in the hope that they can radically change the status quo into one that better favours them going forward, shifting the balance of power away from the West. That could get messy very quickly.
@t3rmit3 As long as those missiles don’t carry nuclear warheads, it’s all manageable.
“War And Anti-War” by Alvin Toffler.
Toffler’s 1996 book uses ‘anti-war’ to present the idea that the wars of the 21st Century would be so different from past wars that we needed a new name for the conflicts. He predicted a massive war with non-state actors, like the current fight against ISIS, before 9/11/2001.
People actually suggested this in the days after the 9/11 attacks; that we should not talk about a ‘War On Terror,’ but the idea was quickly shot down by so-called patriots.
