Ukraine And The Future Of Front Line Ground Combat
After more than two years of all-out fighting in Ukraine, the shortcomings in Cold War era military science are on display for the world to see. The future of warfare is already here.
With only a half week of data to work with, this week’s post will focus a lot on more esoteric, theoretical stuff. War never changes, but warfare is always evolving, and history shows that the side which fails to fully grasp the possibilities of the future tends to get stuck in the past and lose when it counts.
To avert or win an even bigger and more devastating war emerging from Putin’s assault on Ukraine, democratic countries around the world have to be prepared to fight and win under modern conditions. A lot of sacred cows will have to be slaughtered and taboos shed, or a lot of good people will needlessly die because of the blindness of their leaders. Again.
One of the delusions that must be dispelled is the relevance of the USA in the coming world system. Small and middle powers are going to have to knit together institutions to replace what American leadership has mismanaged, because barring a miracle the USA the world once knew isn’t coming back.
I’d go so far as to assert that this is a good thing and also that most who disagree have either financial or prestige interest in the outcome. Which is their right - but they don’t get to then run around pretending to be noble defenders of democracy while making excuses for Israel’s latest atrocity. It’s that kind of hypocrisy that has done the idea of the Western World in and may yet lead to a tragic repeat of the twentieth century’s outright lunacy. I remain hopeful that this is the farcical repeat of the historical cycle that Marx theorized, but it sure doesn’t look that way in Gaza or Ukraine just now.
It’s a multilateral coalition-builder’s world now, and Americans had better learn to live with it or enjoy becoming poor. Some more fun thoughts on the collapsing international order in the third section. First, a short look at what’s been happening in Ukraine the past few days, to be followed by an outline of what future ground warfare looks set to require in terms of equipment and doctrine.
Weekly Overview
The most notable event this past half-week was a major Ukrainian drone attack on ruscist airbases several days ago. Three or four were struck, though how much damage was done remains a matter of speculation.
Ukraine claims that up to a couple dozen aircraft of several types were damaged, but satellite imagery collected the day after the strike showed no obvious signs. However, Moscow will be keen to hide the scale of any damage and knows when commercial satellites are passing overhead, so may have swiftly bulldozed any wreckage into a hangar. Parked aircraft not fueled and armed aren’t easy to catch on fire even if disabled by fragments, meaning no scorch marks left by blazes on the tarmac.
I’m sure some country had a satellite pointed at the bases that would have registered any detonations, but what The Five Eyes knows it doesn’t share with regular folks. Open source intelligence and strategy wouldn’t be any fun otherwise, right?
Regardless, the significance of this attack will only be possible to assess if Ukraine is able to repeat it on a regular basis. But for those like Tom Cooper who have been calling for Ukraine to hit orc airfields instead of oil refineries, here’s the proof that Ukraine can in fact conduct multiple simultaneous operations against different target types. Let’s see if this continues.
A refinery is a comparatively simple target; it doesn’t move, and certain critical structures being disabled severely hinders operations across the entire plant. The Muscovites also have dozens, and delivering some “cotton” to even a few on a sustained basis forces them to scatter their air defenses. This invariably leaves gaps that can allow concentrated drone attacks to punch through airfield defenses.
Another issue with targeting airfields is that unless you’ve got the right bombs to break up the runway or get to underground bunkers holding fuel and bombs, taking out aircraft parked in the open is your best bet. But any competent airbase commander will have decoy aircraft mixed in with active ones and play a shell game with the revetments combat aircraft are parked in near the tarmac.
This means that you either have to get lucky with a planned strike or have agents on the ground who can update targeting information when drones arrive in the area despite electronic warfare efforts. Moscow should be taking extensive precautions against both, but this is Putin’s empire we’re talking about. Being proactive is not seen as a virtue. Personnel wait for orders, meaning that Ukraine always has an opportunity to deliver some damage using a novel approach.
How many suitable drones Ukraine has available or can produce each month to target air bases remains unknown. Regardless of how it mounts these attacks, they must be repeated to have any lasting effect. And if Ukraine has any success, Moscow’s response will probably be to spread its aircraft inventory across more bases. This will make them harder to locate, but also reduce their efficiency and possibly leave individual bases more vulnerable. It’s a long game.
It’s got to be played, though, because glide bomb problem remains one of the most pressing facing Ukraine. Moscow has begun producing kits that extend the launch range to 90km by attaching a rocket booster, meaning that Ukraine is going to have to bring Patriot batteries within about 50km of the front line to effect intercepts. This will inevitably lead to losses, so another six or more Patriot systems and sufficient interceptors to keep them in action is an absolutely critical need for Ukraine.
In apparent retaliation for the cross-border raids by Russian insurgents into Belgorod and Kursk, Moscow has intensified glide bomb attacks against both Kharkiv and Sumy. This forces Ukraine to spread its scarce Patriot(MIM-104) and Aster (SAMP/T) air defense systems out even more than they are. It also helps stoke rumors of an offensive aimed at Kharkiv, which appears to be a disinformation op.
F-16s will offer only a partial solution to the glide bomb issue, unfortunately. Glide bombs can be shot down, but ideally you use something smaller and cheaper than a Patriot or Aster to do the job. Extensive use of decoys, rapid movement between fighting positions, and attrition to the ruscist inventory of airframes and pilots are the best short-term solutions. Electronic warfare is important too, as it can jam GPS signals and degrade accuracy, but two Su-34s releasing a total of eight 500kg bombs allows a flight to act like a heavy rocket launcher. As long as one device falls close enough to the target, having around an order of magnitude more explosive power than an artillery shell guarantees damage.
Without the ability to simply obliterate Ukrainian fighting positions that they encounter, Moscow’s orcs have proven largely incapable of advancing despite fierce and sustained efforts. Moscow is able to push forward by a few kilometers each week after obliterating an area, but this pace never generates sufficient momentum to break deep into Ukraine’s positions and trigger a collapse along a broad front. It also doesn’t leave much worth occupying.
Moscow’s operational art has largely degenerated into punching blindly at the nearest politically significant target, trading away tens of thousands of people and hundreds of pieces of equipment pulled from Cold War storage bunkers. While the severe difficulty Ukraine’s troops are facing on the front lines in many sectors cannot be overstated, zooming out to take in the full scope of the conflict reveals just how high a cost Moscow is paying for so very little. And this is Ukraine fighting without enough artillery.
Putin needs to maintain the illusion that his victory is only a matter of time - the rhetoric his allies in the USA, Europe, and the Global South are pushing makes the narrative objective clear. He can only hope that Trump’s re-election leads to the USA naively pushing Ukraine into negotiations - which would make Trump look like a chump when ceasefire talks invariably fell apart. If that doesn’t work, then Netanyahu starting a war with Iran that drags the USA in is Putin’s last best hope.
Putin’s war effort is on borrowed time; after 2025 either he pretty much gets a massive influx of direct Chinese military aid or his war machine will simply seize up as Europe’s chugs along. Even if he technically has hundreds of thousands of reservists left to throw into the fight, their equipment is getting older and less efficient all the time. Yes, elite units get T-90s and BMP-3s, but Moscow is lucky to produce a few hundred of each in a given year and they’re not accumulating. All the poor mobiks thrown into the average meat assault get are late Cold War T-72s or T-80s backed by BMP-1s at best, early Cold War T-62s or T-54s with MT-LBs becoming more frequent all the time. Quad bikes and golf carts are routinely destroyed alongside real armored vehicles. Tactical innovation this is not.
Moscow is presently able to replenish its losses, but the older a tank is, the more work has to go into refurbishing it. The reason there has been so much talk of late about a new orc offensive beginning in late May is that the lack of artillery plaguing Ukraine this winter has resulted in it killing only 20,000 or so orcs a month, while Moscow’s ongoing mobilization is bringing in 30,000 raw bodies. Many are equipped with brutally outdated gear, but still, there aren’t many people who fancy facing down even a tank from the 1950s.
So Putin is absolutely charging up energy that will likely be unleashed this May and June, but its quality remains questionable. That he doesn’t simply declare that everything under Moscow’s current control constitutes Donbas and declare the region liberated and go into a defensive crouch is indicative of the gravitational force constraining his options. Historically, throwing ever more resources into a largely failed approach is predictive of future failure. Just ask Japan about the Solomons Campaign… or the entire war against China.
In any case, Putin’s orcs continue to be sent to their deaths on most fronts, still trying to make they can of Ukraine’s artillery shortages. What advances have been made and sustained amount to mere kilometers, and there aren’t reports of Ukraine rushing reserves anywhere, so no new crisis appears imminent.
In the ruins of Robotyne and the heavily fortified town of Chasiv Yar, a fresh round of orc assaults have been struggling to breach Ukrainian defenses for almost a week. So far the fighting in both areas is at the uncertain stage where some ruscist troops appear to have advanced but a local counterattack might soon shove them back. Moscow’s forces continue to push west from Avdiivka in the direction of Pokrovsk, but whether this is a serious effort or merely an attempt to secure the flanks of a move north behind the Toretsk position towards Kostiantynivka remains impossible to say.
If Moscow is hoping to approach Pokrovsk from the west this looks like an awfully stupid idea. First they’ve got to get across the Durna, where Ukrainian forces on a ridge to the west can shoot approaching orcs as they come down one slope to reach the water line and then up the next. If Moscow is able to take that ridge, it then has to repeat the entire operation a few kilometers further west along the line of the Vovcha, with the 10km between these small rivers being almost devoid of settlements Moscow can use to build up forces ahead of the next lunge.
If Putin’s orcs want to present Ukraine with an ideal defensive scenario, this is the path to choose. That’s why I have to suspect these operations are intended to secure the western flank of a major push north towards Kostiantynivka in six weeks or so. It’s the only way to have Moscow’s forces on this front give support to the ongoing assault on Chasiv Yar from Bakhmut.
As far as the situation in Chasiv Yar goes, the area is much more critical to Ukraine than either Robotyne or the river lines west of Avdiivka. If Putin can bring the Kramatorsk-Sloviansk area under the boot, that should offer him enough cover to proclaim the war a success and justify holding existing lines for a couple years. At that point he’ll either lunge west of Kharkiv to eat his next chunk of Ukraine, a country he refuses to accept is a sovereign entity, or cut to the chase and go for NATO’s jugular by attacking a member and daring the USA to risk a nuclear conflict to defend them. Extra points if that happens when China has put a ring of ships in international waters around Taiwan and started inspecting inbound cargo ships for “contraband" just to see what the USA is willing to do.
A key reason Ukraine had to fight so hard for Bakhmut last year was that occupation of the ruins would give Moscow a jumping off point for sustained attacks on Chasiv Yar. The town is both on a height and shielded by a canal - except in one area, where the canal runs underground for a kilometer. If Chasiv Yar falls, Moscow will be able to safely push north from Bakhmut without worrying about its western flank. The Siversk bulge east of Sloviansk and north of Bakhmut is a sector Moscow likely wants to reduce because it has to fall before Moscow can even think about attacking Sloviansk in force.
An excellent report by Frontelligence Insight released as I was writing this post does a great job of covering the emerging fight for this critical town. The most concerning part of the report is an apparent lack of mines on the route a major ruscist attack took to reach the outskirts of the town. If this sort of thing is repeated often, it would lend credence to the chorus of media voices proclaiming Ukraine’s resistance on the verge of collapse.
These are as often to be found among pundits who claim to back Ukraine in the West as in orc circles. Eighteen months to two years is about as long as an issue can stay relevant in the delusional American partisan media ecosystem. Even the most sympathetic victim ages out of the media churn and becomes old news after the requisite partisan battle lines are drawn.
However, it would be as unscientific to pretend that Ukraine is bound to win no matter what happens as to claim that russia won’t lose and break apart. Until I see hard evidence to the contrary, I’m operating under the null hypothesis that Ukraine has the situation along the fronts reasonably in hand. Supplies are low, in large part thanks to politics in the USA. And everyone is tired - but after over two years of this, who wouldn’t be? I’m sick to death of this awful war and it’s on the other side of the world from me. Though it doesn’t help, so far as a sense of distance goes, to have a russian troll for a brother-in-law who took his family to live in Rostov-on-Don last year where he gets to be a priest telling one of russia’s ethnic minorities how grateful they should be for living in the russian world and not decadent America.
I dedicate so much time and energy to analyzing the conflict partly in the hope of contributing in some small way to stopping it from becoming a new world war. Science is about generating reliable and useful explanations, and systems science allows for holistic understanding of problems at the scale of whole countries or even the world.
But there are two critical aspects of war prevention:
Accurate comprehension of the possible outcomes,
Keeping all players honest once the majority are brought into general agreement about the rules of the game.
Generally speaking, eras of global conflict only draw to a close once the technology of destruction matures to the point no one can secure a lasting advantage. A big part of why Putin launched this pointless war is his belief that threats of extreme devastation are sufficient to bully his way to territorial gains. Until he is demonstrated to be wrong, others will choose his path.
This means that peace in our time requires a paradigm shift in how military force is organized and used. That must be coupled to strategic-level changes in how countries see themselves in the new disordered world we’ve all been thrust into.
The Near-Future Of War On The Ground
Going into the full details of what needs to change in the way democratic countries wage war is impossible in one post. This section will only be able to summarize the general thrust of how one domain of warfare, ground combat, is set to evolve in countries that value human life.
In my sci-fi mythology hybrid saga Bringing Ragnarok, I take a close look at the near-future of ground warfare in the portion of the plot set in 2040s post-America. Having reviewed a lot of combat footage from Ukraine these past years, I’m a bit shocked by how much I got right about the trajectory of frontline combat. Not all of it, of course, but enough to feel confident my theoretical approach is solid.
What we’re witnessing on the battlefields of Ukraine is battlefield evolution in action - many of the tools being used to great effect today will be totally obsolete in two years. Comparisons to the development of aerial warfare in the First World War are apt, but in truth the level of technological and doctrinal adaptation called for more resemble the challenge facing the Allies from 1939 to 1942.
Aircraft were important in World War One, but they had not revolutionized how war was waged below. The flexibility and ubiquity of air power when used in close support of forces on the ground and at sea led, out of pure necessity, the Allies adapting radical new doctrines to fill all the niches aircraft possibly could. It is notable that the urban strategic bombing obsession of most prewar theorists was entirely incorrect, a bloody catastrophe of impoverished thinking that killed millions of civilians for little to no battlefield gain.
Where aircraft had their true impact was when they worked in tandem with other forces. Germany used aircraft as mobile artillery to dramatically enhance the firepower of the small core of mobile forces they relied on to rapidly advance. Japan employed aircraft as the primary striking element of their naval forces, shocking the twin maritime superpowers of the early 20th century, Britain and America. It was close air support, attacks on troop concentrations and infrastructure within a few hundred kilometers of the battlefield, and fighter sweeps behind the lines that allowed ground forces to advance and take over enemy air bases that threatened control of the skies.
On the ground, the threat of attack from the air altered every essential rhythm. Germany’s ground troops proved incredibly tough nuts to crack on both fronts to the bitter end of the war, but they lost their mobility and eventually supplies when their trucks were all shot up and bridges shattered. Networked drones are only democratizing air support, taking on dangerous missions that free up crewed aircraft for other operations.
The basic rule governing all ground warfare is now what is seen, gets attacked, fast. You can’t get inside your enemy’s decision cycle and out-adapt them if they are able to respond to any move you make by filling the sky with drones, some that spot and others that shoot.
Electronic warfare is an important counter to drones, but an imperfect one. Drones have to receive signals from controllers, as autonomous AI targeting is a deeply problematic technology for technical and practical reasons more than ethical. EW generally acts by broadcasting junk signals that interfere with or entirely block ones a drone relies on.
But signal strength declines quadratically with distance from the transmitter. And it takes a lot of energy to block the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Radiating also means your equipment can be detected and located. Further, the drones being used right now are adapted commercial models. For years the US military has dealt with the threat of jamming and enemy signals intelligence picking up transmissions by using radios that frequency hop, that is, scatter data broadcasts across a bunch of frequencies in a pattern only a correctly-coded recipient radio will pick up.
Jamming-resistant drones are just a matter of time. Ukraine already switches drone control frequencies on a regular basis after assessing how ruscist EW is presently operating. Drones will always find a window, meaning that systems which can track and shoot them down are vital to being able to move on the battlefield.
On the friendly side of the jamming horizon, where allied signals prevail, drones will continue to operate with relative impunity. Even several kilometers behind the front lines mid-sized drones can peer deep into enemy territory. In the future they will probably fire laser guided rockets that personnel on the ground direct to targets with a simple designator. An anti-aircraft system that knocks down Shahed drones with laser-guided rockets has already been put into use in Ukraine, so the day when first-person drones crashing into tanks like long-range guided rocket-propelled grenades has become a quaint relic of the past isn’t too far off.
Sooner or later effective hard-kill anti-drone systems, probably a shotgun mated to an optical sensor with image recognition software, will start appearing on armored vehicles. Existing active protection systems tend to use radars, which emit signal that gives away the vehicle’s location, and are focused on shooting down fast-moving anti-tank projectiles. They’re expensive and also dangerous to any infantry near them because they have to fire automatically when switched on and attacks may come in at ground level. Drone-focused APS will benefit from longer reaction times and likely restrict the field of fire for safety except when on the move.
Many have questioned the value of armored vehicles and tanks in a drone-infested battlespace, but it is precisely the threat of drone attack that makes properly designed ones vital. The day of the unprotected grunt charging from trench to trench with a rifle is, hopefully, almost at a close. It’s cheaper to dispatch a few drones to kill each individual than it is to train their replacement.
In the near future, ground forces professionals will have to be nearly encased in armor. Around 80% of casualties on the battlefield are caused by artillery, not gunfire, and shrapnel comes from all angles. Bullet resistant vests are designed to survive a burst from an assault rifle at close range, and the weight of surrounding a body with ceramic plates too much to leave them battle ready. Helmets too need to cover the neck without restricting visibility, which probably means that digital sights projected onto a heads up display are a matter of time - which will help with defending against small drones. The soldier of the near-future probably packs a lot of computing power, too, likely incorporated into their armor to help dissipate heat. Full-spectrum camouflage is another must-have.
But there is no future where frontline personnel are moving around dressed like ordnance disposal techs unless powered armor becomes a thing - and then good luck covering up the heat profile! The utility of the human body on the modern battlefield lies in its ability to hide in small patches of cover and direct attacks. Protection will have to be comprehensive, but also not expected to survive direct strikes from bullets everywhere but the vitals. A full suit will still weigh more than current body armor despite any average weight reduction barring a breakthrough in materials technology, and the tradeoff will have to be a reduction in the ammunition and gear soldiers carry on a mission.
That means they will have to be even more reliant on vehicles for transportation. And it is only properly protected armored vehicles that will enable the rapid and unpredictable movements required to overwhelm the enemy’s ability to adapt in a given sector and defeat its forces with minimal loss. To put it bluntly, tanks are not obsolete, but America’s Abrams is. Bradleys and Strykers are too. Fortunately for the US so are Leopards, Challengers, Leclerc, Arietes, and all the rest of the Cold War vintage. But this can be expected to change within a short few years even by adapting existing hulls.
The armored vehicle of the future, whatever its role, will feature a fully remote-controlled turret that stows most of the vehicle’s ammunition load and main armament. Crews will sit in an armored capsule located behind the turret ring in the vehicle’s hull. The crew capsule will have tough all-round protection against mines and plunging explosives, the strongest of any part of the vehicle save the front, where the engine is located.
Ideally, to ease logistics, all future armored vehicles will be built on a common chassis, with the turret varying by role. A key advantage of using remote turrets is that they can be seen as semi-disposable: instead of slapping on enough armor to survive a direct hit, the goal of turret armor will be to ward off attacks from the majority of threats but not hostile tank rounds or top-attack anti-tank weapons. Being struck by a sabot or Javelin class weapon already leaves even the heaviest tank partly crippled as a result of internal shock damage to important components like firing computers and the calibration of the tank’s cannon. A mission kill that destroys the entire turret but allows the main part of the vehicle to return to base beats the crew abandoning the thing to drones.
Reducing turret armor and redistributing hull armor to protect the engine block and crew compartments applies the old principle of “all or nothing” that was productively employed in battleship design between the World Wars. It should reduce the weight of main battle tanks while doing little to reduce their effective survivability. Combined with effective APS and electronic warfare kits, lighter tanks ought to be able to survive the dashes between cover that characterize modern ground combat at every level, from squad to brigade.
Armored vehicles are today like horses were for a couple thousand years mixed with mobile bunkers. Soldiers can use them as base camps and rally points, keeping the vehicles a couple kilometers from forward positions under cover. This lets personnel retreat from outposts when these come under attack and set the conditions for an ambush backed by serious firepower.
Future squads should have two vehicles, a proper armored one - tracked or wheeled - plus a mine-resistant truck, optionally crewed. Each squad gets its own quadcoptor drone for local surveillance and conducting limited bombing attacks. To minimize the danger of detection by enemy forces or loss of drones to EW, thin fiber-optic tethers can allow a drone sent up from an armored vehicle to transmit an image of the surroundings without broadcasting.
Infantry and scouts will establish a network of fighting positions in front of their vehicle hides, creating a local tactical network where every friendly and known enemy unit’s positions are visible to other team members. Remote weapons stations represent the first line of defense, while each squad will additionally have at least one legged or tracked drone capable of hauling supplies and casualties as well as conducting simple ground recon.
Before any attack is launched on an enemy position, paths to and from the target need to be traversed by drones. That’s a better way to discover a minefield than sending sappers out blind. Drones can also theoretically be used to set anti-mine charges in an area, limiting the need to bring in vulnerable heavy gear.
All units in the field will have to operate according to a strict ethic of hiding wherever possible then moving once discovered. After being detected it’s only a matter of time before the enemy comes up with the right amount of firepower to wipe out the occupants of a hide. The goal of any fight, whatever direction a team is moving, is always to impose friction on the enemy and ruthlessly leverage its consequences wherever they appear. Exploiting asymmetric relationships is the key.
Another will be systematically embracing the idea of the Combat Information Center adopted by the U.S. Navy in the Second World War. Every unit in the field is a sensor, all the data it has to report of potential value. Pulling all data points into a coherent portrait of the battlefield at multiple levels and making relevant portions accessible to soldiers on the front line is task of command echelons.
The essential role of leadership and command in the modern age is to make sense of available, often conflicting information using critical techniques and steer operations accordingly. Properly trained units know best how to accomplish the task at hand and need only the resources and information to get the job done. Effective commanders aim to deconflict efforts and prioritize scarce resources to enable the emergence of victory.
This paradigm is tested and true, but social and bureaucratic pressures too often conspire to prevent its implementation. Another huge challenge of the Network Era is reforming institutions of control so that they stop stifling innovation without being unable to systematically invest in the most promising ones. That involves mental shifts that are difficult to foster absent a sense of imminent crisis.
It’s important to understand that as much as world leaders may bluff otherwise, none of them has any control over the situation across the globe. Too many ironclad assumptions made by a lot of influential people over the past thirty years have proven more brittle than anyone imagined.
For all intents and purposes, this is the Ragnarok of our times. How bad it gets depends on how quickly enough people recognize the peril and organize an appropriate response. Then, of course, they’ve got to figure out how to make government move - or replace them.
Global System Collapse: The End Of The Postwar Order
No military across the planet was ready for the Network Age. Fundamental parameters affecting human organization have shifted over the past thirty years, and warfare is not immune.
Broadly speaking, the intensity of warfare scales exponentially with two interconnected variables: available energy and the cost of communication. To build a crude but effective theory of both history and warfare, the first step is to recognize that over the course of decades and centuries these factors drive growth and change.
The foundation of human life in a scientific sense is Mutual Aid. Every human brain is wired to communicate with others in order to cooperate. Effective cooperation enhances individual and group survival odds. People need to communicate to more effectively acquire energy, and efficiency improvements in one domain feed back into the other.
Early humans lived in small hunter-gatherer bands which allocated labor according to custom and need in a flexible manner. Working together, a successful band can take in more calories than it uses, storing this energy as fat reserves and ultimately children who can add their labor to group efforts. Energy surplus enables greater freedom of action, the ability to invest in speculative efforts like scouting for resources or waging war.
War today is often defined as violent conflict between States, but this institution didn’t exist in its modern form until the 17th century. Humans have been cognitively modern for tens of thousands of years. Most of that time our ancestors were hunter-gatherers who had strong incentives to avoid pitched combat. Obviously two human groups can always find a reason to fight, but over time it is more cost effective to work out a solution. From defined territories to full on merging of tribes, the existence of anything resembling a broader social order is geared towards minimizing the incidence of warfare.
War is always, at its roots, a contest over scarce resources. The thing with humans is that there exists a strong tendency to invest objects and ideas with value, making possession a form of scarcity. So you can never eliminate war, only chain it, making it less violent by channeling the competition into markets and democratic politics.
What most people today think of as war - armies battling for control of territory - emerged only after humans came up with a new way to acquire energy. Agriculture, both its farming and herding variants, is a basic science that allows groups or even individuals to gain control more energy than through simple gathering activities. Agriculture also scales so long as you have enough arable land and labor and is highly adaptable.
But it also creates new problems. Once surplus is created, the question of who gets to control it rises to the fore. The expansion of cities in Mesopotamia, India, China, and the Americas was due to agriculture, but also allowed small groups to amass and exert astonishing amounts of power. Systematic forms of writing were developed in large part to allow god-kings and dynasties to make lasting claims on property, at times including other human beings.
Waging war against other cities and dynasties became much easier when large numbers of people were accustomed to being organized and ordered about. The imperial virus was thus born, from Mesopotamia spreading into southern Europe, transforming the Indo-European communities of ancient Greece and Rome into vicious imitations of the Mesopotamian system.
For a couple thousand years raw biopower and the written word were the sources of power inequality that drive most conflict. Eventually humans worked out how to harness the wind to wage war across the seas, forge metals, and breed horses to maximize their power on the battlefield - mathematics helped too. Yet as terrible as wars through medieval times were, it was the discovery of chemical power that brought the first true revolution in military affairs since the domestication of the horse.
The various phases of the Industrial Age gave humans access to more energy than they had dreamed thanks to fossil fuel combustion. Development of communication technology like the printing press made creating numerous military manuals filled with specific instructions possible. It didn’t take long for warfare to escalate, innovations like the mass conscription of individuals said to belong to defined nations with their own character and united by certain values enabling slaughter on epic scale.
The Industrial Age reached its apex in the Atomic Era, when warfare became dominated by machines and technology, humanity’s destructive capacity allowing it to vaporize whole cities in seconds with individual bombs. Yet war never really changed, for all that - it only made new groups of people vulnerable. Powerful leaders of major countries soon worked out that nobody was willing to risk dying to wipe out a rival. Wars could be waged so long as no direct confrontation between nuclear powers spiraled out of control.
The Network Age was born out of a century where energy, in relative terms, was cheaper and more portable than at any other time in history. Technological developments during the Second World War gave rise to digital computers powered by electricity mainly derived from burning coal. Oil allowed anything to be shipped anywhere, allowing whole regions of the planet to specialize in a single industry. This made consumer products cheap, sparking massive planetwide economic growth - and, ironically, severe damage to the global environment that underpins all economic activity in the first place.
Putin’s assault on Ukraine has become the first Great War of the Network Age. Cheap, robust, distributed networks make it possible to inflict precise damage on an opponent. Just as powerful computers no longer take up an entire room, small but effective weapons can be produced in large quantities and spread across the battlefield. It is becoming harder and harder to move and hide, a situation that much resembles the one personnel faced in the early twentieth century.
In the Network Age, what is seen gets killed. Survival depends on staying under cover whenever possible and having appropriate fire support and defenses to assist all movement. To defeat the enemy, which is always the purpose of military operations, a fighting force will have to be able to strike the depth of an opposing formation at will, paralyzing it through direct application of overwhelming and precise firepower to enable movement that improves the efficiency of attacks until they prove terminal.
The leaders of today simply aren’t ready for what’s coming. Experience is valuable, but when paradigms shift someone who has spent forty years doing their job a particular way often has a more difficult time adjusting than a kid fresh out of school.
A theme I’ve brought up before and will often is systems-level collapse as described by Adaptive Cycle theory. The apparent seasonality of history is difficult to miss as old assumptions are once again burned away by the cruel fires of reality.
It sounds incredibly arrogant, I realize, to condemn in sweeping terms the leadership presently in charge around the globe. But science is clear on this much: people are the same everywhere. Leaders are not special, graced with no superior insight by grace of their position. Some are competent, others venal fools.
History tends to repeat because similar challenges crop up time and again in life. When powerful people’s expectations about the future shift, ripples spread and calculations change.
Today the collapse of the balance of power that predominated after the Second World War is being driven by a unique situation in recent world affairs. The cost of communication has crashed in the Network Age to a degree far surpassing the disruption caused by the printing press and universal education. At the same time, the world has turned a corner with respect to overall energy surplus produced by the economy.
We are living through the first stages of a long-awaited but poorly understood Global Energy Gain Crisis. The prosperity of the past century has been driven most of all by cheap transportation fuel sourced from conventional oil reservoirs. This and a relatively stable international situation with low barriers to trade after the Second World War drove a worldwide production cost collapse.
But the gains were not equitably distributed. Extreme gradients between rich and poor exist between and within countries, driving ever-worsening social churn. And humanity has now burned through most of the cheapest oil it will ever be available to obtain.
Behind the supposed energy renaissance in the USA over the past twenty years, even setting from its environmental impacts, is a stark truth of thermodynamics: it now costs more than it once did in real terms to pull a barrel of oil out of the ground and refine it for use. This is a function of oil fields naturally depleting over time, rarely going dry but eventually pumping so little of such poor quality it is no longer economical to continue operations.
Fracking and tar sands recovery, which along with offshore rigs are termed unconventional sources, constitute the vast majority of recent US production. But these operations have a much shorter lifespan than conventional oil and also require a higher global oil price to remain affordable. The difference in price between a barrel of conventional and unconventional oil is representative of the energy gain loss incurred by the latter source - which also runs out, usually in 10-20 years, leaving bankrupt companies with no ability to clean up the mess left behind.
One of the major reasons that renewable energy is so important to build as quickly as possible basically everywhere is that the size of the world economy in fifty years depends on how much oil is invested today in energy sources that will last. While over the course of one or even five years the price of oil fluctuates, once you start looking out ten or twenty into the future the inevitability of price inflation is impossible to ignore. In a world where small sustained increases in the price of oil can shatter economic growth, resulting in dire political and social consequences, it isn’t pleasant to imagine what true scarcity will entail for people all over the world.
The solution? Broadly speaking, it’s the same as with defense: distribution.
Putin launched his war on Ukraine when he did and the way he did for a reason. In the future, access to basic resources like arable land are a ticket to power. What parts of Ukraine is he most interested in taking? The ones with the best farmland that are close to ports with year-round access to the ocean. Putin would dearly love to be a grain superpower, which is why Kazakhstan is certainly high on his subjugation list if Ukraine falls.
Even more important than geostrategy for Putin is timing. Over the past twenty years the USA has totally abandoned its role as a reliable leader and partner. The invasion of Iraq proved that international law meant nothing. Failure to beat the insurgency in Iraq or fully destroy the Taliban in Afghanistan warned that being a big tough superpower might not mean all that much where it mattered - not that Rumsfeld or Bush ever went on patrol in Ramadi to know.
That Putin turned to aggression in Georgia in 2008 and then Ukraine in 2014 should come as little surprise. For its part, China has spent the past twenty years deliberately preparing for the threat of a crazy American leader picking a fight because of issues over trade. Had it not, Taiwan likely would not face as severe of a threat from Beijing as is now the case. The USA betrayed its promise of being an impartial, rules-abiding power, then failed to do more than yell a lot and funnel more money to the Pentagon when Putin began his march. The world now knows the true quality of American power - it has always been and always be America First, whatever a particular politician claims.
Trump’s election changed less than the reaction to him did in the USA. Most of the Democratic Party has become like the Evangelical Christian Right, a Neo-Puritan claim to perpetual moral superiority over Neo-Confederate bigotry substituting for effective policy. The Democrats made Trump into a cult hero then kept on doubling down, embracing him as an excuse to not deal with their own rising internal tensions. No matter what evidence emerges warning that Biden is a patently awful choice to defend democracy, Democrats have a ready-made excuse to close their eyes and shut their ears.
So they cannot and will not accept the truth: that Biden has been a disaster for America and the cause of democracy around the globe. Trump will be no less damaging - but he may spark a true reform movement in the USA once back in office and abusing his power. Biden against Trump isn’t weakness against evil or even the choice of lesser evils - it’s Russian Roulette with two rounds in the revolver. Either way, hope for a better rebirth is all the USA has got.
Biden’s Israel policy is the perfect case in point. It took the tragic death of a group of aid workers employed by a celebrity chef Biden knows personally to force him to (allegedly) tell Netanyahu that it’s time for a ceasefire. This, reports have it, is what finally shook him to reconsider the bear-hug of Bibi six months ago that gave him a green light to do whatever he wanted in Gaza - not ten thousand dead children!
That’s empathetic, caring Joe Biden for you. Empathetic to some, caring towards a lucky few.
I fully anticipated Israel’s onslaught in Gaza to be brutal. After what Hamas did, Israeli media was always going to cry Holocaust until the world gave up on the dead dream of a two-state solution Tel Aviv abandoned long ago. Israelis will never accept what that means now: a Palestine with the sovereign right to defend itself. Hamas transformed all of Gaza into a suicide bomb and sacrificed Palestine in the process - I can’t even say I blame Israelis for feeling as they do. But acting on that rage has destroyed Israel’s future.
What I didn’t expect was for Israel, after starting out with the anticipated strategy of breaking Gaza into chunks and laying siege, to actively obliterate most of it and render it uninhabitable. That was collective punishment, not warfare, and exactly what Putin did to Mariupol in Ukraine. American-made Mk 84 bombs weighing 2,000 lbs have no place in urban warfare, pure and simple. Especially not when there are hostages being used as human shields.
That’s why, six months in, more hostages have been killed by Israel than rescued. This is no accident, and neither is the routine targeting of aid workers. It’s a message: that Israel can be more brutal than the House of Saud, Bashar Assad, or even Vladimir Putin. It’s no accident that Israel justifies its actions by citing the equally criminal Allied approach to laying waste to cities in World War Two. This is violence for the sake of it, an effort to convince the whole world not to mess with Israel.
In Lawrence Freedman’s book The Future of War: A History, the chapter on counterinsurgency describes two basic theoretical approaches to the problem, both demonstrating the dead-end that is the Western philosophical paradigm. One is the doctrine the USA belatedly adopted in Iraq, which involves intensive civil engagement backed by period applications of firepower against miscreants. It doesn’t work very well, because counterinsurgency is essentially applied governance, a context where use of force is always a kind of defeat.
But it absolutely beats the alternative as demonstrated by Israel: inflict so much trauma the civilian population won’t tolerate insurgent groups living among them. This never works. Israel just conducted a six month test of this doctrine in Gaza and has utterly failed destroy Hamas even as a military entity.
Sure, Hamas has been badly degraded. The middle case estimate seems to be that half its fighters are dead. But most of its tunnels remain intact, Israel wisely not risking troops to clear them out, and what’s more, in areas the IDF has cleared Hamas groups keep showing up to launch attacks or prevent violence where aid drops are being distributed. In most of the Gaza ruins Israel is trapped in the exact sort of counterinsurgency trap Hamas wanted to pull it into. And if Israel goes into Rafah, the war looks likely to escalate on other fronts. Depending on how Iran responds to Israel’s latest provocation, it might anyway. Regardless, something worse than Hamas is sure to emerge.
Meanwhile Biden is trying to make everyone believe that he’s really had it with Netanyahu this time and by golly there will be consequences if things don’t begin to start changing a bit. If the past is anything to go by, the next atrocity is only days away, and this time media outlets aligned with Biden will likely ignore it the way they mostly did Aaron Bushnell, the air force servicemember who died after setting himself alight in front of the Israeli embassy. I don’t think he should have done it, as there are better and more effective uses of a human life, but to ignore the vital symbolism does another disservice to all American veterans.
Truth is, Biden never had any control over Netanyahu. All Bibi has to do is wait for Trump to come back and he can do whatever he wants to anyone. With the latest hit on Iranian Republican Guard officials, he’s already telling D.C. exactly who calls the shots. No politician has the courage to upset Israel fans - many of whom are ironically American Evangelicals who believe Israel exists only to be wiped out when Jesus returns to punish everyone they happen hate. And are also mostly committed Trump voters who don’t listen to Biden’s appeals.
It doesn't really matter who wins the elections this fall any more - Americans have a choice of decline by ice or fire. Trump is just Biden sped up, the mask stripped off. The two are essentially WWE performers, one the heel and the other the hero, and as the season where the former was running the show drew better ratings the network is reluctantly leaning on a repeat.
As the world wakes up to the fact of America’s effective disintegration, points of tension between countries everywhere risk flaring into some form of war. Even if everyone always kind of knew the USA’s claim to be the sole superpower and global policeman was pompous and targeted at a domestic audience, to have it displayed in such spectacular fashion cannot but alter expectations and behavior.
The Middle East is a tragic postcolonial disaster to which there really isn’t any solution but insulate as much of the world as possible from the fallout by building renewable energy plants. But what China does next with respect to Taiwan - that will have lasting impact.
Those who lump China in with Iran and russia are making a grave and tragic mistake. There is no Thucydides trap or inevitable confrontation between civilizations just as there is no coherent West or East. Chinese people have just about as much democratic say in their federal government as Americans do their own. Putin’s claimed civilization isn’t one, ‘russia’ having no intrinsic meaning and Russian just a language like Spanish, French, or English, not some coherent cultural paradigm.
A whole lot of powerful people and hangers-on in Beijing and D.C. very much want the rest of us to believe otherwise. They will find a reason to wage war if not constrained, trapping the rest of the planet in another futile conflict spiral.
On the flip side, the steady democratization of warfare means that powerful people anywhere will have a harder and harder time securing their position in the future. The other prevailing trends of our time are Ukraine’s incredible resilience and the slow awakening of the European Union’s will to fight.
These may yet counter the slide to a Third World War by restoring a degree of balance to whatever order comes next. The first step in convincing the powerful to seek options other than war to achieve their aims is reminding them that they too are only mortal. Even little countries, so long as they have decent allies, can hold their own on the modern battlefield.
The drones are coming. And so far, they cannot be stopped.