Summary
The ongoing war in Ukraine seems to have slipped into the back of collective consciousness. If the war enters the news cycle it’s usually new footage of the sides trading missile and drone attacks on energy infrastructure, weapon factories, or apartment buildings.
While these are captivating and haunting images, they are far from demonstrative of the reality on the ground.
This is the most deadly conflict in Europe since the Second World War. Estimates are now projecting that combined battlefield casualties to have reached two million.
Putin’s Russia has spent longer in this meat grinder than the Soviets did fighting the Nazis, and with a lot less to show for it.
Why is this war so deadly?
Analysis
23 meters per day. That is the measurement of Russia’s offensive pace from CSIS. This is not the result of incompetence, it’s a methodical approach that has been forged in the conditions of near peer warfare in the 21st century.
Drones have changed the game in two key ways:
Firstly, they provide 24/7 surveillance of the front line. You are never unseen. With this ability they can direct fire from artillery and/or provide other frontline units with real time intel on enemy whereabouts.
Secondly, they are a cheap solution to both defensive and offensive needs. Delivering guided strikes against targets of all kinds (i.e tanks, IFVs, aircraft, infantry) thereby rendering the past decades of orthodox mechanized maneuver warfare unsustainable.
This prevents Russia from being able to use brute force to break the defense line, stagnating the frontline and creating a kinetic stalemate of sorts.
These new realities mean the clear advantage Russia holds in heavy industry, manpower and armaments has largely been nullified by Ukrainian drones.
Tactics evolve to situations. Tanks and mechanized infantry vehicles are now used sparingly, and aircraft are made vulnerable to relatively cheap shoulder launched anti-air missiles.
If you can’t use aircraft, tanks, or humvees, you resort to the cheapest alternative, humans.
Small teams of infantry move in clusters toward frontline positions which are themselves inhabited by equally small defenders. Drones line the front, waiting for someone unfortunate enough to catch their operators attention.
Attackers send drone and artillery strikes into the defending positions, and the defenders do the same to the advancing units.
It may take scores if not hundreds of lives to take a few hundred meters. Rinse and repeat.
More than 70% of casualties are caused by drones or drone directed artillery. It is rare that the men who die ever even see the enemy that kills or maims them.
The war has transformed from what was supposed to last only a few weeks into a protracted and slow moving stalemate with no end in sight.
Moreover the war has become a dystopian sci-fi like testing ground for the future of warfare.
Regardless of the combatants’ nationality, the footage emerging from the frontlines on platforms like reddit and telegram are heartbreaking glimpses into what modern war really looks like.
Mass media conformity to the binary good/evil narrative melts away in the face of the horrors on the war’s front lines.
Humanity stripped away, heroism eroded into wide eyes; still images of a young man’s last moments being posted to the beat of European techno music.
STALEMATE
This war isn’t stalemated because nobody’s fighting. It’s stalemated because a new kind of warfare has made old advantages worthless, and it’s costing lives at a rate the West has stopped paying attention to. Read past the missile-strike headlines, and push outlets to cover the drone war grinding down the front line, not just the footage that’s easy to run.