WELCOME TO MAD MAX
After two decades of war mostly being confined to insurgencies, conventional warfare has returned to the world. From Ukraine, to the Caucuses, to maybe the Middle East in the near future, we are seeing near peer armies fighting each other with modern advanced weapon systems.
What makes this moment interesting, from a military perspective, is that during the preceding years of relative peace there have been decades of massive innovations in military technology. But since we’ve had such a long period of peace, no one really knows how to best use this new technology on the battlefield against an enemy who also is wielding similar technology.
The most apt comparison to this moment is World War I. When the Great War started, new technology like machine guns, barbed wire, and advanced artillery had been developed. However, since this new technology hadn’t been used at scale against a peer before, the generals didn’t know how to best fight in this new environment. The tragic result was that in the first few years of WWI, millions of Europe’s young men died on suicidal charges through barbed wire into machine gun and artillery fire. The conflict devolved into a terrible war of attrition, as both sides fought and died in trenches while remaining in a stalemate.
Today, over a hundred years later, in eastern Ukraine we see once again a conflict with both sides utilizing new technology that has devolved into a trench warfare stalemate.
So how did we get here? To understand this, we have to examine what technology has been developed, and how that’s changed warfare.
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https://im1776.com/2023/10/21/welcome-to-mad-max/