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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I feel sad thinking about Ukraine for similar reasons. Even after they kick out the invaders, they're going to have so much messed up land.

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It is sad, and there are certainly areas where injuries and deaths will continue for decades to come. However I feel the need to point out that the First World War is on a whole other level of scale than the Ukraine War. As per the article , approximately 60 million shells were fired at the battle of Verdun. That's just one spot on the front over the course of about one year. In Ukraine, Russia's recent ramp-up of shell production is allowing for about 10,000 shells per day ( 3.65 million per year) across the entire front. Assuming that pace is maintained, that's about 16x less than was fired at a single spot on the front in WW1.

I write this comment not to diminish the very real suffering caused by the current war, but as reminder of the destructive capacity of a full-scale industrial war, where the entire state is devoted to producing the means of war.

I would also assume that modern munitions are much more likely to either immediately explode or fail (relatively) safe rather than lingering as highly volatile UXO. According to the OP about a quarter of the shells fired back then didn't detonate on impact, and those certainly weren't designed to fail-safe.

That's true, but there is a big cave-at: Soviet shells and North Korean shells can hardly be called modern and there seems to be a lot of duds fired.

Not to mention that Russia has littered whole landscapes with anti-personnel mines, something which didn't really exist in WWI. Small, plastic mines, very hard to detect.

And cluster munitions, used extensively by both sides.

Yep. Forgot about those. All of that stuff is going to be a sad surprise for a farmer one day, just like in France. :-/

It’s one of the most productive bits of farmland on earth due to its soil type. Presumably one of the reasons Putin decided to take it.

Sure, but there's still going to be a lot of wreckage and blown up stuff and ... maybe modern munitions aren't chemical weapons ala WWI, but I don't think the ingredients are like "organic, artisanally produced, biodegradable" stuff either. The US was using depleted uranium for a while, no?

Isn't DU still used? Uranium pierces armor terrifyingly efficiently.

Both the Ukrainians and Russians have been using DU shells, but honestly tanks aren't killing tanks very much, so it's basically irrelevant. Even in the best case the DU is still hitting a 40 ton tank which is full of plenty of heavy metals itself.

Thanks for this, I didn't realize the true scale of WW1. That's horrifying.

Imagine the industrial capacity of total war today...

to me, total war today would include all nuclear weapons, which would alter that horrifying scale.

A question I don't know the answer to.

Is the scale of the conflict simply significantly less, or is artillery more accurate(and has a greater range?) and therefore less shells tend to get used in a modern day context?

It's both scale and the nature of combat changing - in great part due to the horrors of WWI. There was a huge front stretching across Western Europe of mostly static defensive installations like the infamous network of trenches, all of which could easily be targeted by artillery but couldn't be held by enemy troops for very long. Artillery units would sit in the same spot for months firing at each other without the battle lines changing more than a hundred meters back and forth. Once tanks were invented, this stalemate broke and trench warfare with static installations as far as the eye can see became untenable.

While artillery is still useful today as a cheap way to hit static targets with tons of explosives, modern combat has many more mobile units like tanks and armored infantry that are impractical to hit when they're moving around. Artillery is a big part of Russian military doctrine but no one uses it at the scale it was used in WWI.

> Once tanks were invented, this stalemate broke and trench warfare with static installations as far as the eye can see became untenable.

Not sure what timescale you mean by "once" - if you mean immediately during WWI - well the story is a bit more complicated than that. The first tanks were tested in the battlefield in WWI, but they were few, rare, and slow. Some versions were effective at anti-trench warfare, but they didn't fundamentally change they war, because there weren't enough of them and they weren't that good.

WWII tanks were a whole different ball game, travelling at automotive speeds - easily 40mph - over most terrains, with much more effective armor from all sides, and both sides figured out how to use them effectively together with infantry and air power.

The WWI stalemate really got broken because the Allies - US, UK, and France - had a lot more in them, whereas the Central Powers - Germany, Austria, etc - ran out of manpower and supplies to keep up. They still made it hell on the Allies to gain ground, but they effectively had lost their ability to manage a counteroffensive through attrition. Tons of tactics were tried before that point to avoid an attritional war, but planes and tanks to make fast high powered strikes didn't exist (WWI planes couldn't carry much weight, so were ineffective as bombers, and had shorter range; they were mainly used as recon), and artillery was so destructive it hindered it's own slow advance.

Best source I've seen on these subjects is https://acoup.blog/2021/09/17/collections-no-mans-land-part-... and his followup article.

> The WWI stalemate really got broken because the Allies - US, UK, and France - had a lot more in them

Mostly the US had a lot more in them, after sitting out the first 3/4 of the war.

Totally accurate. But also the British blockade of Central Europe was slowly starving the central powers. Maybe part of that was because the US was also supplying the allies...

That was poorly phrased. I didn't mean that the development of tanks broke the WWI stalemate, but that after tanks came into their own in the interwar period, WWI-style static trench warfare was no longer practical.

WWII tanks started to force everyone to be a lot more mobile on the battlefield at which point artillery lost utility compared to the WWI era (though obviously still very useful)

yup, I suspected you might mean something like that. Also of note, part of the major usefulness of tanks was to pair radios with them, so the new faster armies could coordinate as they moved.

And fun historical note, France definitely didn't get the memo, and were caught totally surprised by the speed of the Nazi assault. They were still using fixed phone and telegraph lines and their top commander wasn't even sitting by the phone. Their complete lack of imagination for how all the new technologies would change war was the main reason they blundered their defense so badly. Greatest victory the Nazi armies every won.

Both. And one is a big causative factor in the other. Beyond the technological advances in manufacturing making shells more consistent and powerful and artillery pieces more precise, Great War artillery was essentially blind firing. You had a copy of a paper map produced by surveyors triangulating points. You think the enemy is in this grid square. You point your gun in that direction and calculate how much charge and elevation you need to hit a target at that distance, then you fire. Most of the time you miss. Even if you hit, you have no idea. So you form up your guns in batteries of hundreds, and you fire for hours on end, because it's the only way to guarantee effective hits on your target.

Artillery changes a lot once you have satellites and GPS and guided shells and drones, when the camera on your drone can point at something it sees and instantly turn that into a set of accurate coordinates that can instantly be transmitted to a battery that can instantly calculate a firing solution for those coordinates. You can fire one shell and achieve damage on target you'd need to fire dozens to achieve in WW1.

And this, along with the general technological advancement of war in every other way, means the scale is smaller. In WW1 you had to mass thousands of men in every kilometre because if you didn't then the enemy would, and overwhelm you with numbers. In Ukraine, whenever either side concentrates its forces beyond a handful of tanks and infantry squads, the other side hammers that concentration with accurate artillery as soon as they spot it. WW1 scale simply does not work.

Even massing artillery is problematic in Ukraine, as it is often targeted by drones and loitering munitions.

Or the flip side. Russia is trying to take control of land, but what's the point if you level everything and make it uninhabitable.

buffer zone, natural resources, water supply for warm water port, delusional bragging rights, access to do more of the same to moldova and surrounding states.

Key point here is buffer zone, which Russia has been repeatedly demanding for 30+ years.

Which is kinda pointless in this day and age of aerial warfare, and it's also really unfair on those who live in that "buffer zone". That means they're basically just a throwaway crumple zone to Russia ready to be sacrificed. Who wants to be that? And if they do manage to take over Ukraine they still don't have a buffer zone because they'll be bordering with Poland and Romania.

Also, Russia has actually gained a huge border directly with NATO as a direct result of this war. It's really backfired in that regard. Finland wouldn't have joined NATO if Russia hadn't shown how dangerous they can be. They were perfectly happy with the status quo until this.

Such a lost opportunity. It would have been much cheaper to dissuade them of that idea before this war. The Crimea stunt they pulled should have been the turning point, but instead we get almost no reaction. Now it's going to cost a lot of money and lives to throw them out. :-/

Elections have consequences. Which is why foreign interests often invest in them.

Russia is vast and has a land area that would allow it to use its own land as a buffer if it chose to. Very other countries can do that.

Launching a genocidal war for such goal is as laughable as all the other reasons that get stated.

This "buffer zone" demand is much older than 30+ years. Putin wants another Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to invade his neighbors, to be called 'Putin the Conqueror'. Everything we see are his ambitions to rewrite history. He won't resort to nukes because then there is a risk of no one reading the history of the new glorious Russian empire by Putin the Conqueror, and that's against his life goals.

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