The dangerous delusion of modern warfare
economist.com
economist.com
Oh how much I wish Mr Owen would be sent to the front lines to see for himself how irrelevant he can make 3000$ drones.
The reason why drones are _so_ devastating in ukraine is that there is no air superiority.
that standard "modern" way is bomb the living shit out of anything armoured, and then push forward with your own armour. Hence why ukraine needed so many javelins to stop armour and helicopters.
Its also why despite the sheer amount of stuff that Iran et al threw at Isreal, it hardly got through. unlike Oman or UAE. (However thats not actually apples to apples.)
What isn't said is guerilla warefare with drones is devastating.
Hanoi had extremely heavy air defences and was left mostly alone (both because of that and because it wasn't considered a politically appropriate target).
It means that the side without superiority has no ability to do proper logistics.
Want to move artillery? its going to get blown up.
Want to move troops? can't, because the transport is going to get blown up.
You want to supply food to 10k plus fighters? can't because it's going to get blown up.
Now, it doesn't matter what provides the air superiority, be it missiles, planes or drones.
Its not without precedent, in recent times. If we look at battleships, they went from being the thing that projected power, to a liability when air carriers dominated. the effect is the same, you drive up with your battleship/carrier group and dominated the area for 300miles radius.
For the US and friends is terrorizing the enemy, his forces, his civilian population into giving up. Is feeding a civil war until he crumbles.
> bomb the living shit out of anything armoured
That’s absolutely not what’s missing in Ukraine.
> and then push forward with your own armour.
And then, as soon as you assemble let alone move in the open, you get wrecked. No one has an easy answer for this. The answer is what we’re already seeing: attrition.
> Iran
Iran prevailed in an highly asymmetric conflict by successfully attriting US/Israeli air defenses and surviving their attacks, depleting their arsenals. Which was their goal, not “levelling Tel Aviv”—however much they would have liked to.
Finally, what Israel is facing in Lebanon right now is but a pale imitation of what’s going on in Ukraine. But bad enough. One can imagine what just a couple days of Ukraine-level losses would do to them, militarily and politically. No matter their air superiority.
The US has tried to do it a few times (most notably Vietnam), but it isn't the strategy in the slightest. The goal is always an Iraq style campaign with heavy air attacks to destroy/confuse most enemy capabilities before a swift invasion.
Terrorising the population in submission has never worked. The US Air Force's own study of strategic air power after WW2 concluded so.
> That’s absolutely not what’s missing in Ukraine
> and then push forward with your own armour
If you rule the skies, you shoot down most attacking drones / it becomes too dangerous to launch drones from short to medium distances (because you'd be found out and destroyed ASAP). It's important to remember that not all wars are the same, and a competent army from a strong military power wouldn't have gotten bogged down to trenches in the first place. Mobile warfare is all about speed and unpredictability and the enemy being unable to react in time
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Putin was advised that Russian disinfo had worked and Ukrainians would welcome Russian troops as liberators while Zelensky's government would fold immediately. His generals feared to offer a less rosy assessment because doing so would have been immediately fatal. Trump was advised that invading Iran was a very bad idea[1]. Putin's brutality led to him being misinformed, but Trump ignored good information and made a bad decision.
New technology didn't cause either of these bad decisions. It was old-fashioned arrogance, thuggishness, and stupidity.
As for drone warfare... A real X factor is going to be production capacity.
Ukraine has managed to capture manned Russian positions with only drones. Drone tech evolves so quickly that one side's technological edge can be blunted or even reversed in just a few weeks or months. Stockpiles are not to be relied upon. Being able to out-evolve the enemy is critical, but being able to turn lessons learned into new hardware immediately will likely be a deciding factor in future conflicts.
The chimp troupe is full of itself. Its intelligence and "innovations" are highly overated. Covid brought the whole world to its knees. No intelligence or drones required.
As Lynn Margulis famously said - we are not the main show.
Part of a long trend: Israeli Operatives Who Aided Harvey Weinstein Collected Information on Former Obama Administration Officials to undermine the Iran Nuclear Deal - https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/israeli-operatives-...
To help make the case on Iran, Graham traveled several times to Israel in recent weeks, meeting with members of the country’s intelligence agency. “They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” he said. He spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, coaching him on how to lobby the president for action. - https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/lindsey-graham-trump-ira... (https://archive.is/G1Dt0)
Netanyahu started this war by attacking Iran. He assassinated Ali Shamkhani, Iran’s lead nuclear negotiator, deliberately sabotaging US-Iran nuclear negotiations. - https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1934659864610918435 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Shamkhani#Assassination_at...)
When Israel attacked Iran in 2025, Iran was very, very clear that they did not consider it an attack from the US and did not retaliate against US assets. The US choose to support israel with intel and weapons, and Iran still didn't strike at US interests. Then the US joined forces with israel to push for bigger concessions from Iran just before the ceasefire (that the US broke 8 month later, once again during peace talks).
So do not act as if Israel pushed the US into this war. This was a political and strategical choice the US made, and you should own it. People who were silent on the 2025 bombardment and are now saying "we shouldn't fight Israel war" are to me hypocrites.
Because when 50% of donations to the Democratic party, and 25% of donations to the Republican party, are from Jewish sources [5], it can't be any other way.
[1] In practice, critical negotiations, with Iran and elsewhere, have been put in the hands of two people, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, with close personal relationships with the president and obvious economic stakes in the relevant conflicts. - https://snyder.substack.com/p/on-superpower-suicide
[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2qjLaSyAWj8
[3] if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it our aid, our cooperation with Israel. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1LmnQRnw8I
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6XZKE7a_F4
[5] https://www.jpost.com/us-elections/us-jews-contribute-half-o...
Pretending Kushner’s bullshit has anything to do with being a Jew and not being willing to sell anyone or anything for a dollar is just silly.
The pro-Israel group is just as likely, maybe moreso given the current administration and the people like Thiel running it, to be apocalyptic Christians, trying to bring on their own idiotic vision of the end times.
I guess "Jewish has nothing to do with support for the Jewish state" would have sounded too silly, so you used Netanyahu instead. Luckily we have opinion polls to prove the "trope" true: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/646214/suppo...
The group with the most sympathy for Israel, and least for Palestine, is, unsurprisingly, Jewish.
It is not silly and it is true. In the same way as many Muslims don’t want to live in a theocracy and many Christians are not fundamentalists. Being a Jew, a Sionist, supporting the principle of Israel, and supporting its current apartheid iteration are all very different things.
Your claims about Putin are just as good as mine.
having nukes and a lot of empty land does not make russia "great power", and their war results match this.
It sure feels like “soft power” is “real” power - at least until (if) someone sorts out a defensive strategy. Bluster and bullshit appear to get very limited results, no matter how many missiles are behind them.
And where does your inside info from the Kremlin and Putin's head is coming from?
Putin was raised in the KGB, I think he knows a bit how to get intel. And with secret war style he was very successful in 2014 seizing the Krim and some areas.
It was likely just overconfidence in the ability of the russian army in a conventional war and underestimating the will of the ukrainians to hold their ground in the beginning of the war.
If that battle in the beginning would have turned out different, Kiew would likely have fallen and then the war would have been largely over in a few days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Antonov_Airport
Not many believed, myself included, that Ukraine was strong enough to hold of the russian army - but they did. And now both sides use Drones heavily.
" a Moscow FSB agent once tried to convince him not to investigate the October 2002 Moscow theater hostage siege"
Ok, so the source is one russian journalist who was known at least since 2002 to the FSB as someone to keep away from inner sanctum information. It is something, but I doubt he got really access.
It's coming from the fact that troops approaching Kyiv were supplied with 3 day rations and full dress uniforms, ready to hold a parade in Kyiv. It's also coming from US intelligence (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/russia...). And on top of that, russian propaganda literally repeated times and times again that this war will last for 3-4 days.
> Putin was raised in the KGB, I think he knows a bit how to get intel
Are you saying he planned for 5 years of war and russian economy being destroyed and also planned for over a million casualties for his army?
> underestimating the will of the ukrainians to hold their ground in the beginning of the war
There you go, you just said it yourself. That's the "insight".
I don't believe he had much illusions there, but he surely believed he will win in 3 days.
You don't do that if you think you'll have a quick victory, you do that if you're certain there will barely be any war.
It is wild how many conflicts involve this blunder. I can’t think of a single major example where the advisors were right. It’s such a great example of believing your own propaganda and/or being too afraid to actually look under the hood of your claims to your leader.
Autocracy tends to breed lying yes men near the top I suppose.
So many left after all this so Ukraine’s sympathetic-to-Russia population will no longer be significant by any metric. Putin knows this. He’s lost Ukraine forever if he doesn’t make them surrender.
What's changed is this ability is now easily accessible.
The current situation is not a consequence of modern warfare. It’s a consequence of the many layers of hubris, stupidity and arrogance uttered by incompetent people who put up a show for a shrinking audience.
The stupidity of the leadership in the USA is perfectly broadcasted in full view, for everyone to see, during Trump cabinet meetings, where he is undeservedly praised by weaker men and women. It shows all the weaknesses of the USA in just 5 minutes of watching that cringefest. You don’t even need spies.
A plan with quite long odds you could rightly say, but not as stupid as subduing them by invading them I suppose.
"At 2:30 a.m. EST on 28 February, Donald Trump released an eight-minute video statement on Truth Social, saying that the purpose of the US strikes in Iran was effectively[vague] regime change."
Who will ever trust the US enough to negotiate in earnest?
There’s only one group of people dumber than US politicians and that’s the American people who support them.
And per analysis I heard in French media from Iranian opposition understood the war as a war of destruction, not as a war of liberation. As they continued to be executed daily by the regime.
Meanwhile one of multiple explicit day 1 plans was a plan to negotiate with successor within the regime - recreate the Venezuela situation where you keep the regime, keep its tortures, but put head more willing to give up oil on its head.
"Iranian Patriots, keep protesting – take over your institutions!!! ... help is on its way", said Trump. And then... nothing. They could have provided money, weapons, intelligence, support of all kinds but instead chose to let their potential allies be slaughtered.
Similarly, the US facilitated the dismantling of Rojava, the Kurdish polity in North-Eastern Syria. The Kurds had been led to believe that they'd be able to retain some form of semi-autonomy, but the US pulled the rug from them at the last possible moment. And then, er, wondered why their cousins in Iran weren't willing to rise up against the government there.
It's almost as if they spent the whole of January putting themselves into the worst possible position for achieving their war aims. What did they hope to achieve by sabotaging themselves in that way?
As for the Iraq war, Israel was supportive, but it would be incorrect to say the war was at their behest.
Well also, about Pahlavi being deposed by his own people, who really knows.
They also need to maintain Western support. That's billions in both military aid and payoffs to neutral countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, plus diplomatic ties. Netanyahu's administration wants to maintain support from its own people too. Having enemies isn't a completely bad thing for those reasons.
... Isn't 1 out of 16 higher than 1 out of 25? (May be still lower in absolute numbers due to the population size difference, but the original text is unclear)