All the drone footage is actually pretty horrific to see.
You used to be able to take a hit and survive a war. Those days are gone. Now you die because 1kg of C4 blew up your entire ass, or you take a less dramatic hit but you will never be dragged back to a field hospital.
Eventually the US or similar will have to get into this kind of war, and there will be a come to jesus moment for all the hoo rah americans who think your chances of surviving a war are based on anything other than sheer luck.
This is Bad, man.
Nukes already showed you can't make a weapon so crazily deadly and destructive that man would end war, so things will be bleak for the rest of humanity's reign.
artillery, missiles, and long range drones are in the mix too. AI enabled spotting makes ISR detection rapid and effective.
some kubernetes container spots a random pixel that means hidden vehicles and a HIMARS strike is dispatched ASAP
For example, do you agree that Britain's and France's appeasement of Germany before WWII was the right thing because an attack wouldn't have been self-defense? Or, what about attacking another country to help defend an ally who's being attacked by them? That's not defensive, so I guess it's wrong by your standard for any other country to defend Ukraine. What about defending them by supplying arms and soldiers? The line gets blurry fast.
How about re-taking some recently lost territory? Is that wrong? For example would it be wrong for Ukraine to attack Russia to regain its eastern areas that Russia took at the beginning of the war? Or for Russia to retake any other parts of the soviet union? How about either North or South Korea attacking the other? If everybody opposed such non-defensive wars, they would be severely disadvantaged to a country that incrementally takes pieces of their territory in a ratchet effect.
What about "liberating" the people of another country from a brutal dictator? I'm sure you'll oppose this because it's like Iraq or Syria, but is there really no case where it's justified? Not even Pol Pot's Cambodia where it might have saved a quarter of the population from death it somebody had intervened?
Also recent advances in battery tech brought increased energy density: the same drones which had range 20km now have 40km.
(The killcam is a WW2 invention, starting with linking cine cameras to the machine guns of fighter aircraft)
We want to perform our work skillfully, effectively, and professionally. But we never want our tools to actually be needed.
(Another is that we can't effectively create a shield without the risk of it being used as a sword.)
If you make a hammer, it can always be used to murder someone, but if you make an AK-47, there's only one way it can be used. So if you don't want what you make to be used for killing, don't make an AK-47. If you 're good at toolmaking, choose to make tools that are not weapons.