The more things change…

Watching the wars in Ukraine and Gaza from the safe distance of Australia, it’s clear some aspects of warfare have changed utterly, while others haven’t changed at all.

In Ukraine, drones rule the battlefield. While it might seem like an obvious cliche, that battlefield really has started to resemble the opening scenes of Terminator 2. If you can’t move during the day because hovering drones will blast you, and you can’t move at night because drones with infra-red cameras will hunt you down, it’s no surprise the Russian offensive is moving slowly.

The rapid combined-arms offensives of the 1940s blitzkriegs are not possible in this environment. In its place is a battlefield that more resembles World War One: troops huddling in trenches trying to avoid artillery fire, minefields and barbed wire, infantry assaults being mown down and a frontline that moves incrementally with huge losses, especially for the attacker. Add AI decisioning to the drones in this mix, and it’s not hard to see it rapidly spiralling into a situation where humans simply can’t survive at all on a battlefield.

Meanwhile in Gaza, Israel and Hamas have been forced back to the street-fighting tactics originally developed in Stalingrad, that have since been re-used in battles like Hue and Falluja: massive indiscriminate artillery and aerial destruction, going house-to-house through walls, fighting in tunnels, obliterating all infrastructure and causing massive civilian casualties.

It seems that no matter how innovative scientists are in creating new methods of death and destruction, some things remain constant: you need infantry to take and hold ground, infantry need the support of tanks and artillery, and whoever controls the skies controls the battlefield.

The other thing these two wars have in common with many of their predecessors is that the aggressors have no clear end game. What were Hamas hoping to achieve with their attack on Israel? If it was to shake up the status quo they succeeded, but at the cost of so many lives and their own annihilation. And what was Putin hoping to achieve: a complete takeover of Ukraine to create buffer zone against NATO? In the context of Russia’s history of invasions from the west, this particular paranoia is perhaps understandable, but still not excusable. What will constitute victory? Does he even know?

It seems that the constant in all of this is the same: the desire of some humans to oppress others. While we have that particular gene, as a species we’re doomed to repeating this over and over again.

Ask yourself: if you were an alien race passing Earth, saw what was going on here and reviewed human history, what would you do? I’m pretty sure the response would be this:

“Quick, they’ve already got to their moon, launch an orbital strike and wipe that lot out before they can infest any more of the galaxy.”