Recommendation for anyone wanting to get into the gory, shocking details of WWI:
The podcast, Dan Carlin's A blueprint for Armageddon[1].
Over 24 hours on the topic, and I was left absolutely devastated by the descriptions of the impact and events of WWI. I guess I just didn't have a great appreciation or knowledge of WWI. At least for me, my grade school education was mostly focused on WWII and other more recent conflicts.
I really appreciated G. J. Meyer’s “A World Undone”. My [lack of] understanding of the conflict before reading that did not prepare me for how farcical and devastating the war was.
We just had ANZAC day in NZ [commemorating WWI/battle of gallipoli). A bunch of (I'm guessing younger people) are getting up in arms that it's glorification of war and whataboutism on other things going on the world "why don't we do x about y", "we shouldn't be celebrating it" etc etc.
They really missed the point that it's about not forgetting the brutality of war - to remember those who served and died under horrific circumstances. One of the key phrases is "lest we forget". However I fear we are, as each generation passes from WWI/WWII the horrors gradually get diluted.
While we don't have kids it's apparent the younger generations are not getting the stories of WWI/WWII passed down and their exposure to it is the glorification through Hollywood.
Thank you good HN'er for posting this up. It's always important to remember so we as a world don't go back there.
On the theme of Dan Carlin and generational dilution, the first episode ever was an interesting exploration of how Alexander and Hitler through that lens.
It's completely different to the current audiobook like format, but the early episodes are still well worth a look.
I totally recommend this, especially if you haven't heard Dan's podcasts before. One of his best, next to Death Throes of The Republic (if you want a fascinating depiction of pre-Empire Roman history)
What a weird article. The only WW1 era picture is actually from Belgium, not France. It is easy to find pictures of WW1 France! They even have one in another article on their site on the same exact subject:
Wow. The problem is, this immediately makes me consider all the industrial pollution sites across the world. I genuinely wonder how much of our planet has already been rendered completely inhospitable to life? I'm not trying to be dramatic or bait arguments, I legitimately wonder how much.
The shelling, in Verdun for example, was so absurd that it's not really relatable to pollution. It was days upon days of non stop shells, including chemical shells, going over the same ground back and forth, for weeks if not months.
It really was something completely off the charts.
Edit0: from the wiki on the battle of verdun:
It lasted from february to december - in the very first 10h bombardment, on the first day, over 1 000 000 shells were shot over a 30km x 5 km strip.
It's pretty difficult to make an area inhospitable to all life, including microbial (though I guess massive arsenic poisoning will do it). But as soon as you start thinking like that, then you wind up with a very boring sliding scale of hospitality for microbes, fungus, weeds, insects...
> I genuinely wonder how much of our planet has already been rendered completely inhospitable to life? I'm not trying to be dramatic or bait arguments, I legitimately wonder how much.
As has already been pointed out by multiple people, none of it. That's not a thing it's possible to do.
If you really were legitimately wondering about this... you need to find some sources of information that aren't just lies.
WW I is much more interesting to study than WW II, I think. How it started and might have been prevented, for instance. Why the combatants kept going when it turned out to be much more horrible than they'd ever imagined. And especially, how it ended, and the Treaty of Versailles.
Yes, and the historiography of the causes of WWI is truly enormous. It started during the war years themselves, when document collections were assembled by the various foreign offices in order to support their various disclaimers of responsibility. Well, the War Guilt Clause purported to settle that phase of the argument, although its academic cousin continues on today. A lot of stuff was published around 2010-2014 in preparation for the centenary. I always recommend people check out Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, because it's a really magnificent book. Maybe just a step below Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb (in terms of just really truly great writing of history) but just as worthwhile to read.
I'm not sure WW1 could have been avoided. Once alliances started being formed most countries needed to join in, and naturally these consolidated into two camps.
Up to this point (over centuries) Europe had regularly been embroiled in local conflicts. War in Europe wasn't novel, and certainly peace was not the norm.
So you have these two very large alliances, both fully expecting the other to invade at some point. An arms race develops - both sides unwilling to be perceived as weaker. (And fueled somewhat by manufacturers manipulating public opinion.)
All it takes is a spark to set off a series of cascading events. History records it as the assassination of Price Ferdinand, but if it wasn't that it would have been something else.
After the assassination the Austrian emperor -might- have had a more measured response, but that's expecting a lot from the sort of person who is, well, an emperor.
Sure, he might have found a way out, but there would have been another spark sooner or later. There were just too many munitions around, and the profits of war too appealing to the manufacturers of the day.
In the end it's human greed that is the root of every aspect, and consequence of the war. And that never seems to go out of fashion.
The recent adventure in Afghanistan cost what, several trillions of $. That money flows to companies and ultimately people. There are lots of interests in keeping that tap turned on.
Perhaps a more effective tool in preventing that sort of fruitless combat is to report daily not on how many lives we're lost, but rather how much tax money today cost. The public cares a lot more about money spent than lives lost.
Isolationism always turns into imperialism in times of economic crisis, putting trade dependent nations on deaths ground. World Wars are a side effect of that reaction pathway.
Yes. And yet, the business being unfinished was very much Woodrow Wilson's fault.
OK, that's flame bait, for sure. I'm working (just mentally, so far) on a lengthy article on that. I was watching a series on Prime last night called "The Ultimate Guide to the US Presidents" or something like that, and it mentioned, for Wilson, that he expressed surprise and displeasure that so much of his second term had to be devoted to foreign policy, when ALL of his training was in domestic policy.
It showed. His astonishing naivete and pigheadedness along with the US's immense power and influence worked to end the war in the worst possible way.
Wilson had managed to wrangle the other Big Three into an agreement on an entirely new model of international relations, which he was in part responsible for coming up with, and which was actually somewhat popular. But he had to have the Senate ratify the damned thing. The Senate did not ratify it. That precluded our involvement in the whole business and effectively set us adrift from international concerns again. How it's Wilson's fault that he probably suffered a stroke during his address to the Senate arguing the case for ratification is beyond me.
He did not "wrangle the other Big Three into an agreement on an entirely new model of international relations" -- they only pretended to agree, to placate him and make him go away.
John Maynard Keynes' The Economic Consequences of the Peace gives a contemporary deconstruction of the disaster he made, when just leaving the Europeans alone to settle things in their time-honored way could not possibly have been any worse.
As for that villain "the Senate" : they do have a Constitutional role in ratifying treaties. Yet Wilson went to Paris taking along NO representatives of Congress, expecting them to just go along with his wisdom (hence my term "pigheaded"). And in Paris he got rolled. Besides setting up a treaty that brought Hitler to power, he caused lots of small nations to be created that had no chance of defending themselves.
> How it's Wilson's fault that he probably suffered a stroke during his address to the Senate arguing the case for ratification
He collapsed in Pueblo, CO, not in an address to the Senate. He'd had several strokes before, and suffered the Big One back at the White House.
> How it started and might have been prevented, for instance.
It does not seem likely that the war could have been prevented. Wilhelm II had surrounded himself with war inclined military advisers, had himself entered a very militant mood by then and was determined to go into the war to expand the German Empire.
Otto von Bismarck, who had worked hard in preceding decades to maintain the diplomatic balance and to stop the German Empire from entering a new war repeatedly warned the Kaiser (Wilhelm II) of a looming disaster if the Kaiser were to proceed with any war plans. Alas, Otto von Bismarck and Wilhelm II had a massive fallout, the Kaiser continued to crave more place under the sun for the empire, and, after the former chancellor resigned and retired, Otto von Bismarck's advice was all but quickly ignored.
There is an interesting telegram exchange[0] between the Russian and German emperors, Nicholas II and Wilhelm II, who were cousins and referred to each other as Nicky and Willy, known as «Willy–Nicky telegrams». They corresponded with each other in English. One telegram dated with the 29th July 1914 is particularly interesting as Nicholas II offered a reconcilliation chance to Wilhelm II after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand:
«Thanks for your telegram conciliatory and friendly. Whereas official message presented today by your ambassador to my minister was conveyed in a very different tone. Beg you to explain this divergency! It would be right to give over the Austro-servian [sic] problem to the Hague conference. Trust in your wisdom and friendship. Your loving Nicky»
Wilhelm II, being in a militant mood, was disinclined to consider the offer and both empires proceeded to their own ascencions to an impeding collapse a few years later with vastly different consequences for each empire.
Wilhelm's unreasonable stubborness and unwise decisions even led to Adolf Hitler scornfully dispising Wilhelm later and openly calling Wilhelm an idiot.
No, the pressing issue of the Willy-Nicky telegrams was that Russia had mobilised her troops against Germany. Speaking about the Hague conference while setting troops in motion is hypocritical: you should wait out lengthy proceedings while we are invading your country. In the telegrams, William II tried to convince Nicholas II to stop the mobilisation. But Sergey Sazonov shortly thereafter made Nicholas II restart and escalate the mobilisation. At that point, a major war was inevitable.
I do not have an answer to that question, unfortunately. Given choices A, B, C, D and Z, what motivates people to make the worst (short or long term) one out of all alternatives? There is no answer to that. Personally, I link it to the self-determination theory and the intrinsic motivation, yet neither can be rationalised nor yield a deterministic answer.
Hypothetically, if Kaiser Wilhelm II had access to a time machine and an opportunity to reflect on long term consequences of his own actions, would he have made the same choice to go to war, made a better choice, made a worse choice or anywhere in between? One can't know as human nature is an enigma to date.
"And the relatively elevated levels of lead in certain French wines may result from the wood of the barrels in which they matured, from oak harvested in former red zones."
Okay, so I'm no longer putting French wine as high on my lists.
I always thought these things were relegated to the past but of course we have similar if smaller scale fighting in Ukraine. I'm not sure how to stop it for good.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> It's not pointless when nuclear response depends on seconds
That's exactly why it's pointless. Those few hundred kms don't make any difference.
And in terms of launch warning it's the subs that are the most dangerous and always have been.
Don't forget we have Russia's own enclave right in the middle of Europe and nobody complains about that.
> Russia has repeatedly asked to join NATO, most recently with Putin asking Clinton in the early 2000s. Unelected men in suits always manage to shut it down.
Russia is a crime syndicate masquerading as a country. It's just incompatible with our standards and values and if they joined NATO they would have driven a wedge into it.
We have enough problems as it is with Hungary pivoting to Russia and Turkey turning autocratic. Russia joining would have destroyed NATO. Which is probably why they wanted to join. I doubt it was ever sincere.
I do agree the MIC makes the US do very bad things but at least we in Europe are allies by choice, not at gunpoint like the former Warsaw pact. It's no wonder that counties prefer our side to joining their sphere of influence.
A lot of problems because they are also starting to align with other autocratic regimes like Russia. This is why it was so hard getting Finland and Sweden to join.
> Kicking a dog repeatedly and then shooting it when it snaps at you is US foreign policy 101.
So the likes of Bucha are actually American’s fault?
Putin is welcome to what he has coming and the utter ruin the Russian military is facing is deserved. Russia deserves better leaders.
In terms of a nuclear threat, when was the last time that Russia genuinely faced the prospect of being hit by a first strike?
Russia has probably issued 20 such threats in the last year.
It didn’t ask repeatedly. It was on a membership onramp with other Eastern European countries and then Putin demanded to bypass political and other readiness processes and jump ahead and be admitted directly, and started scaling back cooperation when this jump-ahead proposal was denied.
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. :-/
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.
The podcast, Dan Carlin's A blueprint for Armageddon[1].
Over 24 hours on the topic, and I was left absolutely devastated by the descriptions of the impact and events of WWI. I guess I just didn't have a great appreciation or knowledge of WWI. At least for me, my grade school education was mostly focused on WWII and other more recent conflicts.
1 - https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-55-blu...
https://www.alibris.com/A-World-Undone-The-Story-of-the-Grea...
It’s a long, sometimes tough read (because of the contents, not the writing, which is very well done), but worth it.
They really missed the point that it's about not forgetting the brutality of war - to remember those who served and died under horrific circumstances. One of the key phrases is "lest we forget". However I fear we are, as each generation passes from WWI/WWII the horrors gradually get diluted.
While we don't have kids it's apparent the younger generations are not getting the stories of WWI/WWII passed down and their exposure to it is the glorification through Hollywood.
Thank you good HN'er for posting this up. It's always important to remember so we as a world don't go back there.
It's completely different to the current audiobook like format, but the early episodes are still well worth a look.
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-1-alexand...
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/zone-rouge-plant-growt...
There's also no actual pictures of any red zones?? The only picture of the area is something that is no longer a red zone and has been rehabilitated.
Growing up in the north, I remember holes in the forests that were supposedly dug out by shells a century earlier. They were fun to ride on a bike.
It really was something completely off the charts.
Edit0: from the wiki on the battle of verdun:
It lasted from february to december - in the very first 10h bombardment, on the first day, over 1 000 000 shells were shot over a 30km x 5 km strip.
It's hard to even imagine what that looks like!
Earth life, as a total entity, is amazingly adaptable to any and all circumstances.
As has already been pointed out by multiple people, none of it. That's not a thing it's possible to do.
If you really were legitimately wondering about this... you need to find some sources of information that aren't just lies.
Up to this point (over centuries) Europe had regularly been embroiled in local conflicts. War in Europe wasn't novel, and certainly peace was not the norm.
So you have these two very large alliances, both fully expecting the other to invade at some point. An arms race develops - both sides unwilling to be perceived as weaker. (And fueled somewhat by manufacturers manipulating public opinion.)
All it takes is a spark to set off a series of cascading events. History records it as the assassination of Price Ferdinand, but if it wasn't that it would have been something else.
After the assassination the Austrian emperor -might- have had a more measured response, but that's expecting a lot from the sort of person who is, well, an emperor.
Sure, he might have found a way out, but there would have been another spark sooner or later. There were just too many munitions around, and the profits of war too appealing to the manufacturers of the day.
In the end it's human greed that is the root of every aspect, and consequence of the war. And that never seems to go out of fashion.
The recent adventure in Afghanistan cost what, several trillions of $. That money flows to companies and ultimately people. There are lots of interests in keeping that tap turned on.
Perhaps a more effective tool in preventing that sort of fruitless combat is to report daily not on how many lives we're lost, but rather how much tax money today cost. The public cares a lot more about money spent than lives lost.
OK, that's flame bait, for sure. I'm working (just mentally, so far) on a lengthy article on that. I was watching a series on Prime last night called "The Ultimate Guide to the US Presidents" or something like that, and it mentioned, for Wilson, that he expressed surprise and displeasure that so much of his second term had to be devoted to foreign policy, when ALL of his training was in domestic policy.
It showed. His astonishing naivete and pigheadedness along with the US's immense power and influence worked to end the war in the worst possible way.
Wilson had managed to wrangle the other Big Three into an agreement on an entirely new model of international relations, which he was in part responsible for coming up with, and which was actually somewhat popular. But he had to have the Senate ratify the damned thing. The Senate did not ratify it. That precluded our involvement in the whole business and effectively set us adrift from international concerns again. How it's Wilson's fault that he probably suffered a stroke during his address to the Senate arguing the case for ratification is beyond me.
He did not "wrangle the other Big Three into an agreement on an entirely new model of international relations" -- they only pretended to agree, to placate him and make him go away.
John Maynard Keynes' The Economic Consequences of the Peace gives a contemporary deconstruction of the disaster he made, when just leaving the Europeans alone to settle things in their time-honored way could not possibly have been any worse.
As for that villain "the Senate" : they do have a Constitutional role in ratifying treaties. Yet Wilson went to Paris taking along NO representatives of Congress, expecting them to just go along with his wisdom (hence my term "pigheaded"). And in Paris he got rolled. Besides setting up a treaty that brought Hitler to power, he caused lots of small nations to be created that had no chance of defending themselves.
> How it's Wilson's fault that he probably suffered a stroke during his address to the Senate arguing the case for ratification
He collapsed in Pueblo, CO, not in an address to the Senate. He'd had several strokes before, and suffered the Big One back at the White House.
It does not seem likely that the war could have been prevented. Wilhelm II had surrounded himself with war inclined military advisers, had himself entered a very militant mood by then and was determined to go into the war to expand the German Empire.
Otto von Bismarck, who had worked hard in preceding decades to maintain the diplomatic balance and to stop the German Empire from entering a new war repeatedly warned the Kaiser (Wilhelm II) of a looming disaster if the Kaiser were to proceed with any war plans. Alas, Otto von Bismarck and Wilhelm II had a massive fallout, the Kaiser continued to crave more place under the sun for the empire, and, after the former chancellor resigned and retired, Otto von Bismarck's advice was all but quickly ignored.
There is an interesting telegram exchange[0] between the Russian and German emperors, Nicholas II and Wilhelm II, who were cousins and referred to each other as Nicky and Willy, known as «Willy–Nicky telegrams». They corresponded with each other in English. One telegram dated with the 29th July 1914 is particularly interesting as Nicholas II offered a reconcilliation chance to Wilhelm II after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand:
Wilhelm II, being in a militant mood, was disinclined to consider the offer and both empires proceeded to their own ascencions to an impeding collapse a few years later with vastly different consequences for each empire.Wilhelm's unreasonable stubborness and unwise decisions even led to Adolf Hitler scornfully dispising Wilhelm later and openly calling Wilhelm an idiot.
[0] https://www.loc.gov/item/18001519/
We know that it didn't, but that's hindsight: "whatever happened, HAD to happen." But the players did have choices.
I do not have an answer to that question, unfortunately. Given choices A, B, C, D and Z, what motivates people to make the worst (short or long term) one out of all alternatives? There is no answer to that. Personally, I link it to the self-determination theory and the intrinsic motivation, yet neither can be rationalised nor yield a deterministic answer.
Hypothetically, if Kaiser Wilhelm II had access to a time machine and an opportunity to reflect on long term consequences of his own actions, would he have made the same choice to go to war, made a better choice, made a worse choice or anywhere in between? One can't know as human nature is an enigma to date.
Okay, so I'm no longer putting French wine as high on my lists.
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.
Imagine the industrial capacity of total war today...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Mostly the US had a lot more in them, after sitting out the first 3/4 of the war.
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.
That's exactly why it's pointless. Those few hundred kms don't make any difference.
And in terms of launch warning it's the subs that are the most dangerous and always have been.
Don't forget we have Russia's own enclave right in the middle of Europe and nobody complains about that.
> Russia has repeatedly asked to join NATO, most recently with Putin asking Clinton in the early 2000s. Unelected men in suits always manage to shut it down.
Russia is a crime syndicate masquerading as a country. It's just incompatible with our standards and values and if they joined NATO they would have driven a wedge into it.
We have enough problems as it is with Hungary pivoting to Russia and Turkey turning autocratic. Russia joining would have destroyed NATO. Which is probably why they wanted to join. I doubt it was ever sincere.
I do agree the MIC makes the US do very bad things but at least we in Europe are allies by choice, not at gunpoint like the former Warsaw pact. It's no wonder that counties prefer our side to joining their sphere of influence.
What problems does that cause?
So the likes of Bucha are actually American’s fault? Putin is welcome to what he has coming and the utter ruin the Russian military is facing is deserved. Russia deserves better leaders.
In terms of a nuclear threat, when was the last time that Russia genuinely faced the prospect of being hit by a first strike?
Russia has probably issued 20 such threats in the last year.
It didn’t ask repeatedly. It was on a membership onramp with other Eastern European countries and then Putin demanded to bypass political and other readiness processes and jump ahead and be admitted directly, and started scaling back cooperation when this jump-ahead proposal was denied.
Launching a genocidal war for such goal is as laughable as all the other reasons that get stated.