I’m gonna say Ukraine simply for the obvious rapid shift to automated warfare. We knew it was coming, and we used drones ourselves extensively during the GWOT. But Ukraine made suicide-drones a thing. A swarm can work an enemy trenchline must faster than an Infantry unit can take it. It’s not the end-all-be-all for sure, but suddenly CQB and long-range gunfights are taking a back seat to how well your unit can detect and then defeat or counter drones. WWI taught us the final lesson about archaic tactics vs. modern weapons like machine guns. WWII extrapolated on the air part for sure. Korea was more of the same. Vietnam and the GWOT shared a COIN element, but Vietnam was primarily a high-intensity, small unit conflict against the NVA. We didn’t face a “regular” Jihadi unit except early OEF (with Al Qaeda “main force” units, which we mostly destroyed) and early OIF when we were taking out the Iraqi Army.
Thoughts?
I hate to say it but if we ever go hot with China we will go to the next level of warfare, not necessarily nuclear either. High-tech out the ass.
You might enjoy a YouTube channel called Flat Circle History. He’s got a CGI series going on WW3 that’s pretty sobering. Lots of high tech stuff I’d not really considered is very well illustrated in action.
Ukraine’s lessons are going to change everyone’s tactics. Any military not heeding lessons there, some of which were already obvious, will have bad days going forward, if they face a peer/near peer.
Everyone learns something from every war, but they don’t always apply it properly. Like, generalizing a lesson to other conflicts where it isn’t applicable. Or the other way around.
And armies like to forget some lessons ASAP, even when individual leaders fight to prevent that. Armies have to look at context and determine which lessons are important to all future conflicts, which are important to specific possible or planned conflicts, and integrate those lessons with similarly analyzed ones from past conflicts. Then they have to actually train to heed those lessons.
Inexpensive drones with varying levels of specialty and availability to belligerents is absolutely a disruptive technology on the scale of smokeless powder.
Improvements to artillery are more incremental, but have also impacted tactics down to the small unit level, such as changing the way movement formations are selected.
Drones currently represent a major threat in a conflict where neither side can achieve air superiority allowing for extensive electronic warfare and signal jamming.
Like most threats, counters to that threat will be developed. First rate militaries will develop anti-drone countermeasures, improved drone detection/targeting systems, anti-drone weapon systems, and make changes to the armor profile of tanks and other armored vehicles to provide improved protection from airborne drones.
Drones are very much ‘fk that object/person in particular’.
Artillery called in over the radio is more ‘fk anything stupid enough to be in that grid square’, and will remain so.
Long live the king of battle (though the members of his court will continue to rotate through)
Pre Civil War the Dominiate Tactics were those of Napolean, You start off 1000 meters apart and march toward each other until 300 meters and begin firing.
By the time the Civil War was a year and a half in, we are now dug in much like WWI
So we learned marching toward one another in formation didn’t work and we learned that without a bold initative you will be bogged down for years in a trench.
The Next iteration would be Blitzkrieg which avoids the mistakes of our Civil War and WWI and takes large swaths of real estate but depends on taking key terrain and Cities.
So I will say the realizations of the Civil War begat the Blitz.
Also, Consider the Advancement of Artillery during the Civil War
Anti-Drone Technology is advancing pretty fast, aparently the above disrupts the signal and knocks them down.
I look at drone technology and understand, we are just going to come up with new, inovative and unique ways to kill each other. I’m sure guys sitting in trenchs in 1914 felt the same way about Biplanes and in 1814 Balloons. We will find a way to counter it.
I was sitting at some no name FOB one time during a three day sandstorm. I met a Guy in there that was on year 3 or so of a 5 year deal maintaining Drones. He told me that he was promised if he would stay for five more years he would leave the Company ( I believe N/G) a Millionaire.
Kinda reminds me of the old “Spy vs Spy” cartoon in Mad Magazine! Or Warner Brothers when the Coyote thought he had something rigged up good then the Roadrunner fvcks it all up!
I guess it really is a game of “Keeping up with the Jones’s”.
So, one of the classic graduate school questions is:
“Was the American Civil War the last Napoleonic war, or the first modern war?”
You really can’t prove one answer over the other - it is just to see if you can make coherent arguments. A mental exercise really.
There actually is an answer that addresses a third line of thought, but maybe I will wait to see if anyone wants to make an argument one way or the other.
I have some thoughts forming up about the original thread question - but I have been knee-deep in mid-term exams the last couple of weeks so have not participated in the discussion.
I beleive it would best be described as transitional, Starting Napolionic and then rgressing at time to a preview of WWI at times.
I think that might have been the problem so many trained Military minds of the North had problems with. Keeping up with the changes and remaining fluid under changing conditions was never in the pre Civil War doctrine.
The South, undermanned and under supplied had to figh,t fast hard and dirty and they should have/could have an early victory due to sheer audacity.
After the War we studied Grant and the Germans studied Forrest.
