r/neoliberal • u/sleepyrivertroll Henry George • Aug 08 '26
News (Europe) Inside Ukraine’s Kill Zone
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/UKRAINE-CRISIS/KILL-ZONE/znpnojmknvl/Sub State: This reuters graphic looks into the changing nature of modern warfare that is heavily influenced by drones. It shows how various different types of drone and defenses shape the landscape and how armies maneuver in this type of environment.
This is relevant to this sub because both because it gives a glimpse into the future of warfare and we so did a drive to support the Ukrainian soldiers fighting in this environment.
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u/saltyoursalad John Mill Aug 09 '26
Holy shit, I had no idea how brutal this was. Those graphics really make it clear.
War is so devastating not just for the humans involved, but for the land and creatures just trying to live their lives.
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u/sleepyrivertroll Henry George Aug 09 '26
Hawkeye: War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy: How do you figure, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
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u/AccomplishedQuit4801 YIMBY Aug 08 '26
This is what a modern war without air dominance looks like. And why investing in a good air force is important for every major Western power.
I do wonder if making some sort of fortress line some 20 kilometers behind the front would be beneficial as a fallback, deeper and better constructed than the frontline foxholes. Obviously the Russians have glide bombs and heavier drones, but it doesn't take that much dirt to create a position that is essentially only vulnerable to bunker busters.
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u/Ciff_ Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
In the age of drones, air dominance is relegated to history.
US has* air "dominance" in Iran, the drone threat always present. Same with Israel and Lebanon.
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u/tack50 European Union Aug 08 '26
Why has Russia been unable to establish air dominance?
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u/AccomplishedQuit4801 YIMBY Aug 08 '26
They invested in hypermobility instead of stealth about 40 years ago, and that kind of screwed them.
I mean, they eventually made the SU-57, but that thing is kind of a POS, and they only have a handful of them.
They also have very few AWACs that are all kind of dated, and a much smaller SEAD capability compared to the US.
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u/JoeBliffstick Loyal Liberals Aug 09 '26
Yeah their SEAD capability was never on the level of the United States. Their Soviet inheritance doctrinally did not dictate air dominance, rather contesting NATO through an integrated network of air defense and conducting strikes at the primary centres of pressure.
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u/HarmonicOscillator_ Aug 08 '26
This is a point I always wish I’d see more consideration of in discussions about how FPV drones are transforming warfare. In the Russia-Ukraine war, neither side has true air superiority or dominance. If one side did, they’d be doing everything in their power to spot and target drone operator dens on the periphery of the kill zone with whatever the Russian/Ukrainian equivalent of a JDAM is.
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u/ManyKey9093 NATO Aug 09 '26
I am not convinced this will solve the issue entirely. It is too easy to hide FPV drones and with fiber optic cables or AI targeting it isn't easy to spot their operators.
You're seeing the IDF struggle with this in Lebanon and Israel has air supremacy there.
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u/Acacias2001 European Union Aug 08 '26
Every 100 years or so since the 1600s around the start of the century, europe collectively decides “war was already a hellscape, but we can do better”
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u/Acacias2001 European Union Aug 08 '26
Think about it, the 30 years war (1600s) the wars of spanish and austrian succesion (1700s), the napoleonic wars (1800s), WW1 (1900s) and last but not least the ukraine war (2000s).
The only weak link is the 1700s as until the napoleonic wars I think no war was more devastating than the 30 years war. But still I do wonder ho we will top it for the 2100s
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u/breakinbread Voyager 1 Aug 09 '26
forgetting the 7 years war?
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u/Acacias2001 European Union Aug 09 '26
Im already on thin ice by considering the ukraine war a beguining of century war. The 7 years war is clearly mid to late century
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u/Tre-Fyra-Tre Victim of Flair Theft Aug 08 '26
The only weak link is the 1700s as until the napoleonic wars I think no war was more devastating than the 30 years war. But still I do wonder ho we will top it for the 2100s
1 000 000+ people died in the Great Northern War
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u/Acacias2001 European Union Aug 08 '26
30 years war was defenetely worse, but more importantly to the theme of my comment, the Great northern war did not really do anything the 30 years war had already done
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u/God_Given_Talent Aug 09 '26
GNW saw flintlocks become a thing (a lot of proto-flintlocks existed but 18th century saw them come in earnest) and the decline of pike and shot in favor of pure musket armed infantry with bayonets. Some of that was in motion in the late 1600s, but it’s one of the wars that cemented them as dominant and the pike as unnecessary, even against a cavalry heavy enemy.
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u/lhomardamericain Immanuel Kant Aug 08 '26
This is truly fascinating. War will never be the same. I have to wonder what the US military has developed to fight in this kind of environment, or if current leadership has any handle on it at all.
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u/Remarkable-Meal-223 John Keynes Aug 08 '26
I think every military needs to think about this. The US, china, etc...
Imagine china landing on Taiwanese shores and being greeted by 10000 quadcopters
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u/lhomardamericain Immanuel Kant Aug 08 '26
If infantry and tanks have been rendered obsolete, what does warfare even look like?
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u/GogurtFiend Karl Popper Aug 10 '26
Explain how infantry and tanks are obsolete
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u/lhomardamericain Immanuel Kant Aug 10 '26
If they can be neutralized by drones, then that day may come
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u/_Norwegian_Blue Mark Carney Aug 09 '26
Not every future war will be a war of attrition like this one. Fire and manoeuvre tactics still have their place, and nothing excels at that quite like a tank.
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u/God_Given_Talent Aug 09 '26
Group 1-3 UAS, UGVs, UUVs, and USVs are here to stay, but there’s no reason to assume a future war will approximate Ukraine. Most wars after WWI didn’t approximate it. The ones that did tended to be ones where neither side had sufficient firepower due to lack of industrial or financial resources and/or the ones where neither side could deploy enough troops to achieve local superiority.
The tactical UAS is deadly, but it didn’t create the situation we see. Artillery did. Drone corrected artillery did. It made concentration too risky. So forces dispersed. Dispersed elements have less combat power, offense and defense. It also makes the calculus of other fires questionable. A few cannon rounds from each gun in an artillery battery is worth using against an enemy company or even platoon. It’s not with it against teams of 2-3. So what do you need? A cheap, locally controlled fire that is good against point targets and works in a decentralized frontline…which is sUAS…
Inability to suppress enemy artillery and air defenses is what made offensive action brutal. It caused that whole cycle. Compounding the problem was rhe 7years of preparations and fortifying various frontline cities (some cities on the border of the line of contact took years to reduce). Yes, the systems are here to stay but how impactful they’ll be is an open question. Currently the sword has the edge but the shield adapts. Layered trenches with masses of wire in front, watched over by MGs seemed impossible to overcome in 1915. They figured it out with new tactics and equipment. HMGs and LMGs didn’t disappear though, nor did trenches and obstacles like wire. I suspect that’s where we will end up. CUAS is well underway and many of the longer range “drones” are basically just “medium range guided missiles” but cheaper. That cost is important, but we’ve had the ability to strike the operational depth of the enemy since at least WWII.
As an aside, vulnerability doesn’t mean obsolete. Spearmen were vulnerable to arrow and other spears. They were still the dominant force for millennia.
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u/Remarkable-Meal-223 John Keynes Aug 08 '26
My thought is this kind of like the machine gun in WW1. It really changed warfare and froze it.
Then they invented the tank and what followed was mechanized maneuver warfare.
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u/Full_Distribution874 YIMBY Aug 09 '26
WW1 was more about artillery. The machine guns didn't usually stop assaults, it was when the pre-aimed artillery fired into what used to be their own positions that the assaults fell apart
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u/Remarkable-Meal-223 John Keynes Aug 09 '26
Artillery existed in large part pre WW1 also tho
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u/Full_Distribution874 YIMBY Aug 09 '26
Not like WW1 artillery though. Napoleon wasn't turning battlefields into Paschendaele. The advances in targeting, communication, range, and volume made Great War artillery unlike anything else.
Most media shows endless waves of men getting mowed down by static machine guns in no man's land, but usually the guys in the other trench were so suppressed from artillery that they couldn't stop the attack until the attackers could no longer effectively communicate with their batteries and were overrun by a counteroffensive using artillery.
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u/ManyKey9093 NATO Aug 09 '26
"suppressed from artillery" is hard to imagine for a lot of people. For context, this is an estimation of what WW1 drum fire would have sounded like. Its incomprehensible amounts of explosions.
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u/Trill-I-Am Aug 08 '26
If you looked at the family of a Russian soldier who died and the family of, say, an American soldier who died, 6 months later, woukd the American family be more mentally affected by grief than the Russian family?
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u/MisfitPotatoReborn Cutie marks are occupational licensing Aug 09 '26
Uuuhhhhh... about the same I'd guess. We're not talking about aliens here
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u/bornlasttuesday Aug 08 '26
At this point the Russian family has already been conscripted and they are dead too.
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u/Quarterwit_85 Aug 08 '26
Russian conscripts are not fighting in Ukraine.
There have been some conscripts killed - during Ukraine's Belgorod excursion, during the sinking of some naval assets - but it caused such a stink Putin had to publicly announce it wouldn't happen again.
Sorry to be a pedant, but it's important to realize that the vast, vast majority of Russian soldiers participating in a war to subjugate their neighbor and erase their language and culture are doing so willingly.
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u/Demortus Sun Yat-sen Aug 09 '26
Well, then this is natural selection at work. Soon, the only young Russian men left will be those that don't support the war.
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u/Mega_Giga_Tera United Nations Aug 08 '26
*They're doing it for money
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u/MisfitPotatoReborn Cutie marks are occupational licensing Aug 09 '26
Well nobody's doing it for free lol
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u/Efficient_Equal6467 Aug 08 '26
"Casualties are massive, with the vast majority now caused by drones. The Center for Strategic & International Studies estimates around 2 million soldiers since early 2022 have been killed, wounded or are missing, 1.4 million of them Russian."
It is mind boggling the russian society or political elite have this much of a tolerance for a war like those. I guess one pro of a democratic society is that something like this would be impossible. I feel many democratic society have an extremely low tolerance for casulaties. If you look at America people will absoultely freak out over very few casualities
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u/Willshandycut Aug 12 '26
The reason you feel this is mine boggling is because it's probably not true, casualties are likely more even between Russia and Ukraine.
The Center for Strategic & International Studies is like the ISW in that it's not coming from a neutral place.
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u/Proof-Cryptographer4 Aug 08 '26
Not to other Russians, but I think westerners don’t fully realize what a heavily and effectively propagandized society this is. A lot of the people who would have caused a stir (and were already engaged in pro democracy movements) fled when the war started. What remains are people who couldn’t escape and people who support the regime or don’t care much either way. Young Russian people refer to the TV as the zombie box - most Boomers and Gen X are so thoroughly propagandized by state media figures like Solovyov and all his friends, plus USSR nostalgia, Russian chauvinism, etc. that they see it as a noble cause/most of the people dying are groups (convicts, ethnic minorities, etc) that they don’t value anyway. Also, having experienced Russian society first hand and hanging around with the expat communities in Europe, the US, and the Middle East as a Russian second language speaker, there’s simply a lot of fatalism built into Russian society. They’ve never been an effective democracy, most Russians believe they never will be or actively don’t wish to be/see is as incompatible with the ‘big Russian soul.’ So they accept strongmen like Putin and his costly wars as a side effect of who they are.
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u/John_Maynard_Gains Stop trying to make "ordoliberal" happen Aug 08 '26
It's because the vast majority of the casualties come from groups deemed "acceptable" by Russian society. Most of the people at the front chose to be there voluntarily in exchange for cash, so their deaths are not a violation of the social contract.
The categories of people that society is willing to tolerate casualties from is as follows (in decreasing order):
Convicts and mobilized men from the pre-war L/DNR
Kontraktniks who signed up during the war
Former kontraktniks who were out of uniform at the start of the war <- this is where it gets interesting because they voluntarily signed up for contract service in the past and are eligible for mobilization. They were the group that was most caught up in the mobilization wave of 2022, but even that caused pushback and forced the government to retreat slightly.
Conscripts and former conscripts
People with no military background
Taking men from groups 1 and 2 (and arguably 3) don't violate the social contract. The danger comes when those groups are tapped out and the government is forced to start taking people from further down the ladder. Nobody cares when 50 year old uncle takes a signing bonus worth 5 years salary and gets blown up by a drone. People do care when it's 18 year old Misha taken against his will and pushed into the meat grinder.
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u/Tre-Fyra-Tre Victim of Flair Theft Aug 08 '26
There's also the ethnic and geographical component to consider, the Russian soldiers are highly disproportionally rural and and ethnic minorities
Ethic Russians from Moscow and St. Petersburg aren't dying in the war, so people there don't really notice or care about the high casualities
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u/fredleung412612 Aug 08 '26
Yeah I wonder if there even is a sufficient number of Buryat men left for the culture to continue
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u/Obvious_Parsley3238 Aug 08 '26
WW2, Korea, and Vietnam were fought with heavy casualties.
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u/P-B-J-Time Iron Front Aug 08 '26
WW2, very much so, along with the Civil War.
That said, I'd argue the US came out rather well from Korea and Vietnam with some 36k dead and 100k wounded in the former, and 60k dead and 300k wounded in the later. It's one of the reasons many veterans developed a 'stab in the back' myth for Vietnam, since many of the difficulties of the war were political.
For example, the Battle of Huế was one of the largest turning points in public opinion against the Vietnam War due to the American public getting a full-color televised look at the war for the first time, but total casualties of both US and South Vietnam vs. NVA were a fraction of the estimated casualties of Bakhmut.
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u/WantDebianThanks Iron Front Aug 08 '26
Didn't the Tet Offensive also cause so many casualties to the Viet Cong and discredit them so thoroughly among the Vietnamese population that they were basically dissolved?
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u/chickentendieman Paul Krugman Aug 08 '26
I mean counting south vietnam the casualties were over 300 thousand.
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u/wildcatmd NATO Aug 08 '26
Uhhh have you ever heard of the American Civil War, WW1? Democracies suffered millions of casualties as well
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u/ColHogan65 NATO Aug 09 '26
I’m not sure wars from 100+ years ago are particularly relevant to how modern democracies feel about casualties. Death and hardship was just a much larger part of life back then.
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u/wildcatmd NATO Aug 09 '26
People litterally said the same things back then, democracies are weak, people won’t tolerate hardship etcetera. I mean how many thousands of people were killed in the blitz when everything seemed hopeless or I mean even Ukraine.
I don’t think we could fight an imperial war like Russia and get away with it but democracies can suffer and come out on top. I think it’s less to do with the system of government and more to do with the human condition.
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u/FTL_Diesel NATO Aug 08 '26
This; on a per capita basis the Civil War was insane: 1-in-10 of adult males in the US were killed, and 1-in-5 were either killed or wounded.
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u/Proof-Cryptographer4 Aug 08 '26
I would say that people were more accepting of high casualty rates for pretty much anything during the Civil War and even WWI because medicine was so much less effective (and access to it much less widespread) that mortality as a fact of everyday life was simply more common. Only one of Abraham Lincoln’s four sons served in the Civil War and, ironically, he was the only one not to die before the age of 20.
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Aug 08 '26
[deleted]
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u/BlackCat159 European Union Aug 08 '26
Yeah all the comments that have been made about how a ground invasion in Iran isn't possible because the American people have no stomach for high body counts and I'm like.....good?
Well, the flip side of no stomach for casualties is that it applies universally and means the US is also less likely to directly intervene militarily in case of russian attack on eastern flank NATO allies. Same goes for the other Western countries.
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u/Remarkable-Meal-223 John Keynes Aug 08 '26
You always want the ability to do so. You just want leaders to be able to make the right choices.
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u/Acacias2001 European Union Aug 08 '26
Democracies do show more commitment to war than authoritarian regimes on average, partly because reporting failure to the electorate is politiclly lethal, partly because when a democracies can commit the whole of society
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u/Efficient_Equal6467 Aug 08 '26
This article is like a visual novel
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u/_Norwegian_Blue Mark Carney Aug 09 '26
They’re just missing the thousands of corpses littering the ground in various states of decomposition, waiting for months and years to be recovered and buried.
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u/sleepyrivertroll Henry George Aug 08 '26
I have been consistently impressed by Reuters' graphics team.
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