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What I find most interesting about the current Israel - Iran conflict isn't necessarily a lot of the geopolitical implications / consequences (although of course they are important), but instead the way the war is being waged. It seems, so far as I can tell, that they are almost entirely "trading missile strikes" and that no boots are on the ground, there isn't even really much of a naval component. Just missile centers in cities or in the desert shooting at one another, causing damage that, from a citizen's POV, is essentially random.
I know that the World Wars were considered horrible because death in combat felt so random due to bombings, machine guns, etc. Are we now entering a new stage of warfare where soldiers are barely even involved, and we just shoot missiles at each others population centers, trying to decapitate the enemy leadership?
On the one hand, it's certainly... cleaner, I suppose? Much better than the horrid conditions of trench warfare during the World Wars, at least based on what I've read about it. Still though, it feels extremely cold and random, disconnected from the perspective of the average person.
Then again, the whole war in the Ukraine is very much boots on the ground, even if drones are heavily involved. I'm not sure (obviously) exactly how the future of war will develop, but we are certainly seeing interesting new innovations as of late. And we have barely even scratched the surface of using AI in warfare!
What are your best predictions for how future warfare will develop?
I’m reminded of the young men marching off to the Great War, excited at the prospect of winning glory, and finding a meat grinder.
There’s little glory in pushing the button. Maybe there is in creating the winning system behind the button, but it’s still of a different kind than a hoplite would have experienced.
"Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not."
It must have still felt glorious enough to the people behind the machine guns, or they and their immediate successors wouldn't have been so eager to fight in a war where both sides had heavily mechanized.
From a pragmatic point of view there clearly should be, but in practice Rosie The Riveter etc. don't get glorified until the battles have already begun, at which point it's too late to do more than merely expand a winning system that's hopefully already been created unheralded. Even this year, when we're all arguing about tariffs and protectionism and such left and right, the arguments from the left are mostly of the form "why wouldn't we want to make Pareto trades?" with no hint of awareness of the systemic military implications, and the arguments from the right are mostly of the form "why are we letting them take all our super-valuable green pieces of paper?", focusing on competing long-term allies and on non-dual-use production even when the effects of that undermine industries with security applications.
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