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Jesus Christ what a horrifying implication. I mean, being wounded by a a bullet is surely bad enough. But at least you can generally shoot back at the guy trying to kill you with a gun.
I'd guess, then, the bulk of wounds are from drones, bombs/artillery, maybe landmines, and armored vehicles? Or maybe wounds sustained when your armored vehicle gets blasted?
And this leads me to wonder about that phenomenon we saw way towards the beginning of the war: Western Volunteers who joined up for a chance to fight fascism. Ukraine created a foreign legion for those guys.
As of a year and a half ago it apparently wasn't going well. I daresay the early /r/volunteersForUkraine days where they hyped each other up to grab a rifle and go may have gotten numerous people killed for no major benefit.
Some deeper questions there. Is there any possible rational benefit for a Non-Ukrainian to join up in an actual combat role? If not... what's the remaining rational benefit of Non-Ukrainians continuing to fund the war effort?
I'm sure there's an object-level argument for it, still, but it probably relies on a black-swan type event that utterly breaks Russia's resolve all in one go, similar to that aborted Prigozhin coup.
This has essentially been the case since WW1, and only getting worse since. In WW2 something like 70% of all casualties were from artillery, not small arms fire. This is for conventional war, I'm sure insurgencies have much different ratios.
Right, the two world wars basically squeezed all the remaining romanticism out of warfighting. Vietnam crapped on whatever was left. There hasn't been a single piece of media anywhere that I'm aware of that made the fighting in Vietnam look 'honorable' or 'cool.' (note, I ascribe at least part of that to Western Cultural institutions moving left, but even nonfiction accounts make it sound horrible).
Even the video games about the Vietnam war don't try to romanticize it. WWII games do put some emphasis on heroics but don't undercut how horrible e.g. Storming the Beach at Normandy was.
A tiny bit got injected back in with the GWOT and rise of modern special forces doing surgical strikes with high-tech equipment against relatively inferior opponents. The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Franchise is still a best-seller, at least.
But the Ukraine conflict is NOT THAT. Fair to say that the thought of this precise kind of warfare: long battle lines, grinding attrition to occasionally advance a few hundred yards at a time, and almost all the actual fighting done via 'indirect' means, you'll rarely see the thing that kills you coming... it makes me sick. Inflicting this on your fellow human is probably, dare I say, irredeemable.
Now, I don't think medieval warfare was 'better'. Dying of sepsis or bleeding out face-down in a muddy field after you got gut-stuck with a polearm is not any more appealing. But at least many conflicts of that era got settled with a basic handful of battles and the occasional siege.
Industrialization of the affair just means its an unceasing nightmare.
And many didn't, as the names "Hundred Years War" and "Thirty Years War" tell you.
It's not industrialization which makes war an unceasing nightmare; there have been long non-industrialized wars and short industrialized wars. WWI, for all its horror, was only 4 years.
Funny enough interspersed with truce periods.
And the black death, which wiped far more than the actual war itself could ever hope to.
And yeah there were also long-ass crusades with similar death counts. BUT.
Are there any pre-modern wars where a soldier could be sent out to the front line, and then 2-3 years later in the war, find himself in almost the exact same spot, despite regular bursts of fighting?
This might actually be a decent Friday Fun thread topic. "Assume you're drafted into a 5 year stint in the military, and will be spending the duration on the front line, which you cannot desert but can be KIA. which long war in history would you prefer to end up fighting in?
The Peloponnesian War featured multiple Spartan invasions of Attica. So, probably not the exact same spot in a trench warfare sense, but certainly seeing the same area over and over again.
Can imagine that getting frustrating for a bunch of guys who really just wanted to stab the enemy.
There is indeed something about drawn-out trench warfare that I find particularly distressing. Probably has something to do with one's fate feeling completely out of your own hands. Regardless of your skills as a warrior you're not really enhancing your own odds of survival since the thing that gets you won't be another dude, specifically, but something you never even saw coming.
Kinda like the Longbow hard-countering the armored knight. Now some illiterate peasant with overdeveloped back muscles can one-shot you after a couple days instruction.
Without that issue, I can sort of conceive of a war as banding together with your bros for an adventure and your odds of survival turning much more on your individual skills AND your ability to plan and effectively coordinate rather than luck of the draw.
It has been a while since I did a deep dive on the literature, but I believe that a traditional longbowman was a skilled fighter that required a significant training investment. It didn't require the capital investment of a knight, but you couldn't grab Any Random Asshole out of the fields and expect him to be effective.
It wasn't until crossbows and firearms that we saw the terrifying power of Armed Masses of Random Assholes.
The new weapon that was a game changer and only required a short period of instruction was indeed the matchlock gun, not the longbow.
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