When people think of warfare, they often think in terms of the second world war. I’d like to hear how today’s/near future’s warfare is different from WWII at every level.
Note that we should compare like to like; Conventional warfare in WWII vs conventional war today and partisan/unconventional warfare in WWII vs terrorism/unconventional warfare today.
My first thought is that in modern warfare, the actual combatants are not at risk of their lives. That risk is borne largely by civilians. The combatants are well-secured thousands of miles offshore and fire missiles at land targets, and watch virtual representations of them blowing up like in video games. Which also insulates the combatants from any emotional sense that there are human casualties, while at the same time rendering courage and bravery as meaningless concepts.
One thing you have to understand about modern conventional war is that it’s expensive. Not just adjusted for inflation, but in absolute terms, and relative to GDP. An M1A2 Abrams tank costs 15 times as much as an M-4 Sherman, for instance, and that’s just the tank itself; the munitions cost much, much more. In fact, it’s the high-tech munitions that are determining cost of modern war. There’s simply no comparison between the cost of the stuff armies used to fire in WW2 and the stuff they fire today.
The point is, we won’t be seeing any more years-long absolute-war slugfests like we saw in the past. Any modern conventional war will have to be short; even the U.S. couldn’t fight at full capacity for more than a couple of months. And forget about re-equipping - the Earth just doesn’t have the production capacity for a long war.
Funny they said the same thing right before ww1 started.
You think there is or was no small arms combat in Afghanistan?
Interesting and very very big question. The answers could easily fill a book.
The 1990 Gulf War may, for the purposes of evaluating differences in conventional warfare, serve as a useful comparative yardstick. There you had two large opposing armies squaring off on a linear battlefield fighting for control of a specified piece of real estate, not unlike Europe a half century earlier. The American forces in both conflicts relied generally on a firepower-focused strategy, but the weapons and tactics used in that conflict differed significantly from those of WWII. Combined arms operations evolved in WWII but was still in its childhood. By 1990 the principles had come to full fruition. The efficacy of air power demonstrated during the conflict underscores how much more effective and lethal it’s become since WWII. Air superiority was quickly achieved and immediately thereafter went to work hitting leadership, communications, infrastructure, and ground targets all over the entire theater of operations. By the time ground forces moved in it was largely to accept surrenders. Compare this with the 8th Air Force’s strategic bombing campaign - vast quantities of bombs were dropped on many of the same types of targets but with significantly less efficacy. Laser guided bombs dropped from a single aircraft could take out bridges or dams more effectively than entire squadrons of B-17’s
Have you ever met anyone who was in Iraq or Afghanistan? Jesus.
Besides, in a real conventional war, the people shooting the missiles will be shooting at the people on the other side shooting missiles at them. Assuming equal levels of technology, if you can hit the enemy, that means the enemy can hit you.
Military history classicists would push back on the idea that warfare has ever fundamentally changed. They’d emphasize the relative constant of human factors to which they’d give priority in understanding war.
At the other extreme the question could be interpreted as ‘how is military equipment now different than in the 1940’s?’ like ‘circular error probable’ of GPS/INS bombs is that much smaller than CEP of B-17’s etc. which indeed could go on for book length of every type of weapon and equipment. But that’s not really the same as ‘warfare different’ comprehensively speaking.
Short version I’d say unconventional/counterinsurgency warfare is not much different, given how much it depends on the political interaction between the civilian population and the insurgents and the conventional army trying to suppress them. In hypothetical high intensity combat between the most advanced combatants it might be more different, but that’s rarely been seen.
And even on the technical side there’s a difference between the question ‘how would a force equipped with WWII gear fare against one with modern gear’ as opposed to ‘warfare changing’ under the real world assumption both sides have modern gear. A lot of the changes would tend to cancel out, or at least not cause big changes in how battle is actually undertaken, back in the extreme to the hardcore classicist position. But even more realistically, how different was the 1991 Kuwait campaign (not really peer to peer but of the form of conventional warfare) to offensives in North Africa in WWII, in how it was carried out? Not dramatically.
And they were right. The opposing armies battered each other to a standstill by late autumn 1914. It took nearly 18 months for each to rebuild itself to be able to carry out major offensives, having to content themselves with fights in peripheral areas till then. And it took turning entire nation into societies and economies devoted to the war like North Korea is today.
Along with what **Alessan **and others have said - manufacturing will play very little role if, say, we see a non-nuclear Red Storm Rising between the USA and Russia. Rosie the Riveter won’t come into play. You go to war the way you are. There won’t be enough time to manufacture more submarines, jets, tanks, etc. to make a difference - the entire war might be over in less than the time it takes to manufacture a single Arleigh Burke destroyer.
And on a more trivial note, it might take only a few seconds for a fighter pilot to go from having no kills, to becoming an ace. An F-22 Raptor pilot could, in theory, unleash all 6 of his AMRAAMs at BVR range at six incoming opponents, and kill them all in seconds. “Ace in a minute” becomes the new “Ace in a day.” Whereas in World War II it might have taken quite a few days to get to ace status.
Yes, and the Germans came within a gnat’s whisker of winning the war in the initial offensive. And then all our “everyone knows” common sense about WWI would be very different. We learned “war is futile, defense wins every time, machine guns and barbed wire beat elan”. If the Germans had kept the right flank strong and won in September, we would have learned “Offence always wins, first to attack always wins, elan beats equipment.”
And we saw in 1940 this exact result, in a near exact replay of WWI, only this time the French collapses against the blitzkrieg. If they’d held out a little longer we’d be scoffing at the Germans who thought they could charge the field fortifications.
And note that in WWI the Eastern Front never became deadlocked trench warfare stretching across the whole border. So why didn’t that happen, if barbed wire and machine guns win every time?
So to have a replay of the World Wars you have to have a first spasm where the combatants use up their carefully stockpiled munitions, but neither side wins outright, followed by painful retooling to a total war economy, and the eventual loss of whichever side is ground down the lowest. In any war where one side wins quickly this doesn’t happen. In any war where the first spasm is so intense that neither side can continue the war and there’s some sort of status quo ante peace agreement this doesn’t happen. Also note: nuclear weapons are a thing. So that initial spasm? It’s not going to be pretty, and the devastation that took years in WWI and WWII will be accomplished in a day.
If the balloon goes up, we’re likely to see modern warfare focusing on directly disabling communications, command, and control. In the 1990 Gulf War, we saw a device used that delivered carbon filaments by aircraft onto power lines, short-circuiting the electrical distribution system.
In non-war conditions, we’ve seen Stuxnet used to attack a country’s most secret scientific endeavors.
I believe we would see more of that sort of thing, probably even more sophisticated by now. Power grids, computers, internet, cellular networks – all would be targeted at zero hour, and prioritized over twentieth-century favorites such as roads, rail, and shipping targets.
In some ways this is scary, but for individual humans it may be an improvement. If your superorganism (nation-state, command structure, what-have-you) can disable mine immediately, we might be spared the grinding bloodbath of attrition.
edit: to clarify: in the past, the superorganism could use the bodies of individual humans to shield itself from the consequences of war, perhaps losing only when it ran low on component humans. Modern warfare may see superorganisms directly affecting each other, swiftly and completely, too fast to drag individual sons and daughters to the battlefield and expose them to the price of a nation-state’s follies.
Iraq war:
Coalition troops killed: 172
Iraqi combatants killed: about 30,000
Excess civilian deaths: at least a half a million.
And if you look at either the Gulf War or the Invasion of Iraq, they’re both straight-up pages from the WWII playbook in terms of strategy and operations. The tactics differed, I’m sure, as capabilities are quite a bit different, and we have things like helicopters, satellites, GPS, etc…
Modern day force v. force warfare would be a faster and bloodier version of WWII armored combat in large part. If two non-mechanized infantry units squared off, it would be even more similar.
Naval warfare would be a lot different, and so would the air war however.
Afghanistan war casualties:
2,800+ coalition deaths due to enemy action
21,000+ Afghan security forces deaths
Approx. 35,000 hostile deaths
Approx 25,000 civilian deaths
I think the biggest change has been the vastly increased precision of weapons. Nowadays you can rely on a modern weapon to hit its target more often than not. The downside of this precision has been the cost; these weapons cost a lot more individually than WWII weapons cost. So war has become an issue of getting the weapon in the right position to fire and then firing it. You want small elite forces that emphasis mobility and stealth.
In World War II, you’d normally have situations where you fired a hundred rounds at a target in the hope that one or two of them would hit it. So you wanted a massive number of troops with a massive number of weapons. This placed an emphasis on the ability to produce a lot of weapons rather than produce weapons that were individually great. The ability to build fifty Shermans was better than the ability to build one Tiger.
To simplify it, in WWII the side that had the most weapons beat the side that had the best weapons. In modern wars, the side that has the best weapons beats the side that has the most weapons.
I’m reading a book about the Magna Carta, and the author has a footnote explaining how the £7,000 spent on Dover Castle (castles were the aircraft carriers of their day) in the Twelfth Century was equivalent to about £1.7 billion today. And that wasn’t greenfield construction, just large improvements. (Around the same time, in Henry II’s reign, the crown took in about ~£30,000 per year in total.)
However, that’s not simply adjusted for inflation, it’s sourced from this website measuringworth.com which uses some kind of algorithm with different comparisons to come up with a more realistic number. Looking at the website myself, the range for the current value of that £7,000 goes from the low billions to trillions. Which means England’s largest castle, when it was built, cost something around what an aircraft carrier today would cost, if not vastly more.
So I’m not 100% sure that you can say war is much more expensive today. It has pretty much always strained the finances of the nations involved. The huge costs of Henry’s, Richard’s and John’s military adventures, born by the wealthy landowners of the day, sparked a civil war.
No way.
We hit 4000 KIA, just including US soldiers, when I was stationed there in 2008. As of 2009, there were 179 British soldiers killed in Iraq, too. So I don’t know where your 172 number is coming from, but it’s wrong.
My guess is that he was conflating (or didn’t recognize the difference between) the 1991 invasion of Kuwait and Iraq and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The coalition death figure is reasonably close to the tally of the 1991 invasion.
Of course, his fundamental point is still full of crap.