The end of the trenches

How the “War of the Future” unnoticed in Ukraine, predicted by futurologists

At the beginning of the century, analysts and philosophers predicted a new military revolution. On the one hand, it was supposed to sharply reduce the number of losses in the warring armies of developed countries. And on the other hand, the prospect of this revolution determined the horizon of ethical discussion about whether in principle there is a “fair war”.

Unmanned weapons were put in the center of the predicted “New War”, but they were not limited to the case. It was also about changing war tactics, and the collection and analysis of big data would become a key measurement. The theorists of the war discussed the tactics of Roy , in which unmanned weapons communicate with each other in real time and make decisions in a semi -autonon or completely autonon regime. The action of the swarm is fundamentally different from the tactics of the traditional army, built on the orders vertically given to the command.

It was assumed that in the war of the future there would be a high -tech army of a developed state and rebels (terrorists), who use traditional weapons (the last example of such a predicted war is the US attack in the positions of the Husites in Yemen, which, however, respond to high -precision weapons by the cost of many millions of dollars, not by Kalashnikov assault rifles, but the drones of Iranian production, which costs several orders of order cheaper).

The philosophers exploring ethics talked about a new problem: for the sake of the effectiveness of hostilities, humanity is ready to delegate the right to kill such vehicles.

A public movement appeared against lethal autonomous weapons.

The war in Ukraine in the first stages completely refuted this futuristic picture. Instead of high -tech battles, the world saw the invasion of the Russian army, which developed according to the canons of the second and even the First World Wars: the columns of armored vehicles walked march, artillery duels played a key role in the war, soldiers took refuge from shells in trenches, and compact assault groups were fucked.

The war from the predicted future, in which human life is expensive, and drones become the main weapons of technologically developed armies, remained somewhere on the pages of theoretical articles. At least it was in the first years of the war.

Infernal tactical “futurism” did not occur in 2022, but three years later, when the warring armies established mass production and purchases of unmanned vehicles (primarily aircraft, but also ground and sea), they saturated the front to the limit and accumulated experience of their use.

The war in 2025 is radically different from ideas about the conduct of hostilities three years earlier. This effect was accumulated gradually, and the awareness of the completed transition also comes late.

Messages from the front, as well as numerous technological Warporn Video (video recordings of cameras demonstrating the success of the drone operator in the destruction of people, the most massive variety of cruel content in the “military social networks”), which are published both by the army of Russia and the Armed Forces of Ukraine, show that by 2025 the areas of high activity of drones completely turned into a zone of hunting for equipment, a zone of hunting zone. fortified positions and even individual enemy soldiers.

Digging open trenches, the main occupation of infantry starting from the 19th century, has less and less practical meaning - for drones the space open to the sky is an ideal goal. Therefore, the trenches are now trying to completely close from air attacks according to the same logic as the vehicles put mesh for protection from drones.

The tactics of infantry formations are now determined by the concentration of drones in the air and the peculiarities of their work (the safest time is twilight , when the drones switch from daytime to night chambers and vice versa).

Journalist Dmitry Durnev at the beginning of the year told Novy-European the history of the Ukrainian sniper, whose specialty was outdated due to the widespread spread of drones. Now Direnev shows what the defense of Toretsk looks like: individual infantry positions, over which two hostile swarms are hanging over a permanent rumble. The main thing in the modern war is to find a shelter from an attack from the sky, he concludes.

The soldiers in such a war are forced to remain in closed positions for weeks, a large number of the wounded are dying due to the impossibility of evacuating them because of the drones hunting for medical convoys. The role of armored vehicles and traditional methods of conducting offensive actions from the 20th century has noticeably decreased.

The nomenclature of drones acting on the front line is huge. In addition to traditional scouts, there are drones specializing in guidance in the position of a particular type of weapons, for example, mortars. There are drones that discard grenades, as well as high-speed FPV-spilled, attacking targets as kamikaze and first-person leading.

It is from the cameras of the latter that the terabytes of the most cruel videos come to demonstrate the destruction of people by operators who are many kilometers from the front line. In the fourth year of the war, this became commonplace, and the Russian -speaking and Ukrainian -speaking Internet is filled with a video of disfigured human bodies that arose as a result of a successful “hunt” of operators.

Volunteers who rose to defend Ukraine in 2022 went to one war, and in three years were completely different.

Contrary to the forecasts of futurologists, human life is still cheap on it, but the tactical role of unmanned systems is constantly growing, and the army consists of two parts: those who hold the Earth, hiding from constant threats from the sky, and those who give the commands to their drones, trying to suppress the assault groups and supporting points of the enemy. In this war, little depends on “heroism”, and the factor of individual courage is generally minimized.

When the regional Russian media publish another obituary dedicated to the “heroic death of our fellow countryman”, in most cases this means death from the drone - especially meaningless even in this meaningless war.

Historically, there were excessive expectations with respect to any new type of weapons. The massive distribution of machine guns at the beginning of the 20th century was supposed to make the war unthinkable , because no one would send the infantry chain to attack the positions that are protected by automatic weapons. In the 1930s, it was believed that the future war would be waged exclusively with the help of aviation, taking into account its destructive potential (partly this forecast was justified, given the scale of the bombing of industrial facilities and cities of Germany, as well as the significance of aircraft carriers for the Pacific theater of military operations). Finally, nuclear weapons were supposed to put an end to large wars with the participation of nuclear powers.

The famous analyst Edward Luttvak in 2023 pointed to these historically overstated expectations and wrote that the outcome of the war in Ukraine would not be decided using unmanned vehicles due to their limited amazing ability.

But two years later you can fix that drones still changed the rules of war. They did this not as predicted futurologists, most of which generally excluded the possibility of a full -scale war between two in technical terms of armies. However, the real revolution occurred and remained not very seen behind the daily reports from the front.

Data obtained from drones in Ukraine are used not only for propaganda. Both telemetry and videos collected in huge data arrays can be analyzed by the warring parties in order to take a step towards the creation of autonomous weapons using the swarm tactics.

From the point of view of the future military artificial intelligence, the massacre in Ukraine is a huge Data Set, on which the army, where a person becomes only a victim, but not the subject demonstrating “traditional military virtues”, will train to destroy each other even more efficiently, delegating this to the machines. The influential American publication Politico writes that the “War of Machines” has already begun in Ukraine, but we miss this message in the stream of daily tragedies.

This war, in which, like in any war, there is nothing human and which pushes the world to new high -tech wars, pumping the world with the frames of torn bodies, should be stopped. True, the Russian dictator is clearly in no hurry with this.