alt Hacker NewsWe have heard this so many times. The future was mechanized warfare, or missiles, or aircraft, or stealth jets. It seems that now in Russia/Ukraine, pretty much all forms of mechanized warfare have been rendered irrelevant and you can't achieve military objectives no matter how many bombing runs you conduct with your planes. And those planes are not safe either. Same goes for Iran. You still need the guys to go in.
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Another way to view those conflicts is that (horrible as it is to say) neither side has anywhere near enough missiles to completely disable their opponents.
As a thought exercise, imagine if ukraine had 100k missiles ready in a silo.
Russian autocrats agree. 1.5M Russian casualties in the last 5 years(!) with an unprecedented fatality ratio, but sure, you still need the guys to go in.
All these fancy weapons are called "force multipliers". And multiplying zero is still zero.
You still need people to occupy the place, take control of objectives, interact with the population, etc... Otherwise, you are just making craters.
An advanced army with appropriate support can make a soldier 10x more effective, but you still need a soldier to begin with.