“In the last few months, the western media has been reporting on large scale protests sweeping Iran against the hijab in the wake of the death of Mahsa Amimi. The protests were described by some journalists as a revolution against the Islamic Republic, and have been highlighted as a movement led by young women. Is this true? Is there a revolution? How much of this is part of a major media disinformation campaign?
We are joined by Mazda Majidi, Iranian author, journalist, and anti-war activist who has recently returned from Iran.”
“The soldier’s main weapon against death is the shovel.” It doesn’t sound like modern hi-tech war. But in fact, it’s a very recent statement by Alexander Khodakovsky, a veteran of eight years fighting in Ukraine, and the commander of the Donetsk People’s Republic’s Vostok Battalion. After months of full-scale war following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Khodakovsky notes that most casualties come from shell fragments whizzing along just above ground level. If you want to live, he says, whenever you have a break—dig. Dig, dig, dig.
If it sounds very First World War, that’s no coincidence. For as the Russia-Ukraine war nears its first anniversary, what has become clear is that despite all the technological paraphernalia of modern warfare, over the past 100 years very little has changed in the way that large-scale armies fight one another. It’s still a matter of assembling the biggest possible force, equipping it with as many weapons as you can, and firing off as much ammunition as your factories and stockpiles will permit. It is, simply put, not very subtle at all.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. For the past 30 years or so, military theorists have been telling us that the character, or even the very nature, of war was undergoing fundamental changes. The idea was that precision-guided weapons (PGMs) would allow armies to drastically reduce ammunition expenditure, as they would be able to hit the target most of the time. Modern intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets would cut through the “fog of war” allowing those possessing them to achieve “information dominance” over their enemies. Computer networks would connect command and control systems with ISR and PGMs, allowing almost immediate, and accurate, strikes on enemy positions. The result would be a shift in advantage to the offensive, with the dominant side winning rapid victories at low cost.
All of this would mean that the massive armies of old, equipped with huge amounts of heavy equipment, would become obsolete. War would cease to be a linear affair, with armies lined up opposite one another. Instead, small mobile, widely dispersed forces would move across the battlefield with great rapidity, while the primary source of firepower would be aircraft.
Overall, this was meant to constitute a “revolution in military affairs,” with new technology combining with new tactics and organization to produce a synergistic effect of such magnitude to fundamentally alter the character of war.
As so often though, practice has brought theory down to earth with an almighty bang. When one looks at the war in Ukraine, and compares it to all these predictions, one is forced to the inevitable conclusion that almost none of them correspond to reality.
First, it has become obvious that precision guided weapons don’t reduce ammunition expenditure to any noticeable degree. We don’t know for sure how many munitions have been fired in Ukraine, but the number is huge. Estimates of Russian artillery ammunition expenditure vary from a low of 7,000 rounds a day to a high of 60,000. The most commonly cited amount is about 20,000 rounds a day, with the Ukrainians maybe firing a third of that amount. If that is the case, then combined, the Russians and Ukrainians may have expended up to eight million rounds so far during the war.
They have not, of course, killed anything like eight million people as a result. Modern artillery systems can be extremely accurate. Yet the reality remains that 95 percent of shells don’t hurt anybody. The same goes for other types of munitions. According to one Russian war correspondent, troops of the Wagner private military company are using 2,000 rifle rounds a day during the battle for the town of Bakhmut. Probably 99.9 percent of these bullets miss the target (a report for the US government similarly noted a few years ago that the US army fired 250,000 bullets for every insurgent killed in Iraq and Afghanistan). Modern war is anything but precise.
In these circumstances, the way one makes progress is by bombarding the enemy with as much as one can. To protect themselves against this, soldiers follow Khodakovsky’s advice and dig, dig, dig, producing a line of trenches and fortifications that in places resembles the Western Front of 1916. British intelligence reports that the Russians have built an almost continuous trench system some 60 km long in the most northern part of the front line. Russian war correspondent Alexander Kots writes that “I travelled from Kherson to Lugansk, and… there is now literally construction of fortifications on an industrial scale… trenches, anti-tank moats, … concrete pillboxes… and bunkers.”
With this, the war in Ukraine has taken on a decidedly linear form. Far from disappearing, front lines are well-defined and change only slowly. Instead of “contactless war,” or war by means of small, rapidly moving detachments relying on air support, we have a slow-moving war of mass, reliant above all on what Stalin called the “God of War”—artillery.
In this war, the advantage belongs not the offence, as theorists imagined, but to the defence. Modern surveillance systems contribute to this. Drones are ubiquitous—some of them military grade, but most of them quadcopters bought off the shelf in an electronics store and shipped off to the front. Compared to aircraft, drones are cheap. Even a very modest army can easily equip itself with hundreds of them. The result is that is increasingly difficult to hide large-scale concentrations of force of the sort required to carry out offensive operations. It’s not impossible, but the risk of being discovered and then immediately destroyed by enemy artillery is greater than ever before.
This greatly complicates offensive action, and strengthens the tendency to precede any attacks by long artillery preparation. The problem with this tactic, however, is that it eliminates the element of surprise and gives the enemy time to bring up reserves. Attacks may make some initial progress, but any holes in the enemy line are soon filled up by reserves and the process has to start again from scratch. The result is a very slow moving pace of operations.
One may be sure that the military industrial complexes of Western states are taking note, and rubbing their hands with certain amount of satisfaction. For the nature of the war in Ukraine is a wonderful opportunity to press the case for larger armies, more and heavier weapons, more ammunition and, of course, more money. One may expect military planners to start arguing that they must prepare for the possibility that wars of the future may look very like wars of the past, in other words, that they may be prolonged and bloody wars of attrition, and that the outcome may be determined by which side is able to mobilize the largest army and the greatest firepower. This will necessitate a move away from the smaller, lighter forces favored by Western states in the immediate post-Cold War era and towards bigger, more heavily equipped militaries, with large peacetime stockpiles, all backed by a significant domestic military-industrial capacity.
This makes some sense, but only if you consider it likely that you will fight a peer, or near peer, competitor, something that Western states haven’t done for a very long time. But there’s another lesson that military planners ought to take away from the war in Ukraine, namely that a war of that type is utterly suicidal. Rather than teaching us how to fight such a war, what events in Ukraine are really telling us is that we must do all we can to make sure that we never ever have to.
Once a Pittsburgh sister city also known for its steel industry, Donetsk, and the greater Donbas region in which it is located, has been at war since 2014. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, 14,000 people died in this conflict, even before Russia began its military operations in February. I’ve just returned from there.
Before Russia’s intervention, the conflict had been between the people of that region and the government in Kiev, after an unconstitutional coup took 2014. This coup, known as “Maidan,” was — as then US Ambassador to Ukraine Victoria Nuland explained in a recorded telephone conversation — managed by the United States.
The coup brought to power a pro-Western, anti-Russian, government, which contained elements which were far-right and even Nazi. The best known element, as the Nation Magazine reported in 2019, is the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which has been part of Ukraine’s National Guard since 2014. Its commander Andriy Biletsky once wrote that Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade…against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
As The Nation explained, the Azov Battalion is not merely Nazi in theory, but also in practice. In present-day Ukraine, “there are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.”
The American press wrote about this sporadically before this year. Now the press does backflips to obscure and deny this reality.
However, the people of Donetsk, who have lived this reality now for almost nine years, are very clear that all of this is real. Indeed, I met people in Donetsk (some quite elderly) who volunteered back in 2014 to defend their land and their people from the Kiev government’s aggression.
Much of the government views the predominantly ethnic Russian people of the Donbas as inferior beings whose language and culture, including the Russian Orthodox Church, should be eradicated. I actually traveled to Donestk in a vehicle laden with clothes destined for a Russian Orthodox monastery in Donetsk that is constantly being shelled by the Kiev government. These monks now live in underground rooms beneath the increasingly-destroyed monastery.
The people I met in Donetsk view their struggle as a fight against fascism. As one told me, there is a saying in Donetsk which goes, “First Stalingrad, now Stalino.” (Stalino was the former name of Donetsk.) Stalingrad, was where the Nazis were finally forced to retreat from Russia. The people of Donetsk are now dedicated to doing the same to the neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
And yes, despite how inconvenient to Americans it may be to accept this, they see Russia as their ally in this struggle.
While I was in Donetsk, the Kiev forces regularly shelled the area, firing over the frontlines to hit civilian targets in the city. Such targets included a school, the soccer arena and a building where residents come to gather fresh water, water being in short supply as the government in destroyed Donetsk’s water treatment facility some time ago.
Such shelling has been an integral part of life in Donetsk since 2014. You would not know this from the mainstream press coverage — the very worst and most dishonest coverage I have ever witnessed.
While the worst of the conflict came in the years 2014 and 2015, witnesses in Donetsk told me that the shelling from Kiev increased greatly in the days preceding the Russian intervention. On Feb. 22, 2022, just two days before the Russian intervention, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reported 528 ceasefire violations, including 345 explosions, in Donetsk, and 1,182 ceasefire violations, including 1,075 explosions, in neighboring Luhansk.
Now, after the Russian intervention and after the referendum in September in which Donetsk residents voted to join the Russian Federation, the situation in Donetsk has actually improved. The streets are filled with cars, and people are going about their daily lives, including shopping and patronizing cafes and restaurants.
As I witnessed in Donetsk City and Mariupol, the Russian Federation helps with reconstruction. It has helped build huge housing projects and hospitals and restored damaged buildings.
With all of this said, I am not trying to convince the reader that the Russian intervention was justified, or that Russia’s own misdeeds should be excused. I am trying to push back against the cartoonish, Manichean view of the conflict being peddled by the US government and its compliant media — a view which is pushing us ever closer towards a cataclysmic war with Russia in which there will be no winners.
Another side of the story is not being told — a story about the forgotten people who have suffered under a regime backed to the hilt by the U.S., which acted in terrible ways and provoked the crisis. It is my hope that if this reality is taken into account, our leaders will work towards a negotiated settlement of the conflict rather than spending more billions of dollars on the hopes of a total victory which is neither possible nor desirable.
