Global Courant 2023-04-19 04:08:15
The current conflict in Ukraine regularly evokes parallels with the First World War. It’s a comparison creature made by politiciansjournalists, analysts and military personnel.
For example, coverage over the past winter months has focused on how Ukrainians fight in WWI-like mud trenches in Bakhmut, while Russia suffers near WWI levels of casualties.
It is no surprise that commentators turn to these comparisons. The return of war in all its destructive power to Europe has shaken up Western society cultural memory by war on this scale. Unfortunately, these comparisons are often useless.
Many of the WWI equations tension the unmodern nature of what is happening on the battlefields of Ukraine. This leads to ignoring the modern nature of what is happening even in Bakhmut, potentially underestimating Russia and overestimating the differences between Russian and Ukrainian armed forces. And, more importantly, by making these kinds of historical comparisons, we detach ourselves from the war horror and violence.
Unmodern and modern war
It is striking how many of the WWI comparisons use the rough nature of Russia’s military effort and the apparent failure, cold bloodedness And irrationality of the Russian generals. In these comparisons, WWI serves not as a benchmark for modern warfare, but as the ghostly image of primitive industrial warfare from more than a century ago.
Netflix is recent prize-winning movie by Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front helped bring this WW1 image back to the fore.
What is so characteristic of WWI and seems so unmodern is the lack of progress. Four years of fighting on small strips of land with little result. Modern conventional wars are expected to move quickly, like Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and the second US invasion of Iraq in 2003 (if we conveniently ignore the years of insurgency that followed), or like the fighter pilots in the movies Top gun: Maverick, to provide another movie reference. And while we’ve seen drones and other hi-tech weapons of war on the news, we haven’t seen much progress in pushing back the front lines. Instead, we’ve seen footage of trenches and read of mass casualties.
Western military planners have been obsessed of short wars for decades. One of the reasons for this is the belief in fast results delivered by modern technology.
Yet the war in Ukraine is modern in the sense that it is what is expected in the circumstances and circumstances when roughly similarly equipped forces meet on the battlefield and neither side has (yet) enough strength to completely overcome the other.
Underestimating Russia’s goals
One of the consequences of using the WWI equation could be to miss the point of what the Russians are trying to achieve. The unmodern is, of course, closely connected not only with the war in general, but above all with the actions of Russia. I am not suggesting that Russia’s tactical and operational warfare, especially during the last few winter months, has been impressive and successful – on the contrary. But by linking Russia’s behavior to a stereotype of WWI battles, we could stop analyzing the full context. Russia’s warfare is flawed, but also rational in the context of a rapidly growing and ill-prepared military force, the dynamics of Russian politics, and the regime’s ideology.
On an operational and tactical level, the WWI equation can lead people to underestimate what Russia could be try to reach and how it is trying to adapt its force structure and tactics excercise on the battlefield. One could also lose sight toll the current battle could be up against Ukraine’s “more modern” armed forces.
Finally, by focusing so heavily on battlefield failure and success (and seeing this through the prism of a stereotypical WWI image), we may be missing Russian interpretations of strategic and political success. While taking Kiev and not losing Kherson is more attractive than the Kremlin alternative, it is wise to ask yourself how the Russian leadership understands the war. Is it a war against Ukraine, or a war against the West that happens to be fought in and over Ukraine? And what, then, must Russia achieve on the battlefield in order to achieve its short, medium and long-term strategic and political goals? While battlefield and strategic and political success are connected, this connection is anything but straight. It could be that in the current assessment of the situation, a stalemate in eastern Ukraine serves the Kremlin’s purpose and (revised) goals.
Breaking free from reality
For some, the war in Ukraine is a return to the barbarism of early 20th century industrial slaughter. It serves as an indictment of the war and Putin’s regime, but also highlights our own modernity: this should not happen in 2023.
But that is a dangerous and misleading thought, because it isolates what is happening in Ukraine from our own time. What we see in Ukraine is not a historical horror show, it is the ugly face of full-scale modern war. In recent decades, Western society has become strangely ignorant of what happens in a modern war. The war in Ukraine confronts us with these horrors.
It is not that Western powers or other powers have not fought wars in the last 50 years. But since most of these were relatively small-scale and fought outside the West (with the exception of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s) and against non-Western powers (or between non-Western powers), coverage of those people and societies on the receiving modern weapons of war is limited. With war so much closer to home (as far as Europe is concerned) and between similarly equipped forces, we’re starting the costs of a modern war.
When future generations look for something to compare the horrors of their new wars to, they may not choose Flemish Fields and instead look at what happened in the fields of Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk and Kherson in the 2020s. I am sure the Ukrainians will.
Christian Harinkis a lecturer in the history of international relations and war University of Utrecht.
This article has been republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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