The_Capt

The most dangerous thing Ukraine has done with ATGMs and MANPADs is link them into an integrated C4ISR complex. An ATGM is point defence in the grand scheme, even at 5kms. The team on the ground needs to see the tanks coming and know where to put that point defence . Linking point defenses together is how one creates enough massed precision to defeat massed threats. If you kill an opponents ISR, it won't kill the ATGMs but it will blind the brain that knows where to put them. At that point surprise and mobility are back on the table for tanks. Dangerous, oh my yes, but unless an opponent can lay out and sustain these systems over operational distances you could definitely have a ball game. (Hey kids I can argue both sides!). Also if you can effectively blind an opponent armed to the gunnels with UAS, then you have achieved air superiority below 2000 ft, which is not going to solve for small 2-man teams in bushes but it definitely gives one a better shot. Add in APS and counter-systems and you may stand a decent chance. Sustaining freedom of manoeuvre is never about eliminating all threats, it is about eliminating dilemma. If you break an opponents ISR, their ability to project dilemma on your forces goes down pretty dramatically - how does PGM artillery know where to shoot. Their UAS is already degraded. So poor shivering infantry are pretty much it, even with next-gen ATGMs the odds get better for the old beasts of the Red God. Logistics. Again, ISR. Degrade an opponents ISR and they cannot see that long tail as easily, so they cannot hit it. The very big question is "how do you blind a monster of a million eyes?" We put sensors in everything. That story of the early days of the war where an artillery commander brought in a strike via a gas station security cam blew my mind. I am not even sure it can be done...but that appears to be the game now.

I think game developers need to really look hard at drone vs drone actions. It won't solve for tanks as we can see very far and by other means but freedom of movement on the future battlefield is going to require an ability to achieve air-superiority below 2000 ft, even if temporarily. I strongly suspect the best thing to kill a UAS, is another UAS. UGVs will go the same way. This will mean a combination of front edge unmanned swarm systems battling out, while manned forces are trying to kill each other over the horizon in the initial stages. Then someone's unmanned cloud will collapse, ISR advantaged will slide violently and the losing sides manned systems will die very fast if they cannot run away. Big, slow hot will be a liability in that environment. Arquilla's three rules: Many and small beats large and heavy Finding always beats flanking Swarming always beats surging The_Capt's Axiom - Mass beats isolation, precision beats mass, mass precision beats everything.

"Be more combined armsy!" There is only one way that I can think of to keep the tank in the game: win the ISR war. If you can blind an opponent from strategic to tactical then all of the PGM interdiction systems that make the tank system so vulnerable start to fail. Of course if I have won the ISR war to that extent, do I need heavy? I mean a solid IFV with a lot of fast moving Light out front will likely be able to do the job because my PGM is still effective and will be hitting and killing before troops even arrive. Hardpoints can die from PGM artillery or any number of ways and if you run into the one gold plated bunker, well then push a big old troll gun up and take it out. This would push tanks basically back to being assault engineering vehicles - where they started.

Ok, let me present The_Capt's theory of the trajectory of the tank. And then maybe we can tie this one off and just wait and see. 1. Denial - Western militaries will simply ignore the data from this war. They will rest easily in the certainty that "we will do it better". Then we will have a major failure. If we are lucky it will be in training. The idea of tanks and even heavy mech will hit a major and unavoidable wall that we cannot rationalize away. This will likely be a long process after we spent billions on next gen tanks. 2. Anger - We will try to protect the tank, just so we can keep it viable. Layers upon layers of systems, R&D, new tank variants and just obscene amounts of money. No one is going to tell us we can't use the tank! Some may work for awhile but eventually the pressure against this capability will become too much. 3. Bargaining - We will narrow the employment of the tank. We will save it for very specific points in a campaign. We will tie them to decision points in order to preserve the value of the tank. Eventually pressure will continue to mount as someone else does what a tank is designed for, with something else for much less. 4. Depression - We will push the tank back. Someone will figure out how to put a big HE PGM round on a tank and we will employ the thing like we see in Ukraine today. 10kms back, a heavily armoured SPG lobbing shells in the space between infantry and artillery. This weird work will continue until someone points out that we already have systems to do all this. 5. Acceptance - A sad vestige of another age, some bureaucrat is going to do the math on the cost/benefit of the old girl and time for museums. The worm will turn and every "visionary" will claim they knew the tank was done "way back in 2022". Staff college papers will be written and the world will keep on spinning. We gotta keep the rotation going. I think we should have Canada bashing day based on that stunt we just pulled in Parliament as we hosted and celebrated a proud veteran of the Waffen SS.

We want the one above “breakthrough”. Ignore “encircled”. Breakout, is regaining freedom of movement and therefore tempo, therefore creating decision superiority and expanding options spaces. Last Fall we saw UA breakout battle, we want that. Enough of these tactical breakthroughs adding up as the RA system erodes might just do it yet.

Short answer seems to be a combination of ISR, PGM and Unmanned systems. The actual job of a tank is to take a big gun, move it around the battlefield, point it at the enemy and hurl a slug/shell at them. They carry a lot of armour and other system to allow them to survive. Ok, so let’s just break it down: - Mobility. Small unmanned systems have already demonstrated extremely high mobility on the battlefield. Even with the counters and their vulnerabilities the sheer volume of those systems combined with their small size and manoeuvrability basically positions them everywhere. A tank has mobility but it is limited in comparison. They can roll across the battlefield at 60-80 kph, but never really do for obvious reasons. - Survivability. Big heavy armour no longer equals Survivability. Distributed, redundant cheap systems equal survival. A force can lose 10 drones a day and still sustain that entire system, tanks cannot. Being small and many essentially means that entire unmannned system, plus ISR is more survivable than that of armour. - Lethality. That big old gun projected energy like no one else’s business…whammie. Nothing else can put a slug down range at an opponent at over 2kms per second. Thing is that big guns performance is not the only measure of lethality. As far as Range is concerned, PGM have far out ranged the tank gun, in some cases by an order of magnitude. As to actual energy transfer, well chemical energy on the target at point of impact is extremely portable and distributable. In the past the only thing keeping chemical energy in place was accuracy. A tank gun is extremely accurate and things like artillery were not - they were considered area weapons. This war has demonstrated in spades what PGM can do - massed precision beats everything. So basically we are seeing a distributed systems of chemical energy-based weapons able to move and survive -as a system- and kill with better precision and range than a tank gun, at a fraction of the cost. How many times have we noted that it looks like the UA is maneuvering via Deep Strike? We have seen massive trends of Denial based on the combination of ISR, PGM and unmanned. The tank has not been replaced by a single platform, it has been replaced by a swarm…at least for right now. If we need to move death rapidly around the battlefield that can precisely kill, well we are seeing it. If technology shows up that can sweep unmanned systems for the sky or defeat PGM well then we are back to a new-old ballgame. The proof of this has been building in this entire war. How many time have we seen either side try to mass mech/armour and fail? Tanks are noted right now as fire support. They are either being pulled forward in 1 and 2s for sniping. Or standing off 10kms and lobbing in shells. Why do you suppose both the UA and RA are doing this? Is it because both sides suddenly forgot how to put 16 tanks into a squadron and smash them at an opponent? (Btw, that is the working theory for some). Or is it because they already tried that, multiple times, and it failed to deliver? What PGM, ISR and unmanned has not been able to deliver is breakthrough in 2023…yet. That suite of systems is not able to provide rapid break in, through and out of an opponents defensive. But neither can the tank, which was its primary job. So we seem stuck in a mutual Denial situation. What I do not know is where it goes from here. Are we looking at Denial/Defensive primacy in warfare? - we have been here before. Or is this a blip until PGM, ISR and unmanned fully mature? Can we actually build the counter-systems rapidly enough to regain a level of symmetry? We do not know. This entire back and forth about a single ground platform is in fact silly, but not a bad way to pass a weekend. The reality is that land warfare, maybe all warfare is likely fundamentally shifting. This is an earthquake in military affairs. We do not know if AirPower works the same. We do not know if Offence works the same. We do not know if combine arms as we knew it works anymore. Manoeuvre Warfare, Mission Command, how we force develop and generate…they are all looking like they may be in the wind. Hell based on the last week, I am not sure Naval Warfare as we knew it is going to survive. Trying to figure out what still works, what does not and what will work is going to be the central challenge moving forward. Unless we fall back on “Russia Sux” and “Poor UA just don’t get it”, which we will of course. It won’t be until some NATO force gets crushed in some 3rd party nation that the lights will go off…or maybe we will buck the trend and get out in front of the change…we have managed it before.

No it wasn’t. It was about victory. If they wanted to stop the killing they could have done it much sooner any number of ways. Or here is a crazy idea, don’t start the war in the first place. The tank was not about the preservation of human life on the Western Front, it was about breakthrough and killing more Germans. It was about winning. Both sides had spent millions of lives in that useless war by 1917 and it wasn’t compassion or sanctity of human life that drove them to create the tank, it was the fact that they were afraid they were running out before the other side would. They saw humans as a resource they were at risk of running out of so they needed to break the deadlock, breakout and yield a victory. Victory is all that mattered and why they were slaughtering a generation in the first place. The idea of “hey we need a machine because too many lads are dying. Huh, oh yes send them over the top again for now” is absurd. In any war one tries to reduce loss of human life for largely resource reasons. A human being is extremely replaceable…we have a lot of them. And once wars of this scale start it is all about preserving resources because resources equal options. The value of human life in war rests solely on its utility to prosecute the war and drive it towards winning - this is the harsh calculus I keep talking about. Does anyone think Ukraine is going to hit a magic number of 18 year olds, do some math on their lifetime earning power and go “oops that was the one too many…we surrender”? Or that is some basement they have done the maths on how many they would have lost under Russian rule and when they cross that line they will also quit….no freakin way. You guys all wanna be pro-Ukrainian hawks? No comprise, no surrender? Well welcome to the harsh reality of the business. Of course the UA should not throw their people’s lives away - no professional military should. But do not think for a second they won’t spend those young people toward victory for as long as they can. Until it breaks the Ukrainian will to fight (which is pretty far off as of now) or Ukraine runs out of fighting aged adults - and plenty of nations have then gone on and sent in children and old people. In war people are no longer people. They are part of a big machine smashing and grinding away at another machine. They are fuel we keep feeding into those machines. How efficient the machine is on burning them up is based on how professional a military is or how desperate the situation is. Take any high minded thoughts about “humanity” and save them for when the war is over, and then really remember them so we don’t keep doing this (but we will). This is about more Russians dying faster than Ukrainians until the Russian military organization breaks. And only military capabilities that can make that happen are going to continue to thrive and survive on the modern battlefield.

As a professional soldier who has led men and women in combat the cost of a single person to too high. But in order to make war, let alone win one, you have to box that one up or you will be useless in a week. The human cost of a war is something that is in the calculus but if you let it drive the agenda it will only make things worse. This is why politicians (and the people, in democracies) need to be damn sure they understand what this thing is. We are talking about using people as ammunition, no dressing it up, no sugar coating it. We use them as ammunition for effects, effects to decision, decision within options, options + decisions = outcomes. Human cost in war should not and cannot drive the agenda (although it very often does). We enter into the lands of vengeance and fear too deeply. If Ukraine let the shocking human cost drive their thinking then they would have surrender on Day One. No they understand that cost but they are spending their young people for a reason worth that cost. Now to try and play the “blood” card in defence of tanks, well that is just poor form. People as a military capability are a completely different set of metrics. Cold, harsh metrics but not the same in any way to human being costs. Muddling the two is a fast path to really bad strategy and emotional arguments, not professional military advice.

Ok and here we separate the amateurs from the pros. You have to create two parts of your soul to do this work, that is something very few people really understand. In one part there is the value of a human being, in the other the value of a human fighting system. Don’t mix them together or you can’t do this work. Infantry is incredibly cheap to produce and sustain from a military value point of view. We have 8 billion human beings on this planet. Ukraine has around 44 million. Even at 10% fighting capable, that is 4 million troops they can put into action. Training and equipping those troops is not cheap but is can be done relatively quickly. You can turn a civilian into a soldier in about 6 weeks (or less). Right now Russia can produce about 200 tanks per year. We in the west are not much better. We don’t have 8 billion “civilianized tanks” to pull from. Production wise tanks are extremely expensive and very low density. It is disingenuous to try and link their battlefield vulnerabilities as a metric and ignore their sustainment realities. It is also really poor to try and play a “oh the humanity” card in defence of freakin tanks. The idea that we should somehow “send tanks and AFVs to war not people” is ridiculous, and I honestly hope I am misunderstanding. The reality is that losses of armour and AFVs are demonstrating that as capability they are unsustainable in their current employment. Basic dog-faced infantry are, and frankly are about the only thing holding either side together on the ground right now. Tanks and AFVs are not staying alive long enough to get value out of them, infantry are. I have been reading this forum and just about everything I can find on this war and have not seen that sentiment at all. Infantry seem far more worried about artillery and UAS in this war. Tanks are a threat, right up until they are dead and they got pushed back, with helicopters in this war very early on. If you remove all the systems to kill/oppose the tank? Sure then we are back in time and the tank has a central role. But we cannot “unsee” the events of this war. Look you guys love tanks and still see a core role for them. That is great. I disagree and argue that the trend is towards marginalization and narrowing of what armour is going to be able to do for us. As with the last iterations we have seen the usual arguments - Shield systems will preserve the role of the tank, infantry are vulnerable but we still use them, can’t get rid of the tank because nothing else can do its job, tanks is still dangerous, the role of the tank still needs to be filled, we have been here before and a new one, “think of the people”. Can’t speak for everyone but I am still not sold. Too much evidence against, not enough for. Too big, too expensive, too slow to reproduce for the environment it finds itself in. The recipe for extinction on this planet for millions of years.

Ok, where to start. Well SHORAD and C-RAM are two very different things and you seem to be drawing a parallel that isn’t there between them. One is AD, which is going to have a big enough problem with C-UAS let alone indirect fire. Nano technology, which is also already well on its way, is not about Grey Goo (yet) is about additives to manufacturing. For things like explosives it means one can get yields from weights that are an order of magnitude smaller. The implication is that sub-munitions can get smaller and retain lethality. APS. And this makes me wonder how up to date you are on technology. You are resting a whole lot on Shield technology to keep current armour in the fight. APS is not designed for ICM or indirect fire nor is the tech ready to do that. Current APS are challenged by top attack, decoys, multiple sub-munitions, stand-off EFP…oh and landmines of course…we haven’t even touched kamikaze UGVs. However, I was not aware APS was not integrated at a team of troop level, that is not good news at all because it means MBTs are still built for individual vehicle defence while everything designed to kill them is already talking to each other. Logistics. The RA had a 12:1 force ratio advantage at Kyiv and were stopped cold. No small part of that was sustained hits to there logistics lines. So they did not “cope with it” they lost. The UA introduced HIMARS and broke their logistics back again last fall resulting in massive setback ps for the RA. The RA has not conducted a mech/armoured offensive since last summer. So as far as heavy is concerned they are not managing it. They can supply infantry and artillery (for now). Any believe that it is business as usual in rear areas in a UAS/PGM/ISR environment are delusional. Did it ever occur that Ukraine is also keeping to bite sized pushes because that is all they can support en masse? Take a look at this war. Infantry walking is exactly what we are seeing. Ya think there might be good reasons for this? How we can mount and move infantry is another really big question. Right now I would invest in quad bikes/ATVs over any heavy metal. My approach to military evolution is to see what is happening and adapt to it, not try and get reality to adapt to what I already have in garrison. We know we can keep infantry and artillery. Unmanned is a must. Precision and ISR are also non-optional. What we do with mech/armour is up in the air. How we do logistics is up in the air. I am not even sure Offence has not stalled for now. Denial is clearly the “it” thing. Defence still works (thank gawd). I like how “hey we really might have to re-think tanks” = “throw everything out”…kinda shows bias right there.

Problem is that old planet earth is round and bumpy. And that “m” can only fly in straight lines at that “v”. Given the ranges of engagement trends the fight could very well already be over before forces get into direct fire range…or at least forces with human beings in them. That, and there are a lot of other ways to get E than m and v on the future battlefield.

Militaries are living breathing monuments to the Sunk Cost fallacy. https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/the-sunk-cost-fallacy

Tank Fight!!! Steve already beat up on a lot of this. To which I would add: - C-RAM. If technology becomes mature that allows a force to shield hundreds of small sub-munitions coming in at 100s of m/s then the tank will be long gone already. In fact with that level of resolution and precision targeting anything larger than a field mouse (with a little helmet on) above ground is dead. You may as well cite Gandalf and the League of White Wizards. C-RAM tech is currently big, heavy and effective against very few incoming at a time, largely in a COIN or low level conflict context. To upscale to what we are seeing in Ukraine is…well…just not happening anytime soon. - ATGMs and RPGs are nowhere near the limits of lethality to weight. Do just a bit of reading on nano-treated explosives. https://www.army.mil/article/243587/army_argonne_scientists_explore_nanoparticles_for_future_weapon_systems. And that is not science fiction, prototypes are already in the works. -Integrated APS at platoon level - I should freakin hope so! You mean we don’t have this already?! It will buy some time I am sure but as we have seen sticking a lot of tanks close to each other is not smart on this battlefield, let alone the next one. A whole platoon popping off APS is going to draw a lot of heat (tee hee) but hey if it get you to sleep at night. - Logistics. This will be the fight for the next decade at least. How does one protect logistics lines? Self loitering and longer more precise artillery is going to push fights over the horizon (well out of tank fire range) and protecting logistics is going to be really challenging. Guns have the advantage because they are already well back. As to tank “driving back”…see movement=spotted=dead on the modern battlefield. Right now in Ukraine the tanks are largely already back near the guns. - Mech infantry and their kit: “You are always creative unless it is stuff you don’t like”. So you think all those unmanned systems might take some of that load off. I mean you are ready to lean on freakin Iron Dome force fields to hold off DPICM but somehow having unmanned offset infantry loads is just science fiction? -How have infantry been doing against ISR and artillery? Well better than armour but not by enough on the offensive, yet. But hey we get it infantry screwed, armour forever! Look everyone can go hug their stuffed tank while sporting their armoured corps pyjamas. I frankly don’t have a dog in this fight. What I am very interested in is ensuring we chart a military capability course based on reality and not culture or history.

Oh very clever. Ok let’s have it out on infantry vs tanks moving forward. Infantry are extremely cheap. Putting human life aside, Russia has demonstrated that infantry, though soft and squishy can be replaced in the tens of thousands. Tanks are big expensive and hard to manufacture at scale. Infantry as humans do need a lot of support - likely why we will see more unmanned. But they also do not need a recovery vehicle that also weighs 40tons, nor do they burn tens of thousands of gallons of gas per day. An infantry soldier can survive on a few kilos of support per day (food, water and ammo), a tank needs hundreds of kilos all on vulnerable trucks. Infantry can be pushed to keep going, when 50tons decides to stop moving it is done. This whole “infantry can die to” as a counter argument to the continued trajectory of obsolescence of heavy mech and armour is not only illogical it is deflecting. Infantry can disperse, dig in and hide. They are able to cross terrain impassable to tanks. They break down but are easy to replace. They can fight in built up areas. They do not weigh 50 tons each and give off enough heat to be seen from space. They are cheap, light and now armed with ISR, comms and weapons systems that can kill a tank out past 4km (and with NLOS tens of kms). Infantry have completely different roles on the battlefield and we have yet to find technology to replace infantry…we may never. So come on the board and bleat all you want about the life left in heavy armour but for the love of gawd can we put that stupid “infantry die too and we are not getting rid of them” argument in the ground? As soon as we can produce thousands of fighting tanks per week out of a global civilian tank population of 8 billion you may have a point.

How does one provide cover from smart-DPICM raining from the sky? This is a criticism I have about the entire "tank defence", it picks a few threats and goes "we can solve for that". What it fails to do is recognize: 1) The technology to defeat any counters is moving too fast. As Steve notes every time a solution is found, two more pop up. Ok, we layer APS on everything to counter those pokey and vulnerable ATGMs. Then someone builds an ATGM with sub-munitions, so Javelin 2030 (tm) splits into 6 smart attack vehicles and APS can't keep up. Oh wait there is more...standoff EFP. Worked very well for insurgents in Iraq and is aching for a comeback. Now you could have a ATGM that essentially explodes 50m out and drives a slug thru your tank. Now APS needs to push out even further. The trends of lighter, smaller, cheaper and smarter are accelerating anti-tank weaponry to the point that the tank is trending towards marginalization. 2) The entire tank system is too damn fragile. Even the tank itself is pretty fragile. The thing need only take a few sub-munition hits and one can knock out the engine, or the gun, or the track. Then all of the support systems from forward repair, to recovery, to logistical support are also heavy, hot and easily spotted. So now one has to bubble wrap that entire system just to keep the tanks in motion - even assuming away all the threats to the tank itself. I am pretty sure our gas trucks burn as well as Russian ones. The tank is being squeezed, along with the rest of mech. And it is also being replaced. If the job was to hurl energy at targets from 2kms+ back, well we kinda got that covered off without needing 50 ton behemoths to do it. Infantry support...this one is interesting especially in this war. Between ISR and UAS, infantry and artillery have formed an unholy union. Add in UAS attack capability and if infantry need something under cover to die there are ways to do it not involving a multi-million dollar vehicle that needs a Broadway production just to keep it rolling from A to B. I am sure people will still buy tanks. They built battleships for years even after they were pushed out. But the trend will be lighter, longer, lethal and cheaper. We will see militaries de-aggregate into lethal mist. If someone brings expensive, big, hot and heavy to a fight that mist will simply rust the entire heavy system to ash. No, mist on mist is where this is going.

I think overlaps could be the desired effect depending on fire mission (@JonS where are you?) - say neutralizing versus harassing type thing?

Well they did Euro-bashing day yesterday...time to keep moving in the rotation.

Not a bad idea either. Right now there is no guidance on these rounds. They only have drag ribbons to try to ensure they hit the ground fuze side down to detonate - I mean this is 60-70s technology really. Putting guidance on the little bastards is not really a high water mark of technology so I expect it is already on the books or out there. Mass production of that as we enter into a Precision Race is going to likely kick into high gear. And because it is a slow Saturday (except for what is looking like a pretty effective UA counter-C2 node campaign), now tanks are going to need umbrellas, and anti-ATGM APS, and EW, and ground fences, and C-UAS, and fairy invisibility dust...well you get the point.

Each one of those munitions is roughly equivalent to a 40mm grenade going off. So about a 10m diameter lethal radius and then chances to injury going out from there. A standard 155mm cargo shell can hold 88 of them (https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/m483.htm). So take a picture of the circle and start drawing 10m circles, then say 40m circles and you can get a pretty good idea of the effect. It should get heads down at least.

From my study of it, I suspect they can by varying the fuse of the cargo shell. Higher trigger would mean greater dispersal, lower a tighter grouping. There is a minimum height for DPICM arming so they can only go so low. The old style DPICM were designed for area saturation using salvos, not single shot precision. Now that we are seeing more of that, next gen cluster munitions will likely evolve to little PGM rounds (they were working on these systems already). Back to mech/armour mass, when a single cargo shell can drop 20 PGM DPICM rounds that can hit vehicles with 80% accuracy or be programmed for specific patterns/targets…well one can see how it is going to get more challenging.

Excellent reply - better than some staff college students I know. I would add that is also puts additional strain on the entire Russian military enterprise as they now have to worry about replacing what they have lost (they still have eyes on the bigger global game). And last but not least, it may give a level of freedom of manoeuvre for Ukrainian forces on the sea. Even modest raiding and SOF capabilities could drive the RA nuts and pushing their naval capabilities back is nothing but good news. My personal hope would be an amphib operation but I do not think that is under the tree for this year. Back to a central thesis, this creates Ukrainian options while taking options away from Russia…and that is how wars are won.

When the pandemic started I was tasked with a team to go off and do a quick and dirty study of the impact trends of pandemics across history and then translate that into potential risks coming out of COVID. We took about three months and I read more about pandemics than I ever wanted to know. In the end we came up with a long list of repeated observable trends and then translated them into modern context. The one thing I pulled from that experience is that every pandemic is the same, and every pandemic is unique. They all follow similar impact patterns and trends, yet they all were unique in the context of the event and what followed was highly shaped by their context. To my mind wars are exactly the same. They are all the same, and they are all unique at the same time. So while universal metrics exist they miss the context of the war in the time it happens and context matters very much. So if you want to measure the impact of a war…study the damn war in detail and in context.

That does not send encouraging signals.

Illustrates my point perfectly. I personally think Pinker is selling cool aid and using selective statistic to try and flavour. Considering the potential long term impacts of this war, I do not think a "well at least it isn't WW2" line of thinking is really all that helpful. The scope and scale of its impact are not directly related to body counts or any single metric.

You and Pinker are kinda making my point. Right so we firmly establish that this current war is indeed not A World War because it falls under a certain (arbitrary) scale on a single metric of loss of life. So what? Do we feel better? Do we have a better frame or lens through which to look at this war? How does that offer one wit of anything valuable to the analysis? And by fixating we are missing the larger picture: sure this isn't a World War (and no one has jumped in with legal of diplomatic definitions) - but it is a Global one. It is having global effects on security and collective defence, food security, human security, nuclear warfare deterence and the role of the UN and global order to name a few. This war will very likely change the cultures of Ukraine and Russia in ways we cannot even see yet. It is shifting power dynamics in a region which again has global repurcutions. Within the information space this war has gone global with open source and information warfare happening everywhere (even here). In reality, I am not entirely sure if a war can be truly "small" anymore; however, this one definitely is not. So beyond drawing arbitrary lines on narrow metrics todays fixation, like a lot of them in this vein, completely misses the point.