Raleigh

Why it’s so much harder to hide on the battlefield | The Economist

Adam Roberts, Shashank Joshi, Raleigh, Anshul

The Ukrainian conflict has transformed into a translucent battlefield where ubiquitous sensors and cheap precision munitions have expanded kill zones to over 30 kilometers, forcing soldiers to face near-certain death from saturated airspace. Top Ukrainian commanders have leveraged this "democratized precision" to inflict monthly casualty rates of 35,000 on Russian forces, effectively testing the limits of Russia's training capacity through a strategy designed to bleed the adversary dry. While this environment empowers weaker nations to challenge superior adversaries, the high lethality of modern drone swarms simultaneously renders traditional amphibious assaults and major ground invasions increasingly untenable for global powers like China.