Gaza and Ukraine show that war hasn’t become futuristic — it’s still hell

The Israel Defense Forces clashed with Hamas last week in the most intense day of house-to-house fighting since the Gaza campaign began. Roughly 1,200 miles north, Ukrainian troops shivered in their trenches as they settled in for another long winter of attrition with the Russian army. To the distant observer, the innovative aspects of these wars generate the most interest, but this emphasis on tools can obscure the physical demands imposed upon the humans waging them. 

In his classic history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon wrote that although Rome’s armies were led by men of “liberal birth and education,” their ranks were filled with the “meanest” and “most profligate” of mankind — for they were the ones who won the battles. Although these are not ideal virtues for soldiers today, ground wars still require of their participants a type of communion with violence that may seem antiquated in the 21st century. 

Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, who was commander of U.S. airborne forces during World War II, characterized American foot soldiers as “determined killers in combat, compassionate neighbors in camp.” The modern world and its technological novelties have convinced many that Gibbon’s paradigm is now inverted and such miscreants are of little value in America’s algorithmic wars of choice.

Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei of Axios recently endorsed this philosophy, proclaiming that “future wars will be won with Stanford [University] nerds” and “precision robotics.” They quote former Google CEO and Pentagon whisperer Eric Schmidt, who thinks it is “clear that drones and other weapons … can replace tanks, artillery and mortars,” and the war in Ukraine “proves this point.” This would be news to anyone fighting there. 

The authors then ask a question, the answer upon which they believe U.S. military superiority is hinged: can old generals “foresee the awesome power of artificial intelligence” in time to fix their “generation-old” thinking?

Ridgway, once an old general himself, was the target of similar castigation in his era. Many of his defense colleagues believed air power and nuclear weapons alone would win the next war, that the foot soldier was obsolete and that conflict had evolved beyond the need for large reserves of ground forces and conventional weapons.

In 1955, Ridgway addressed such claims in his retirement letter to the Secretary of Defense: “The Army has no wish to scrap its previous experiences in favor of unproven doctrine, or in order to accommodate enthusiastic theorists having little or no responsibility for the consequences of following the courses of action they advocate.”

Ridgway walked what he talked, too. As he explained in his memoirs, when the War Department imposed troop limits on his airborne units before the war, he simply ignored them and built nearly double what the department authorized. This allowed the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions to enter World War II with nearly 15,000 paratroopers instead of the authorized 8,800. Ridgway spent much of his career dismantling the misguided yet popular idea that less was more regarding bodies at war because new capabilities would offset manpower shortages.

Self-assured forecasts of a radically transformed and less human battlefield kept appearing. In 1988, at the twilight of the Cold War, military robotics experts Steven M. Shaker and Alan R. Wise published “War Without Men: Robots on the Future Battlefield.” They wrote that “man is moving toward a battlefield without humans.” By the early 21st century, political scientists such as Christopher Coker were exploring the concept of post-human war that Eric Schmidt now champions.

Yet today, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army is the largest in the world with roughly three million active members, Poland intends to nearly triple the size of its ground forces in response to Moscow’s latest aggression, and Russia cannot find enough bodies to throw at Ukraine. Earlier this month, Vladimir Putin ordered an additional 170,000 troops into his army, bringing its strength to 1.32 million. While America remains obsessed with artificial intelligence, the “existential” threat to its ability to project land power, according to Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth, is its inability to find enough young people to recruit. 

None of this is to say that exploring new possibilities is a fool’s errand. The Pentagon should and is doing so energetically. But just as Russia could not hack its way into Kyiv and the sophisticated Israeli Army could not code its way into the heart of Gaza even from its border, policymakers should avoid placing undue faith in synthetic warfare. Conflicts like those in Ukraine and Gaza keep dragging us reluctantly back to an inconvenient reality: the type of soldier described by Gibbon and Ridgway is still the most effective and reliable tool in the American arsenal. 

Future battlefields will require large armies with the capacity to deliver and withstand extreme violence as much as they need coders and drone pilots. Washington must further scrutinize the assumption that it can produce the former even as it dedicates the preponderance of its time and energy to attracting and retaining the latter. Let us hope these soldiers from the past keep showing up to our wars of the future. 

Capt. Michael P. Ferguson, U.S. Army, is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is coauthor of “The Military Legacy of Alexander the Great: Lessons for the Information Age.” The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policies or positions of the U.S. Army, Department of Defense or Government.