Eric Schmidt writing about the Ukraine / Russia drone war, not very +ve for Ukraine.
(www.foreignaffairs.com)
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That's a good point. I saw an interview maybe a year ago with an English mercenary who went back home after just a few months. He estimated that he had lost about 40% of his hearing from the continuous shelling.
The addendum to that was his answer when the interviewer asked if any of the shelling had been close. He said that (IIRC) one had hit as close as 100m.
As far as being life-threatening from fragmentation, as long as you're in a trench or on the deck it doesn't sound that close. But having these enormous rounds rain down around everyone and blow up anywhere in the vicinity has got to be ear-shattering. Literally.
Warfare has changed so much, its not even funny. I’d honestly prefer just melee weapons and both sides lined up and let the one with guys standing be the victor. We have too many weapons and tactics that make being anywhere near a combat zone insanely dangerous. Guerrilla tactics, mines, chemical and biological weapons, artillery and naval shells coming in from 15+ miles away, missiles launched from further than that, snipers, IED’s, kids being strapped with explosives and sent as a suicide bomber, the list goes on. I’ll hate the bankers and politicians that make the mess but i feel for the warriors and soldiers on both sides of a conflict. Most aren’t being told the truth, and all are being used for someone else’s goals.
OMG, modern warfare is terrifying. We see war movies and they're dodging around during an artillery strike and exciting stuff like that. The real deal is that you're standing around smoking a cigarette on a sunny afternoon and then you're dead.
But you know what I see as the biggest "conspiracy" about warfare, modern of historical? You can find discussion on just about any aspect of it, but you'll find very little about the single most crucial aspect: how can this insanely anti-human activity even begin in the first place?
Even the Russians, for whom this is a just and necessary military action entered into reluctantly, talk very little about that. Why? I would say that the Russian leadership understands that the vast majority of the populace--in the West especially but even in Russia itself--is so far away from understanding how the world really works that it is a pointless task.
When you consider what "They" have done to people's minds, the details of warfare begin to fade. I mean, you can build a drone to blow up a whole giant steel tank, but how do you build a drone to convince someone the world they live in is not at all like they think it is?
The manipulation has gone on too long to count. Too many good people slaughtered over bullshit lies. I don’t think we’ll ever get along fully. We’re all just too different.
I tend to be much more optimistic than that. I think that a big part of the horrible trauma put upon us is that we have little idea what human nature is really like. And I would add that that optimism is not just happenstance of my own personal nature, but I would have to take you back to the days of the "Four-minute mile" controversy to see why.
You can see in this article that it was widely thought impossible, and not just from pessimism, but from long experience and even scientific reasoning:
Did doctors/scientists say that breaking the 4-minute mile was impossible?
So I see humanity's current situation as analogous: we're suffering under a tremendous Satanic oppression (literally, as I came to find out), and that's like a runner back in the early 50's wondering if he can run the 4" mile but he hasn't noticed he's wearing a full suit of knight's armor over coveralls made from lead dentist's aprons. Well, there's no way.
But if he notices that extra weight and removes it, most people (as we saw in that Quora article) would still disbelieve, that being again from all experience and very good reasoning.
But fast-forward to today: all competitive middle-distance runners can do it and many talented high-schoolers. Who saw this coming? Who predicted such a simple thing? No one. They had no idea what was not only possible for humans, but commonplace.
So there's my analogy: we have all reason for pessimism, and also no idea what is really possible.