by kragen | 2025-07-24 08:04:35+00:00
I'm not complaining, exactly; I'd rather the Ukrainians be blowing up Russian planes, which were thousands of kilometers from the literal warzone, than the Russians blowing up Ukrainian planes thousands of kilometers away.

I'm saying that the events we're seeing in the Ukrainian war are convincing evidence that the nature of war has changed, and the implications of that change for human society are disquieting.

For two million years, people have often resolved conflicts by warfare. But that warfare, though it has never ended completely, has always been localized, which meant that most places most of the time were peaceful.

This is the foundation of the system of international relations in which different states exercised monopolies of legitimate violence over geographical territories: by so doing, they could prevent warfare and provide security. This system has existed to one extent or another for thousands of years.

Warfare is no longer localized, so now the only place for anywhere to be peaceful will be for everywhere to be peaceful. It is no longer possible for states to provide security to the people within their borders. Consequently statehood itself has lost its meaning. The last time we saw such a change in the nature of warfare was twelve thousand years ago when the first states arose.

I have some corrections for you about other things that you did not understand either about my comment or about the wars we are commenting on.

It bears repeating that the planes blown up in Operation Spiderweb were not in a literal warzone, nor anywhere close to a literal warzone. Some of them were thousands of kilometers from the literal warzone, in a part of Russia that has China and Mongolia between it and Ukraine.

The Ukrainians reportedly did have humans in the loop for that attack in particular, and both the Ukrainians and the Russians are mostly using FPV drones rather than autonomous drones of any sort at this point, unless we count landmines as "autonomous drones". In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM Russian drone developer Sergey Tovkach specifically says that Starlink is the reason Ukrainian sea drones have established control of the Black Sea — Russia could build sea drones but does not have an equivalent to Starlink, so evidently both Ukraine and Russia are dependent on remote piloting for their sea drones. He also says Starlink's latency is too high for piloting quadcopters. (Evidently Operation Spiderweb used the Russian cellphone network.)

The Israeli attacks are also using precision-guided weaponry and (in some sense) AI, not conventional bombs, and they're killing lots of innocent people, but you're right that it's less worrisome to me, for three reasons:

- The total number of people they're killing is about an order of magnitude smaller, about 80,000 so far (out of a total of 2.1 million Gazans), versus roughly a million in the invasion of Ukraine. Many more civilians have been killed in Gaza, but both Russia and Ukraine practice conscription, so it's not as if the soldiers being killed are only or even mostly volunteers; they were civilians until being, in many cases, conscripted.

- The weapons Israel are using are mostly very expensive, which limits the number of people they can afford to kill with them. By contrast, the drones being mass-produced in both Ukraine and Russia cost only a few hundred dollars each, and each country is expected to produce about 3 million of them this year.

- The people Israel are killing are almost entirely in close geographical proximity to Israel. Gaza City is 80 km from Jerusalem. Beirut, the residence of many of the Hizbullah personnel that Israel killed with explosive charges in pagers (along with, in several cases, their children), is 230 km from Jerusalem.

Therefore, while Israel's war is clearly causing terrible suffering to millions of innocent people, and it could easily spiral into a Third World War, it does not represent the advent of a new, borderless mode of warfare in which the cost of untraceably killing a precision-targeted human anywhere in the world is similar to the cost of a small air conditioner or 20 kg of beef.

The developments we are seeing of the mode of war in the Ukrainian invasion do represent such a transition, and that is true regardless of how the conflict goes. But mostly it is not the Ukrainians and Russians who are responsible for the transition; it was an inevitable result of developments in batteries, motors, power electronics, and 3-D printing and (more broadly) digital fabrication.

What will the new equilibrium look like, now that statehood is effectively meaningless? Well, it might be better or it might be worse, but not many people currently alive will live long enough to find out.