[POST] Warfare devolving into sheer punishment
The Military Singularity: when war crimes become the strategy
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Been a while for me on this particular subject, but a couple of stories bring me back to my persistent theme of a looming military variant of the singularity — or when technology so advances that a genuine paradigm shift unfolds from one way of war to another in a permanent manner (i.e., no going back).
From a piece I published explaining this history-bending development:
The world has long been regaled with predictions of a Technological Singularity when scientific advances converge at such speed and volume to defy, and ultimately escape, human control. This much-feared post-human era is arriving now in military affairs. Drones, robots, and AI are rendering the modern battlespace too dangerous for troops, making them increasingly irrelevant in warfare – along with their human-centric platforms (ships, aircraft, tanks).
The evidence for this Military Singularity abounds in today’s ongoing conflicts:
Drones wiping out infantry as they muster for duty because their smartphones reveal their exact coordinates.
Drones blowing up troops in their tents because they dared surf social media – the “new cigarette in the foxhole.”
Hummingbird-like drones that approach individual soldiers and then blow themselves up – in effect, a mine that finds you!
Naval drones costing hundreds of thousands of dollars sinking capital ships costing hundreds of millions.
“Turtle tanks” so overburdened with extra armor to survive drone attacks that their reduced maneuverability makes them sitting ducks.
All these attacks make great video for terrorizing families back home with a steady stream of snuff films. Their meta-message: ground troops now serve primarily as casualties-in-waiting. They can’t take ground and they can’t hold ground. At best, they can hide in trenches or underground, waiting – in the vernacular of the Military Singularity – to be attrited by attritable opponents.
It’s no longer a human-centric battlespace when it’s you versus an unkillable opponent. Then it’s just a shooting gallery for robots.
How do humans regain the upper hand? They don’t and they never will.
At best, humans can send in their own drones and robots to fight the other side’s drones and robots, rendering the contested battlefield no better than a no-man’s land.
Sound pointless? It should also sound familiar to students of history.
Look at how Russia-v-Ukraine has devolved into a re-run of World War I trench warfare where the primary role of ground troops was to die en masse. It’s also a re-dux of World War II artillery warfare – sans the blitzkrieg.
What invariably results from these back-to-the-future outcomes is best described as the apogee of area-denial operations: You may want this land, but I can deny it to you by turning it into a moonscape ruled over by killer drones and robots. In strategic terms, this is a pyrrhic stalemate for everyone save arms dealers: your drones battling my drones for as long as we can keep fielding them.
In many ways, the Military Singularity will do to small wars what the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine did to great power wars: namely, render them unwinnable so long as both sides can 3D print their unmanned forces – an oxymoron without par.
What is simultaneously so maddening and encouraging about these developments is that they signal the sheer lack of utility in attempting to conquer territory — the primary driver of conventional warfare throughout history. One can attempt and even sort of achieve territorial gain, but one’s opponent can thereupon hold that territory hostage to constant, individual-level danger — a permanent no man’s land marked less by where your troops actually are and more by the range of your drone attacks.
In effect, keeping an area permanently contested is now possible at reasonable treasure (cost) and strangely little blood (military casualties). You just need to be willing to kill civilians as your primary means of aggression-cum-terror.
This is basically where a military morphs into a terrorist enterprise — a profound devolution.
Russia’s and Ukraine’s armies now exist primarily to inflict pain upon the other’s side civil population — to wear them down with incessant attacks to the point where every actual bee’s buzzing sends individuals into triggered panic attacks.
The message is simple: Give me what I want or this will never end.
The thing is, once you narrow warfare down to that messaging strategy, two players of greatly different size can pretty much go it ad infinitum.
And that’s when you really achieve the bizarre apogee of terror and death for no purpose other than to keep the score relatively balanced and — thus — the status quo intact.
I’ve made the reference before: The classic Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon”:
The USS Enterprise visits Eminiar VII, a planet locked in a 500-year war fought entirely through computer simulations with a neighboring planet.
Per long-standing agreement, after any attack, the projected "casualties" are required by treaty to report to disintegration chambers for execution.
When the Enterprise is declared a victim during one simulated attack, Kirk and his team are captured for execution.
Kirk pulls his usual kill-the-main-computer trick, destroying the computers driving the virtual war.
When faced with the prospect of actual war, the rival planets are compelled to seek genuine peace instead.
The episode forces one to contemplate the sheer absurdity of the non-stop killing — however sanitized. What is the point after all these years of attacking each other’s population centers merely to extract calculated-deaths-leading-to-executions?
But ask yourself, how different is that now for Ukraine and Russia? Neither side can move the frontlines, so they resort to mass drone attacks that are mostly about killing individuals and terrorizing the rest. There is no longer any point to this conflict except its continuation as a matter of course/pride.
Russia’s efforts continue to narrow down to mass drone attacks, per an exhaustive CSIS study: The New Salvo War — Russia’s Evolving Punishment Campaign. The summary bullets:
Russia has normalized massive, mixed drone‑missile salvos: The average wave size has risen from about 100 munitions in 2022 to nearly 300 in 2025, while intervals between major strikes have compressed from roughly a month to as few as two days.
The salvo campaign now leans heavily on Shahed swarms to saturate Ukraine’s air defenses in line with the increasing Russian low-cost drone manufacturing capability. These salvos reflect an attritional punishment strategy—victory through volume, persistence, and psychological strain.
Ukraine must counter with layered, cost‑efficient defenses: rapidly field high‑energy lasers and HPMs, expand cross‑domain early‑warning networks, diversify low‑cost interceptors and rapid‑fire guns, and fuse civil‑military tracking to decode salvo patterns in real time.
Tell me the two states haven’t already achieved the pointless logic of that Star Trek episode, where war becomes perpetual because both sides have made it administratively manageable: sufficiently sanitized (from escalation), automated (guys sitting in lawn chairs remotely piloting drones), and endlessly sustainable (both sides cranking millions of drones each year). Just as the episode critiques the futility and human cost of war by attrition for its own sake, the current Russian strategy aims not so much for a quick military victory but for gradual psychological and material exhaustion of Ukraine.
Historical evidence overwhelmingly suggests that attempts to win wars primarily through unrelenting punishment and attrition (i.e., hoping the cumulative effect of destruction and demoralization will collapse resistance) rarely achieve decisive, durable victories.
Classic examples:
Germany’s “blitz” bombing campaign against London during WWII
America’s massive bombing of Nazi Germany in same war
US versus North Vietnam in that conflict
Russia and later the US bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age (short trip)
Russia’s barrel-bombing of Chechnya and later Syrian rebels.
The even more digital, persistent, and massed approach seen in Ukraine now risks repeating these historical lessons.
Ah, but you’ll cite the US dropping atomic bombs on Japan as doing the trick, and there you do have a point — if you’re willing to go that far. But, as I’ve discussed here repeatedly, MAD (mutually assured destruction) holds firm as a ceiling-defining concept throughout this conflict. By all history, this fight should have triggered nuclear Armageddon between NATO and Russia, but clearly it hasn’t and will not — even if Russia is stupid enough to pop one off. Instead, this perpetual war serves Putin’s purposes on several levels — just like it does for Netanyahu, regarding Gaza, in Israel.
As in " The Taste of Armageddon" episode, where war becomes endless and self-defeating when sanitized and systematized, Russia's punishment salvos will grind on without producing strategic breakthrough, especially as Ukraine adapts through innovation — namely, developing layered, cost-effective defenses while maintaining international support.
In summary, Ukraine and Russia show us the future of conventional war — pure area-denial and systematic punishment to the point of ruling out what history has long described as “victory.” As such, this conflict is simultaneously one of the most important wars in human history in addition to being one of its most pointless.
But that’s what makes it such a gateway experience in humanity’s embrace of the Military Singularity.
The truly tragic part of all this? We are repeating the pointlessness of World War I warfare, optimized as it was to producing casualties and nothing else. In this instance, warfare is being optimized to traumatize a civilian population — basically war as terror, which is what you end up with (along with cyber warfare) when you hit the Military Singularity.
BBC: They escaped Ukraine's front lines. The sound of drones followed them
One story:
After more than a year at the front, Pavlo has returned home to the Kyiv apartment he shares with his wife. But the sound of the drones has followed him. Everyday mechanical tools like lawnmowers, motorcycles and air conditioners remind him of the FPVs that hunted him and his unit mates.
And nature is not an escape. Pavlo can no longer hear the sound of bees and flies buzzing near him without a creeping panic. "I don't like to go into nature anymore and hear this sound, because it reminds me so hard of the drones," he said.
Trauma associated with sound is not new – generations of soldiers have been affected by sudden noises after returning to civilian life. But as the war in Ukraine has evolved into a conflict driven by drone technology, the trauma has evolved with it.
"Over the past year, the majority of patients – if they are not physically wounded – have mental health injuries as a result of being under drone activity," said Dr Serhii Andriichenko, chief psychiatrist at Kyiv's military hospital. "We call this droneophobia."
I am certain this effect is spreading throughout the civilian population, eventually — and comprehensively — warping the minds of young people who grow up with this dynamic being normal to them. To me, that really is civilizational murder — not just killing today for today’s sake but killing today to destroy a population’s future functioning.
Is it basically the same thing that Israel is doing to Gaza?
Yes, yes it is.
We have reached the point, with the Military Singularity, where war crimes are no long an externality of conflict but its primary purpose and thus its complete moral bankruptcy is exposed.
