I was unsure where to post this but since I’m mainly interested in a discussion and don’t consider this to have much informational value otherwise, i decided against posting it in one of the Ukraine war news or geopolitics related coms. I recently stumbled on to this take by a fairly popular Twitter user in the Ukraine conflict commentariat circles. Initially i found it thought provoking but upon further reflection i found that i actually fundamentally disagree with their view on war. And i’ll explain why further below. Here is the post in question:

"The war in Ukraine is contributing to the normalization of the kind of warfare that is the absolute worst - industrial mass warfare. The SMO was originally supposed to be a glorified police operation, an exercise in “hybrid warfare”, similar to the Crimean operation - more political and social technology than violence, and only a little bit of carefully applied military force. This approach failed, and the Ukrainian state managed to inflict several military defeats on the small professional Russian force by turning on what people call the “meat grinder”, which is nothing other than reverting from “5th generation warfare”, “hybrid warfare” or whatever else you want to call it, to old-fashioned 20th century style mass warfare. I.e., by grabbing hundreds of thousands of civilians and giving them rifles and putting them in metal boxes and telling them to dig trenches.

In a blissful utopia, wars would be resolved diplomatically, or at least they’d only be fought by small numbers of professionals (or just robots/drones). Modern warfare shouldn’t devastate civilians as much as it does, and the trauma of WW2 has generally created a taboo against all-out total war. Where these wars happened anyway, they either weren’t between states (but civil wars or insurgencies instead), they were so lopsided in numerical or technological terms that they were over before they really began (e.g. Desert Storm) or they happened in Africa where it’s easy not to notice them for the rest of the world. There were a few exceptions, e.g. Iran-Iraq, but they don’t really change the general picture.

Levée en masse, originally introduced by the French revolutionaries to be able to fight off the First Coalition, has shown itself to be one of the most disastrous concepts ever introduced to statecraft. Ideologically, culturally, socially, politically and demographically, few revolutionary novelties have ever wrought as much havoc as the idea of grabbing every other guy off the street and handing him a gun, along with the necessary mind programming to do so.

The horrors of WW2 had seemed to serve as a vaccination against this kind of warfare in the civilized world, but Kiev has broken the taboo, and obviously Russia responded in kind. It is very easy to transform the modern state back into a machine that converts normies into slaughter.

Many people, some of them with genuinely good, ethical intentions, are calling on Kiev and the US to ask Russia for peace negotiations. I’m afraid that won’t be enough. The genie is out of the bottle and to stop everyone else from giddily jumping back into industrialized mass warfare it’s probably necessary to make an example out of the Ukraine, simply to uphold the trauma and stop the planet from plunging into decades of large-scale warfare with millions of deaths and immense damage to the infrastructure of the modern world.

The Ukrainians have broken many taboos already and then acted surprised when their enemy responded in kind - attacking military hospitals, targeting medevac, executing POWs and so on. It’s gonna hurt really, really badly when they realize that breaking the taboo on mass warfare and forcing Russia to go from unideological hybrid policing operation to Great Patriotic War was a terrible mistake. But by then it’ll be too late"

First things first, i will point out that this Twitter account is run by people with some pretty reactionary and in particular anti-communist views. And imo this take is a reflection of that fundamental difference in world views. They get the facts right about the present state of the Ukraine conflict but their view on war, while i may at one point when i was still a naive liberal have shared it, is just something that i no longer agree with.

It is tempting to want to prefer war to be a “clean” affair, a fight between professional armies with as little civilian involvement as possible. But now as a Marxist i believe that that is precisely what leads to a glorification of war, an overindulgence in it because it is perceived as something far away and removed from the daily life of most people, and ultimately because of the separation of war from its mass-political character to atrocity prone mercenary armies.

I now tend toward the opposite view that if war is to be waged then it must involve the entire population of a country and happen only with their consent and participation. Far from being a bad development, the levee en masse of the First French Republic was revolutionary and progressive in character as it raised the political consciousness of the masses. The very destructiveness of such a war is what teaches societies to not engage in war (other than that which is waged for the existential defense of the people) and to value peace.

A big reason why nowadays Europe has become so warmongering again is because they are too far removed from the trauma of WWII and their recent experiences with war have been limited to the expeditionary imperialist wars waged by the US/NATO with small professional forces against weak global south nations. War has been normalized as something that can constantly happen in the background somewhere else “over there” while life goes on as normal for most of our society. This should NOT be the case. A country that chooses to wage war should feel its impacts.

This notion of “fifth generational warfare” that was developed in the decades since the end of the cold war which the professional military and political classes of the West have been so enamored with is an illusion. Unless you are at an extreme overmatch over your opponent as in the aforementioned colonial expeditionary wars, then there is no other form of modern war other than mass industrialized warfare. Anyone fantasizing about polite wars between small professional forces or bloodless drone wars is deluding themselves and dangerously so.

Furthermore, professional armies are much more reactionary/apolitical in nature. Armies raised with mass conscription are much more prone to becoming politicized against the ruling class sending them to war. This provides an opportunity for the army to defect to the revolution in the event of a revolutionary upheaval in society as happened in Russia 1917, as opposed to a professional mercenary army which would not feel a connection to the masses and would follow orders to put the revolution down, as the inherently reactionary police forces would do.

I’m curious to know what other comrades’ thoughts on this are. Maybe i’m entirely off the mark here and i am looking at this all wrong, so some comradely criticism would be very appreciated.