Full tweet:

The whole Gaza and Iran-Israel thing serves as a reminder that there are a lot of hot spots on this planet that could erupt into large-scale warfare at any given time. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, so I'm gonna say a few unpleasant things about this. 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

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