I was looking at the casualty and territorial data from the twenty twenty-five Russian offensive earlier this morning, and the numbers are just fundamentally broken when you look at them through the lens of traditional military success. We are sitting here in March of twenty twenty-six, looking back at a year where the Kremlin concentrated a staggering seven hundred thousand troops for a massive push. They had an almost incomprehensible amount of armor, air support, and North Korean munitions. Their stated objective was the seizure of the Odessa corridor—a move that would have effectively strangled Ukraine’s maritime access and ended the war on Moscow’s terms. And yet, after twelve months of some of the most intense fighting since the nineteen forties, they managed to seize about five thousand five hundred square kilometers. To put that in perspective, that is roughly the size of a large American county, or about half of the state of Connecticut.
It is the end of the high-speed maneuver era as a universal solution. Herman Poppleberry here, and I have been obsessed with this shift because it exposes a massive cultural blind spot in Western military thinking. For decades, the gold standard has been maneuver warfare—the idea that you can use speed, surprise, and superior command and control to bypass enemy strength and collapse their will to fight. We grew up on the legend of the nineteen ninety-one Gulf War, where a massive army was dismantled in weeks. But what we are seeing in Ukraine, and even in the protracted, grinding nature of the Israel-Hamas conflict, is a return to force-centric warfare. This is a term Alex Vershinin from the Royal United Services Institute has been championing, and it is the only way to make sense of the current map. In a force-centric war, the objective is not a specific hill, a city, or even a corridor to Odessa. The objective is the systematic destruction of the enemy's ability to regenerate combat power.
It sounds incredibly grim when you put it that way, Herman. It is not about taking ground; it is about breaking the factory that makes the soldiers and the shells. If the goal is just to out-produce the enemy's death rate, then the battlefield is really just a giant accounting ledger where the currency is industrial capacity and human lives. I noticed that the Russian territorial gains in twenty twenty-five were only slightly higher than twenty twenty-four, despite a much larger commitment of manpower. They went from four thousand five hundred square kilometers to five thousand five hundred. That is a lot of blood for a very small increase in real estate. Today's prompt from Daniel is about these wars of attrition—specifically the ones where nations get bogged down in objectives that seem to just keep receding into the distance. It feels like we are watching the death of the decisive battle in real time.
We absolutely are. And the reason we are getting bogged down is that we are trying to apply twenty-first-century technology to a nineteenth-century problem without the industrial base to back it up. We have been living in a "peacetime efficiency" model for thirty years. We optimized our militaries for small, expeditionary "wars of choice" where we had total dominance. But in a peer or near-peer conflict, the "decisive strike" is a myth. If you don't destroy the enemy's ability to replace what you just blew up, you haven't actually won anything; you've just paused the timer. This brings us to the "Victory Paradox" we discussed back in episode fourteen zero nine. You can win every tactical engagement, you can clear every tunnel in Gaza, or take every tree line in the Donbas, but if the strategic cost of those wins exhausts your society before the enemy's will breaks, you are actually losing.
That is the core of the problem. Why are modern militaries getting stuck? It is because the defense has become so much more efficient than the offense. Between ubiquitous drone surveillance and precision artillery, there is no "fog of war" left to hide a maneuver. If you move a tank battalion, the enemy sees it in twenty twenty-six before the engines are even warm. So, instead of a breakthrough, you get a grind. You get a war of industrial math.
And that math is brutal. When you look at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly reports from late twenty twenty-four and into twenty twenty-five, they were estimating Russian casualties at over six hundred fifteen thousand, with over one hundred fifteen thousand killed in action. On the other side, Ukrainian casualties are estimated between one hundred thirty thousand and two hundred thousand. In a traditional maneuver war, those kinds of losses would signal a total collapse of the front. But in a war of industrial capacity, as long as you can keep the replacement rate high enough—as long as you can keep the meat grinder fed—the war just continues. It becomes a question of who runs out of steel, silicon, and people first.
Which brings us to the "High-Low" mix and the shell gap. This is the part that should be keeping planners in Washington and Brussels awake at night. We are seeing Russian annual artillery output reaching four point two million units for one-two-two and one-five-two millimeter shells. That is a wartime economy in full swing. Meanwhile, the combined output of the United States and Europe is struggling to even hit a target of two million units by the end of twenty twenty-six. That is a two-to-one disadvantage in the most basic currency of modern land war. You can have the best satellite targeting in the world, but if you have one shell for every two the other guy has, the math of attrition is eventually going to catch up with you.
And it is not just about the shells; it is about what we call "robotic mass." Ukraine is providing the blueprint for how to survive this gap. As of this month, March twenty twenty-six, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense confirmed that forty percent of their military procurement is now produced domestically. They aren't just waiting for Western hand-me-downs anymore. They are aiming for an annual capacity of four million unmanned robotic systems. Think about that number—four million. That is not a hobbyist industry; that is a fundamental shift in how mass is projected on the battlefield. They are producing two hundred seventy different types of ammunition domestically. They are trying to solve the manpower shortage with silicon and rotors.
Four million drones a year is an insane number. It changes the calculus of traditional artillery because the drone is essentially a guided shell that can wait for its target. It is the ultimate "low" in the high-low mix. You use the high-end systems—the ATACMS, the Storm Shadows, the F-sixteens—for the deep strikes on the depots, but you use the low-end robotic mass to hold the line and make every meter of ground prohibitively expensive for the attacker. It is about making the cost of the offensive higher than the value of the territory.
And we saw the effectiveness of those high-end strikes in twenty twenty-five with the attacks on the depots in Toropets and Tikhoretsk. The Ukrainians managed to take out an estimated thirty-two thousand tons of munitions in a single night. To put that in context, that is months of combat operations—thousands of North Korean shells and S-three-hundred missiles—vaporized. It actually narrowed that five-to-one firing advantage the Russians had held during the peak attritional phases of twenty twenty-four. But even with those tactical wins, the strategic problem remains. Russia has transitioned its entire economy to a wartime footing. They are spending a massive percentage of their gross domestic product on defense, and they are doing it with a level of domestic political insulation that Western democracies just do not have.
You mentioned the firing ratio. It is fascinating how that fluctuates. In early twenty twenty-four, it was five-to-one in favor of Russia. After the depot strikes and the ramp-up of Western aid, it started to level out, but it is still a struggle. This is where the logistics of the "force-centric" model get really complicated. If you are Russia, you are betting that your ability to produce four point two million shells and recruit thirty thousand men a month will eventually outlast the West's political will to fund the gap. They are looking at the twenty twenty-nine threat horizon. They aren't just thinking about the next village; they are building the capacity now for a broader conventional conflict later.
That is exactly what NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has been warning about. He is calling out the "strategic risk gap." He is essentially saying that even if we reach ammunition parity by twenty twenty-seven, we are still behind because the Russians have already built the industrial muscle. They have the machine tools, the supply chains for nitrocellulose, and the decentralized assembly lines. In the West, we are still treating defense procurement like we are buying a luxury car—we want the best features, the latest tech, and we only want to buy a few at a time because they are so expensive. In a war of attrition, you need to buy military equipment like you are buying bottled water. You need it in massive quantities, you need it to be standardized, and you need it to be delivered every single day without fail.
It is the difference between an "exquisite" force and a "resilient" force. We love our F-thirty-fives and our high-tech missile systems, and as we discussed in episode eleven ninety-three, even failing missiles can win if you have enough of them to saturate the defense. But if you only have fifty of those missiles and the enemy has five thousand decoys and cheap drones, your "exquisite" advantage disappears. This is why the "High-Low" mix is so critical. You need the high-end to blind the enemy, but you need the low-end mass to actually survive the grind.
This cultural resistance to attrition in the West is a huge part of the problem. Alex Vershinin argues that our military academies are still teaching officers how to win the last war—the short, decisive one. We are culturally unprepared for a "force-centric" grind. We see attrition as a failure of command, rather than a fundamental characteristic of high-intensity conflict between industrial powers. We want the silver bullet. But there are no silver bullets when the enemy has a deep bench and a wartime economy.
I want to pivot to the economic toll, because this is where the attrition starts to eat the society behind the military. Look at the Gaza campaign. The Bank of Israel revised the direct costs to sixty-nine billion dollars by mid-twenty twenty-four, which was about ten percent of their gross domestic product. And those costs just kept climbing through twenty twenty-five as the conflict shifted from a high-intensity maneuver to a long-term security and "mop-up" operation. That is the Victory Paradox in action. You can dismantle the enemy's formal military structure, but if the cost of maintaining that victory starts to hollow out your domestic stability, are you actually winning?
That is the core of the attrition trap. The military objective stays just out of reach because the enemy's will to resist is tied to their own perception of your exhaustion. If Hamas or Russia believes that the West or Israel will eventually lose the political will to fund the sixty-nine billion dollar bill or the two million shells a year, they have a rational reason to keep fighting, regardless of how many tactical losses they take. Attrition is as much about the endurance of the taxpayer as it is about the endurance of the soldier. It is a competition of social resilience.
It seems like Michael Kofman's "hold, build, and strike" strategy is the only logical response to this. Kofman, who is now at Carnegie, has been very influential in shaping the twenty twenty-six perspective. He argues that you have to accept that you cannot win quickly. So, step one is "hold"—focus on defensive depth, minefields, and robotic mass to exhaust the attacker's resources. Step two is "build"—ramp up your industrial base and train your forces for the specific reality of the current front. And only then do you "strike" when the enemy's regenerative capacity has been sufficiently degraded. It is a very un-sexy way to fight a war. It does not make for good headlines. It is just years of holding the line and waiting for the other guy's factory to break first.
Kofman is right because he recognizes that the offense-defense balance has shifted heavily toward the defense. Between ubiquitous drone surveillance, precision artillery, and dense minefields, the cost of moving forward is now significantly higher than the cost of staying put. In that environment, maneuver is not just difficult; it is often suicidal unless you have total air superiority and a massive advantage in electronic warfare. Without those, you are stuck in the grind. And the grind favors the side with the deeper pockets and the more resilient industrial base.
So, if you are a military planner looking at this in twenty twenty-six, your first priority has to be regenerative capacity. It is not about how many tanks you have on day one; it is about how many tanks you can produce on day seven hundred. We have seen this in the Russia-Ukraine conflict where both sides started with massive stockpiles of Soviet-era gear, but once those were depleted, the war turned into a competition of new production and refurbishment. The side that can iterate faster on drone software or shell casing manufacturing becomes the side with the strategic initiative.
And that requires a transition of the defense industry from a peacetime footing to a wartime footing, which is exactly what Mark Rutte is calling for. Companies like Rheinmetall in Germany and Nammo in Norway and Finland are trying to scale up, but the lead times on the heavy machinery required to make artillery shells are measured in years, not months. You can't just flip a switch and start making a million shells a year. You need the machine tools, you need the skilled labor, and you need a guaranteed long-term contract from the government so the companies feel safe making the investment.
It is a sobering thought that our security in twenty twenty-nine might depend on a machine tool order placed in twenty twenty-four. It makes the political delays in funding feel even more consequential. When a budget gets stuck in a legislature for six months, you aren't just losing time; you are losing the ability to compete in the industrial math of the future. The Russians aren't waiting for a committee vote. They have already committed to the force-centric model. They are comfortable with the grind because they have structured their society to absorb it.
There is also the issue of single points of failure in the supply chain. This is a huge takeaway for planners. If all your high-end chips come from one place, or all your nitrocellulose for gunpowder comes from another, a single strike or a single trade embargo can shut down your entire regenerative capacity. This is why diversifying supply chains and bringing manufacturing closer to home—"friend-shoring" or "near-shoring"—is a strategic necessity, not just an economic preference. We saw how the strikes on those Russian depots forced them to change their firing ratios because they couldn't move the ammo fast enough from the remaining distant hubs. Imagine if a similar strike hit the primary manufacturing hub for a critical component in the West. We don't have the same depth of reserves to fall back on.
It really feels like the lessons for planners are all about humility. You have to assume the war will be long, you have to assume the enemy will not collapse after the first strike, and you have to assume your own public will get tired of the cost. If you plan for a six-week maneuver war and you get a six-year war of attrition, you have already lost. You have to build the system for the long haul from the very beginning. This includes the psychological aspect—managing "alert fatigue" which we touched on in episode fourteen fifty-six. When the sirens are going off every day for two years, the human brain starts to normalize the danger. That is when discipline slips, and in a war of attrition, discipline is a resource just like shells are.
That involves a fundamental change in how we train officers too. We spend a lot of time teaching them how to execute a perfect combined-arms breach. We need to spend more time teaching them how to manage a defensive sector for two years while losing ten percent of their equipment every month. It is a different kind of leadership. It is about maintaining morale and operational effectiveness under the constant pressure of erosion. It is the difference between a sprint and a multi-year ultramarathon through a swamp. The side that stays disciplined for the longest wins.
I think about the social collapse aspect of the Victory Paradox again. If the people on the front line feel like they are just being thrown into a meat grinder with no end in sight, or if the people at home feel like their quality of life is being sacrificed for a stalemate, the whole system can seize up. You have to provide a coherent strategic plan that people can believe in. You have to show them that the attrition is serving a purpose—that you are building toward a point where the enemy's capacity to regenerate finally fails.
So, looking ahead to twenty twenty-nine, what is the deterrent? Is it just having more stuff? Or is it showing the enemy that you are prepared for the grind? It seems to me that the best way to avoid a war of attrition is to prove that you would win one. If the other guy knows you have the industrial capacity to out-produce them for a decade, they are much less likely to start the conflict in the first place. Deterrence in the twenty-first century is an assembly line. It is the ability to produce four million drones and two million shells and keep your economy stable while doing it.
It is a tough sell for a public that wants lower taxes and more social spending. Telling people they need to fund a massive industrial expansion for a war that might not happen is the hardest job in politics. But the alternative is watching the global order get ground down by regimes that have no such qualms about putting their people and their factories on a permanent war footing. It is a choice between the cost of preparation and the catastrophic cost of being caught unprepared in a force-centric world.
And we are already seeing the cost of being caught unprepared. The billions spent in Ukraine and Israel are just the down payment. If we don't learn these lessons now—if we don't fix the shell gap, if we don't embrace robotic mass, if we don't diversify our supply chains—the next bill will be much higher, and it might be paid in more than just currency. We have to move past the illusion of the decisive strike and start building for the reality of the industrial grind. That means ammunition parity is just the baseline. The real goal is regenerative superiority.
It makes the concept of peace feel very fragile. If the only way to stay safe is to be in a state of perpetual industrial mobilization, the line between war and peace starts to blur. We are moving into a world where the shadow of the factory looms over every diplomatic negotiation. It is a return to a much older, much more brutal form of international relations, just with better sensors and more efficient explosives. It is the return of history, as they say. We thought we had escaped the age of mass industrial slaughter, but it turns out we just took a thirty-year break.
The tools have changed—the drones have replaced the heavy bombers in some ways, and the satellites have replaced the scouts—but the underlying logic of attrition is exactly what it was in nineteen sixteen or nineteen forty-three. It is the systematic application of industrial power to break the enemy's will and capacity. The sooner we accept that, the better our chances of navigating the twenty-nine threat horizon without a total global collapse. We need to be thinking about how software is being updated on the fly to counter electronic warfare, how decentralized workshops can survive cruise missile strikes, and how to maintain social cohesion during a multi-year economic hit.
On that cheery note, I think we have given the planners enough to chew on for one day. The takeaway is clear: prioritize regenerative capacity over the illusion of the quick win, diversify your supply chains to avoid the Toropets-style catastrophe, and recognize that your economy is your most important weapon system. If you aren't thinking about the shell gap and the drone production numbers, you aren't thinking about modern war. You are just waiting to be ground down.
And stay curious about the technical shifts. The way Ukraine is iterating on those two hundred seventy types of ammunition is a masterclass in rapid industrial adaptation. That is part of the capacity too—the ability to change your tactics as fast as the enemy changes theirs. It is not just about making the same shell four million times; it is about making the four millionth shell smarter than the first one.
Well, this has been a deep dive into some pretty heavy reality. Thanks as always to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping the gears turning behind the scenes. And a big thanks to Modal for providing the GPU credits that power this show and keep our research moving at the speed of the twenty twenty-six tech landscape.
If you found this discussion on attrition and industrial warfare useful, we have a whole archive of deep dives at myweirdprompts dot com. You can find everything there, from our look at missile signaling in episode eleven ninety-three to the Victory Paradox in episode fourteen zero nine.
You can also find us on Telegram by searching for My Weird Prompts to get notified the second a new episode drops. We appreciate you sticking with us through the technical weeds. This has been My Weird Prompts. We will see you in the next one.
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