ArjanSandhu73 Yes absolutely. What that bar chart doesn’t show is that the Vietnam war was far higher intensity than the ones since then. And the Gulf war again far higher intensity than the others. Though it was a short war it was very high intensity in terms of the numbers of soldiers fighting.
Apart from the Ukraine war. That has more soldiers fighting in it than the Gulf war. But that is because of the unusual nature of the fighting, with both sides unable to achieve air superiority and the very long front line, well over 1000 km long with static fighting for a very long period of time.
It’s barely shifted in well over 3 years of fighting, just a few small cities (more like towns as we use the word in the UK, more like Slough or Carlisle or Harrogate than Oxford in size) and villages won by Russia. Bakhmut is by far the largest city that Russia has won in 3 years and it’s around the size of those towns (71,000 to 76,000). But Ukrainians and Americans call it a city. Russia also won Avdiivka and Pokrofsk far smaller than Bakhmut. And the Ukrainians won and then lost Sudzha, even smaller at 4,000.
http://lovemytown.co.uk/populations/townstable1.asp
So it’s been a long war of a lot of fighting but very little change on the ground.
The number of soldiers you need to fight is roughly proportional to the length of the front line. The reason that China has 2 million soldiers is to defend its very long land border. It’s border is over 22,000 km so the 2 million soldiers only work out at one soldier every 11 meters along its border. So the very large size of the Chinese army is deceptive, they can only afford to deploy a small % abroard as almost all are needed to guard the borders.
Similarly the Russia / Ukrainian soldiers are at about 1000 soldiers per kilometer of front line on the Russian side and rather less on the Ukrainian side, which isn’t that much for active all out war.
I think it is pretty clear that Putin would NEVER have entered such a war if he’d known how it would turn out and after the war ends there won’t be anyone else he COULD invade like that. NATO is so vastly superior that any engagement would end quickly in favour of NATO so he won’t try. He’s not going to try to invade Kazakhstan or something.
If he attacked Georgia it is just too small a country to have such a long front line.
I think the main risk of large-scale fighting might be if Russia breaks up in a way that involves fighting. Hopefully it stays together or breaks up peacefully as for the former Soviet Union.
Hopefully this Iran war ends with a peace treaty. If so that would end the main causes for fighting throughout the Middle East which has been one of the main areas with fighting for decades.
Gradually we see this pattern globally of larger and larger zones of peace. So I think that is likely how it ends eventually - not an end of warfare in some global peace deal. But rather, larger and larger security regions where all the borders are settled or else disputes are settled peacefully until eventually it covers the entire world.
