David Betz, M.L.R. Smith
For all the vast commentary in the Western media on the Russia-Ukraine war, a persistent fact remains: beyond the immediate theatre of conflict, few observers possess a clear or consistent grasp of events on the ground. The fog of war—historically the product of battlefield confusion—has thickened in the digital age, not merely through competing strategic narratives and decontextualised drone footage, but also through the prevailing mists of Western wishful thinking.
For nearly three years, a steady stream of commentary—often by writers whose proximity to the conflict is more editorial than operational—has peddled forecasts heavy on conviction but light on corroboration. A familiar rota of Atlanticist voices,[i] supplemented by the op-ed pages of most of the major newspapers, have repeatedly assured their audiences that victory is within Ukraine’s grasp,[ii] or that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime is tottering on the brink of collapse.[iii] These declarations, rarely anchored in battlefield realities, have served less as strategic analysis and more as psychological reassurance: therapy disguised as insight.
This genre of morale-management has dovetailed neatly with the illusions that defined post-Cold War Western military orthodoxy. Political leaders and defence planners confidently envisioned a new era of warfare—rapid and surgical—executed by streamlined expeditionary forces deploying precision munitions and networked command systems. War, in this vision, would be not only decisive but decorous: fought at arm’s length and, metaphorically speaking, finished before lunch.
Instead, they got Bakhmut.
This essay seeks to dissect the collision between digital-age delusions and industrial-age realities. The war in Ukraine has exposed the fragility of Western military assumptions over the past three decades, not through a deliberate strategic reinvention but through war’s primordial nature reasserting itself—dragging Western theory back from its digital abstractions to the hard logic of force, friction and sustained political will.
The End of History did not arrive. The Return of Artillery did.
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