Wars in the time of marches!

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Victory celebrations in ancient wars took on aspects of religious and national pride, and capitals received returning leaders with military parades, spoils, and triumphal arches, offering sacrifices to the gods in thanks, and popular poems and chants glorified the heroics of warriors.

Blitzkrieg wars relied on rapid incursion, the element of surprise, and decisive strategic strikes that completely paralyzed the opponent, resolved battles and annihilated armies, in a few hours, days, or weeks.

Today, battlefields have become open theaters, and achieving surprise is extremely difficult. They are no longer decided by the balance of power, but have turned into long wars of attrition, in which the decision depends on the ability of each party to withstand and exhaust the other’s capabilities.

Drones and missiles imposed a new reality and caused a radical transformation that confounded traditional military doctrines and demonstrated equal competition for strategic bombers and stealth fighters. These developments established the fact that the magnitude of the military arsenal alone is no longer sufficient to resolve the conflict, which remains dependent on the control and direct presence of soldiers on the ground. Cheap weapons, such as drones, often outperform expensive fighters and bombers, and depend on Its effectiveness on density and attrition, and launching massive swarms, at a cost equivalent to the price of only one missile.

And when the other party is forced to use a missile costing a million dollars to shoot down a drone whose value does not exceed five thousand dollars, we are faced with a real war of economic attrition, which favors the cheapest and least expensive weapon in the long run. These variables have made modern wars complex and intertwined, lacking a decisive formula, with neither a victor nor a decisive defeat, and in light of the mass destruction, continuing economic exhaustion, disruption of global supply chains, cross-border threats and cyber attacks, it has become The concept of “complete victory” is merely a “strategic illusion.” It is governed by a “mutual attrition equation,” in which success is not measured by the size of field strikes, but by efficiency in reducing losses, in light of a world in which the idea of the “absolute winner” has become a thing of the past.

Wars are no longer military confrontations, ending with the victory of one party and the defeat of the other, but rather protracted crises that go beyond the battlefields, leaving behind deep human wounds, and economic and social impacts that threaten the stability of peoples and the future of generations. Behind every conflict are lives lost, dreams shattered, and societies struggling to regain their security and cohesion.

The losses are not limited to material destruction, but extend to include the depletion of resources, the decline in development opportunities, and the widening circles of poverty and displacement, and wars turn from a means to achieve interests into an obstacle to progress, and a real threat to human and economic stability.

Hence, peace becomes a necessity and a shared responsibility, which requires giving precedence to the language of dialogue over the logic of force, resorting to justice instead of violence, and working to build sustainable solutions that address the roots of conflicts and not their temporary manifestations. True victory is not in the number of battles that are won, but in the lives that are preserved, the nations that are reconstructed, and the generations that are raised in the shadow of security and peace.

Quoted from "Akhbar Al-Youm"