Land Warfare

Land warfare is fighting on the ground, the oldest form of warfare and, despite everything, the one where wars are ultimately decided. Air power, sea power, and the newer domains of space and cyber matter enormously, but they mostly serve the land fight, because the fundamental object of most wars, controlling territory and the people on it, can only be secured on the ground, by forces that physically take and hold the land. You can bomb a country, blockade it, and dominate its skies and seas, but you have not defeated it until you control the ground, which is why land warfare, for all the technological revolutions around it, remains the decisive domain, the place where the outcome is finally settled.

Why the ground decides

Land warfare is decisive because controlling territory, the fundamental object of most conflicts, requires physical presence on the ground that only land forces can provide. The other domains can dominate, deny, and destroy, air power striking targets and denying the enemy the use of the air, sea power controlling the waters and projecting force from them, but they cannot occupy and hold ground, cannot be physically present to control territory and the people on it, which is what deciding most wars ultimately requires. A war fought to control territory, which most wars are, is decided when one side controls the contested ground, and that control can only be established and held by land forces physically present on it, so however much the other domains contribute, the land fight is where the decisive outcome, the control of territory, is achieved. This is why land warfare has remained central through every technological change, since the recurring predictions that air power or some other capability would make land warfare obsolete have been wrong every time, defeated by the enduring reality that controlling ground requires forces on the ground, a reality that no technology has overturned. The war in Ukraine, for all its drones, precision weapons, and technology, remained fundamentally a land war, decided by the ground fight over territory, a stark demonstration that beneath the technological sophistication, warfare still comes down to the struggle for ground, the land warfare that remains the decisive domain even in a conflict full of advanced capabilities from the other domains.

Land warfare is also the most complex and demanding of the domains, fought in the intricate, varied, cluttered environment of the ground, among terrain, structures, and populations, which makes it harder and more brutal than the cleaner domains of air and sea. The land is complicated, full of terrain that shapes movement and combat, hills, forests, cities, rivers, obstacles, all of which affect the fight, and it is inhabited, so land warfare is fought among populations, entangling combat with civilians in ways that complicate everything, and it is close, bringing forces into direct, personal contact with the enemy in a way that the more distant domains often avoid. This complexity and closeness make land warfare especially demanding, requiring the integration of many arms, infantry, armor, artillery, engineers, air support, in the combined-arms approach that land combat requires, and imposing the harshest conditions and heaviest costs, since the ground fight is where forces close with the enemy directly, endure the most brutal combat, and suffer the heaviest casualties. The infantry, the foot soldiers who ultimately take and hold the ground, bear the greatest burden of land warfare, enduring the close, dangerous, exhausting reality of ground combat that the other domains are largely spared, and the cost of land warfare, in lives and hardship, has always fallen most heavily on the forces that do the close fighting on the ground. This makes land warfare not only the decisive domain but the hardest and most costly, the place where wars are settled but also where they exact their greatest price, fought in the complex, inhabited, close environment of the ground that makes it the most demanding form of warfare.

Land warfare in the modern era

Land warfare continues to evolve as new technologies transform how the ground fight is conducted, even as its fundamental nature, the struggle to take and hold territory, endures. The modern battlefield has been changed by the technologies that now saturate it, drones providing pervasive surveillance and strike, precision weapons enabling accurate fires, advanced sensors making the battlefield transparent, and networks connecting forces, all of which transform the tactics and character of land combat without changing its fundamental object of controlling ground. The war in Ukraine displayed this transformed land warfare, a ground war fought with drones, precision fires, electronic warfare, and the persistent surveillance that makes the battlefield transparent, forcing dispersal, concealment, and constant movement, while remaining at bottom a struggle over territory decided by forces holding ground in brutal close combat, the traditional substance of land warfare beneath the technological transformation. The lessons of this modern land warfare, the importance of drones and counter-drone capability, the lethality of a transparent battlefield, the return of attrition and the importance of mass and industrial capacity, the enduring role of infantry and artillery, are being absorbed by militaries reorienting toward the possibility of major land war after decades focused on other kinds of conflict, and the character of land warfare continues to change as these lessons and technologies reshape how the ground fight is conducted. Yet through all this change, the fundamental nature of land warfare remains, the struggle to take and hold territory, decided by forces on the ground, which endures as the decisive object beneath the evolving tactics and technologies, so that land warfare, transformed in its methods, remains unchanged in its essence, the fight for the ground that ultimately decides most wars, the oldest and still the decisive domain of warfare, evolving in how it is fought but constant in what it is fought for, the control of the territory that only forces on the ground can secure.

If air and missile power are so advanced, why can't they win a war alone?

Because air and missile power, however advanced, cannot occupy and hold territory, which is what deciding most wars ultimately requires, so they can dominate and destroy but cannot secure the control of ground that only land forces provide. Air and missile power can strike targets, destroy forces, deny the enemy the use of the air, and inflict enormous damage, and these are powerful and important contributions to warfare, but they cannot physically occupy ground, cannot be present to control territory and the people on it, so they cannot by themselves achieve the control of territory that most wars are fought to decide. A country can be bombed extensively, its forces struck, its infrastructure destroyed, and still not be defeated, because defeat, in a war over territory, requires controlling the ground, which the bombing cannot accomplish, so air and missile power, for all their destructive capability, cannot substitute for the land forces that take and hold territory. History has repeatedly shown that air power alone does not win wars fought over territory, since the strategic bombing campaigns and air operations that were expected to be decisive on their own have consistently failed to achieve victory without the land forces that control the ground, a lesson relearned in conflict after conflict, and the recurring hope that air or missile power might win a war without a costly land campaign has repeatedly proven illusory, defeated by the reality that controlling territory requires forces on the ground. This does not diminish the importance of air and missile power, which contribute enormously to warfare and can be decisive in enabling and supporting the land fight, but it means they cannot win a war alone when the war is over territory, since they cannot provide the physical control of ground that deciding such a war requires, control that only land forces, present on the ground, can establish and hold, which is why land warfare remains the decisive domain and why air and missile power, powerful as they are, serve the land fight rather than replacing it in the wars whose object is the control of territory.