[jcranmer]

A serious question here: what history are you drawing this inference from?

Popular history tends to be a distorted view of history that willfully ignores evidence to the contrary to tell a good story, and military history especially tends to fall victim here. As a good case in point, take WWI. In popular history, WWI is a war of unimaginable destruction because generals were idiots fighting Napoleonic-era tactics with modern weaponry. But that's not really sustained by the evidence. The generals and officer class were aware of how much more effective modern guns and gunnery was compared to the Napoleonic wars, and their battle plans accounted for this. Trenches came out of known tactics--on the defensive, digging in is the most effective way to avoid the lethality of opposing weapons, and an underground trench is more effective than an above-ground static fortification.

[whatshisface]

Any historical claim can be argued with, and I guess this is an example, but I would maintain that WWI involved a lot of things that wouldn't be repeated with modern knowledge. To offer another example, consider actual Napoleonic-era tactics: why was Napoleon running around and defeating everyone with them when the same guns were basically available everywhere? Ideally everyone would have copied his artillery tactics as soon as he used them once, but military leadership rarely moves that fast. If you sent a general from the era to West Point today, they would probably be able to defeat Napoleon.

[credit_guy]

> consider actual Napoleonic-era tactics: why was Napoleon running around and defeating everyone with them when the same guns were basically available everywhere?

More prosaically, Napoleon had much larger armies available to him than his opponents: "You can't stop me, I spend 30000 men a month" [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25qmz6/can_s...

[Aloha]

I would argue that WWI was so deadly because it was modern weaponry without modern medicine to go with it. We made huge strides in treating casualties between the two wars.