Is the scale of the conflict simply significantly less, or is artillery more accurate(and has a greater range?) and therefore less shells tend to get used in a modern day context?
Both. And one is a big causative factor in the other. Beyond the technological advances in manufacturing making shells more consistent and powerful and artillery pieces more precise, Great War artillery was essentially blind firing. You had a copy of a paper map produced by surveyors triangulating points. You think the enemy is in this grid square. You point your gun in that direction and calculate how much charge and elevation you need to hit a target at that distance, then you fire. Most of the time you miss. Even if you hit, you have no idea. So you form up your guns in batteries of hundreds, and you fire for hours on end, because it's the only way to guarantee effective hits on your target.
Artillery changes a lot once you have satellites and GPS and guided shells and drones, when the camera on your drone can point at something it sees and instantly turn that into a set of accurate coordinates that can instantly be transmitted to a battery that can instantly calculate a firing solution for those coordinates. You can fire one shell and achieve damage on target you'd need to fire dozens to achieve in WW1.
And this, along with the general technological advancement of war in every other way, means the scale is smaller. In WW1 you had to mass thousands of men in every kilometre because if you didn't then the enemy would, and overwhelm you with numbers. In Ukraine, whenever either side concentrates its forces beyond a handful of tanks and infantry squads, the other side hammers that concentration with accurate artillery as soon as they spot it. WW1 scale simply does not work.
It's both scale and the nature of combat changing - in great part due to the horrors of WWI. There was a huge front stretching across Western Europe of mostly static defensive installations like the infamous network of trenches, all of which could easily be targeted by artillery but couldn't be held by enemy troops for very long. Artillery units would sit in the same spot for months firing at each other without the battle lines changing more than a hundred meters back and forth. Once tanks were invented, this stalemate broke and trench warfare with static installations as far as the eye can see became untenable.
While artillery is still useful today as a cheap way to hit static targets with tons of explosives, modern combat has many more mobile units like tanks and armored infantry that are impractical to hit when they're moving around. Artillery is a big part of Russian military doctrine but no one uses it at the scale it was used in WWI.
> Once tanks were invented, this stalemate broke and trench warfare with static installations as far as the eye can see became untenable.
Not sure what timescale you mean by "once" - if you mean immediately during WWI - well the story is a bit more complicated than that. The first tanks were tested in the battlefield in WWI, but they were few, rare, and slow. Some versions were effective at anti-trench warfare, but they didn't fundamentally change they war, because there weren't enough of them and they weren't that good.
WWII tanks were a whole different ball game, travelling at automotive speeds - easily 40mph - over most terrains, with much more effective armor from all sides, and both sides figured out how to use them effectively together with infantry and air power.
The WWI stalemate really got broken because the Allies - US, UK, and France - had a lot more in them, whereas the Central Powers - Germany, Austria, etc - ran out of manpower and supplies to keep up. They still made it hell on the Allies to gain ground, but they effectively had lost their ability to manage a counteroffensive through attrition. Tons of tactics were tried before that point to avoid an attritional war, but planes and tanks to make fast high powered strikes didn't exist (WWI planes couldn't carry much weight, so were ineffective as bombers, and had shorter range; they were mainly used as recon), and artillery was so destructive it hindered it's own slow advance.
That was poorly phrased. I didn't mean that the development of tanks broke the WWI stalemate, but that after tanks came into their own in the interwar period, WWI-style static trench warfare was no longer practical.
WWII tanks started to force everyone to be a lot more mobile on the battlefield at which point artillery lost utility compared to the WWI era (though obviously still very useful)
yup, I suspected you might mean something like that. Also of note, part of the major usefulness of tanks was to pair radios with them, so the new faster armies could coordinate as they moved.
And fun historical note, France definitely didn't get the memo, and were caught totally surprised by the speed of the Nazi assault. They were still using fixed phone and telegraph lines and their top commander wasn't even sitting by the phone. Their complete lack of imagination for how all the new technologies would change war was the main reason they blundered their defense so badly. Greatest victory the Nazi armies every won.
Totally accurate. But also the British blockade of Central Europe was slowly starving the central powers. Maybe part of that was because the US was also supplying the allies...
Artillery changes a lot once you have satellites and GPS and guided shells and drones, when the camera on your drone can point at something it sees and instantly turn that into a set of accurate coordinates that can instantly be transmitted to a battery that can instantly calculate a firing solution for those coordinates. You can fire one shell and achieve damage on target you'd need to fire dozens to achieve in WW1.
And this, along with the general technological advancement of war in every other way, means the scale is smaller. In WW1 you had to mass thousands of men in every kilometre because if you didn't then the enemy would, and overwhelm you with numbers. In Ukraine, whenever either side concentrates its forces beyond a handful of tanks and infantry squads, the other side hammers that concentration with accurate artillery as soon as they spot it. WW1 scale simply does not work.