[throwup238]

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.

[dgoldstein0]

> 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.

Best source I've seen on these subjects is https://acoup.blog/2021/09/17/collections-no-mans-land-part-... and his followup article.

[throwup238]

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)

[dgoldstein0]

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.

[dragonwriter]

> The WWI stalemate really got broken because the Allies - US, UK, and France - had a lot more in them

Mostly the US had a lot more in them, after sitting out the first 3/4 of the war.

[dgoldstein0]

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...