[amenhotep]

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.

[m4rtink]

Even massing artillery is problematic in Ukraine, as it is often targeted by drones and loitering munitions.