Comment by openasocket

And I'd invite you to re-read my comment. He agrees with my main point:

> In static-system vs. static-system warfare. Thus, in Syria – where the Syrian Civil War has been waged as a series of starve-or-surrender urban sieges, a hallmark of static vs. static fighting – you see significant use of chemical weapons, especially as a terror tactic against besieged civilians.

The Russians being in a similar situation because they do not have equipment suitable for a highly mobile army (I don't quite expect them to use them for reasons below, but worth pointing out).

There's a lot wrong with his take. A lot of what he is writing is unsourced conjecture. It's like saying man portable missiles are irrelevant when you can have the CIA topple their government and remove their will to fight.

For one, conventional arms are horribly inefficient at killing in the first place! It's thousands of rounds fired for a confirmed kill, and the stat is equally as bad for artillery. Any marginal improvement is a big deal.

He does not convincingly separate their lack of legitimate use from moral concerns. Developed nuclear states don't use them for a lot of reasons, but a huge issue is that chemical weapons are on the escalation ladder. In the US's case it's also that we don't want to kill indiscriminately. He so much as states this at one point:

> In essence, the two big powers of the Cold War (and, as a side note, also the lesser components of the Warsaw Pact and NATO) spent the whole Cold War looking for an effective way to use chemical weapons against each other, and seem to have – by the end – concluded on the balance that there wasn’t one. Either conventional weapons get the job done, or you escalate to nuclear systems.

> But if chemical weapons can still be effective against static system armies, why don’t modern system armies (generally) use chemical weapons against them? Because they don’t need to. Experience has tended to show that static system armies are already so vulnerable to the conventional capability of top-flight modern system armies that chemical munitions offer no benefits beyond what precision-guided munitions (PGMs), rapid maneuver (something the Iraqi army showed a profound inability to cope with in both 1991 and 2003), and the tactics (down to the small unit) of the modern system do.

I take no exception to this, but basically no large army has encountered a case where they need quickly deployed area denial that is different from landmines. A massive retreat into the interior of a country may be such a case, but you run into issues where a decapitation against that state is probably going to be more effective.

For what it's worth, this is why Russia's concern of NATO countries walking up into it is nonsensical. It's just, perhaps, they never realized how nonsensical it was, as their defense planners do not have experience with a highly dynamic army. (But oddly they seem to have some idea of what might happen, as this is what likely led to their development of nuclear/neutron mortars and artillery. But any situation where those would come out is going to be ICBM time anyway.)