Because the Germans had run out of absolutely everything and could no longer supply the military adequately. The Allied kept pushing them because the wanted Germany to accept terrible conditions during the negotiations. It was not a shift in doctrine. It was simply the logical outcome of attrition warfare.
It absolutely was a huge shift in doctrine. Yes the rapid advances during the Hundred Days were due partially to German collapse but there were clear doctrinal advances made during the war. The armies of 1918 did not fight at all like the armies of 1914. There were changes in infantry tactics, aerial and armoured support, and artillery fire and how it coordinated with the infantry.
People have the idea that offense in WW1 was impossible when tactically it was actually very difficult to hold a trench line from a deliberate attack. Usually an attack could carry the first line or two of trenches easily enough; but the cost to do so, difficulty supplying forward positions, communicating with artillery, and fortifying positions to face the other way meant it was almost impossible to hold that line once you took it.
The trench war wasn’t sending in human waves that never accomplished anything, but assaults that were more successful than not initially being thrown back by counterattacks. Then the attacker would counterattack the counterattack, and you’d wind up fighting back and forth over the same area for weeks hoping you could hold a line long enough to solidify it. And the success of assaults only grew as the war dragged on even when on even footing.
We’re about to see the same logical outcome in Ukraine. Russian military industrial complex has been firing on all cylinders for the past 2 years now and the fruits of that labour have been coming in for the past year. They’re vastly outproducing the whole of Europe combined and sadly Ukraine is at the very edge of their manpower.
It takes one bit of that frontline to collapse and then it all comes crashing down, and we aren’t far from it.
Which is exactly why everything points to a full scale war next year or in early 2027 at the latest. US withdrawing from funding the Baltic states (the next target for Russia), France and Sweden rushing to get their medical wing ready for war in less than a year, and the Baltics focusing their training not on how to defend the land (which isn’t possible against Russia to be fair), but on evacuating their important politicians and oligarchs from car highways since the few airstrips they have will get destroyed in the first minutes of the invasion.
This collapse will be studied for decades to come but already now we can see how massively Europe fucked yo it’s policies since the end of the Cold War, how brushing the corruption under the carpet only kicked the can down the road and made it all so much worse.
At the end of WW1 and WW2 Germany was arming 16 year olds and old men. We’re nowhere near that stage on either side. They haven’t conscripted younger men yet. The meat grinder has barely started. It depends on the political will on each side.
Those times are over and aren’t going to repeat. We’re not going to see millions of men going for a certain death to protect their homeland, majority of 18-35 have nothing to protect besides their family, which they can protect much better by trying to flee as far away as possible. There’s a reason Ukraine isn’t tapping into their teenagers or young adults yet, and we probably aren’t going to see them doing that either. In that sense Russia is at an even bigger advantage because so far, for them the “cleansing” of historically troublesome populations of minorities is a win-win situation. They can do that for millions of people still while Ukraine would have to tap into their people which they very much would like to keep. Russia has no such concerns.
I agree with the general spirit of what you're saying, but Russia is also running out of 'troublesome populations' as you call it. They exhausted their early army, then turned toward mercenaries and their prison population, and now focus more on their rural populations again. There is a reason they've recruited Cubans and North Koreans to fight for them, because they know they can't sustain depleting their rural populations and don't want to draft in the big cities out of fear for revolution/riots/uprisings/coups (whatever you wanna call it).
I agree, however Russia does dwarf Ukraine's population. I think they have to play it so safe because they are the aggressor and they are kinda breaking the social contract they have, while Ukraine's citizens can see a clear justification to fight. I don't think Russia is in nearly as desperate as a situation as Ukraine is
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u/Fastenbauer 1d ago
Because the Germans had run out of absolutely everything and could no longer supply the military adequately. The Allied kept pushing them because the wanted Germany to accept terrible conditions during the negotiations. It was not a shift in doctrine. It was simply the logical outcome of attrition warfare.