The war in Ukraine has now exceeded the first world war in duration. And while the comparison between these two conflicts is imperfect, it is becoming difficult to ignore.

Some of the similarities are obvious. At the tactical level, the conflict in Ukraine has witnessed the return of artillery as the dominant arm of battle.

During much of the first year of the war, artillery was responsible for the vast majority of casualties. Although drones have since transformed the battlefield, artillery remains indispensable to both sides.

Equally striking has been the return of extensive trench systems. Not since the Iran-Iraq war, which was fought between 1980 and 1988, has a major interstate conflict depended so heavily upon field fortifications and prepared positions such as trenches, concrete obstacles and belts of barbed wire.

Large-scale manoeuvre has given way to attritional combat measured in hundreds of metres rather than tens of kilometres.

Yet the deeper similarities lie not in trenches or artillery, but in the underlying logic of the war itself. Like the first world war, the conflict in Ukraine has become a contest of endurance: manpower, industrial capacity, economic resilience and political will.

These factors, rather than any individual weapons system, are likely to determine its eventual outcome. Of these, the most important is manpower.

Broadly comparable losses

During the first world war,........

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