War is hard to watch—real war, that is, not the stuff of video games or action movies. The closer you get to combat, the more jarring it becomes. Death comes randomly. The noise is terrifying; the fear is stifling. And most people can’t bear to see what war actually does to the human body—how a brief instant can transform a living, breathing person into ugly scraps of flesh.

The fighting in Ukraine has, in many ways, transformed the nature of warfare. As many as 80 percent of battle casualties are now inflicted by drones, not machine guns, artillery, or missiles. That number is likely to be similar for armored vehicles and other equipment at the front. As NATO commanders scramble to adapt to the new technologies and ways of fighting, their old military doctrines are no longer worth the paper they’re written on.

War is hard to watch—real war, that is, not the stuff of video games or action movies. The closer you get to combat, the more jarring it becomes. Death comes randomly. The noise is terrifying; the fear is stifling. And most people can’t bear to see what war actually does to the human body—how a brief instant can transform a living, breathing person into ugly scraps of flesh.

The fighting in Ukraine has, in many ways, transformed the nature of warfare. As many as 80 percent of battle casualties are now inflicted by drones, not machine guns, artillery, or missiles. That number is likely to be similar for armored vehicles and other equipment at the front. As NATO commanders scramble to adapt to the new technologies and ways of fighting, their old military doctrines are no longer worth the paper they’re written on.

Yet the war has also revolutionized how we witness war. Since it started in February 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been an oddly intimate affair, flooding the world with unprecedented close-ups of the battlefield. This is the result of the wide use of two powerful technologies: the camera-equipped drone and the GoPro-style action camera. Drones offer startlingly clear views of battlefields and chart the final moments of flying munitions zeroing in on their targets. Bodycams bring the viewer directly into the action—sometimes too close for comfort. We used to talk about the “fog of war.” Now military planners, in Ukraine and beyond, are struggling coming to terms with the transparent........

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