Attrition warfare
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Attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel, materiel, and morale. The word attrition comes from the Latin root atterere, meaning "to rub against", similar to the "grinding down" of the opponent's forces in attrition warfare.
The Battle of Verdun resulted in over 700,000 casualties.
Ukrainian soldier in a trench during the Battle of Bakhmut. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the Russo-Ukrainian War since February 2022.
Approximately 750,000 soldiers were killed over four years during the American Civil War.
Trench warfare
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Trench warfare is a type of land warfare using occupied lines largely comprising military trenches, in which combatants are well-protected from the enemy's small arms fire and are substantially sheltered from artillery. It became archetypically associated with World War I (1914–1918), when the Race to the Sea rapidly expanded trench use on the Western Front starting in September 1914.
British (upper) and German (lower) frontline trenches, 1916
German soldiers of the 11th Reserve Hussar Regiment fighting from a trench, on the Western Front, 1916
Plan of Ruapekapeka Pā, an elaborate and heavily fortified Ngāpuhi innovation, which James Belich has argued laid the groundwork for or essentially invented modern trench warfare.
Trenches at the Siege of Vicksburg 1863