Now I don’t doubt we’ll be seeing incremental changes here, and more uses of drones and autonomy, but I don’t think this is going to rewrite the rules of war anytime soon.
Drones already rewrote the rules of warfare. The recent invasion of Ukraine would have gone very differently without drones. Primary effect they are having is on sensors/surveillance; every assault is seen building up miles before it reaches the front line, and artillery is targeted on it in real time. Big buff to artillery and big nerf to armored assaults.
Secondary effect is kamikaze drones—now the #1 weapon by monthly kills maybe, or maybe #2 after artillery. It says a lot that I’m not even sure which is doing more killing now, since artillery is far and away the obvious contender for a static conflict. Even ww2 which was mobile saw most deaths from artillery I think.
Special mention to naval and long-range drones (bayraktar, shahed, etc.) which are not exactly revolutionizing anything but which are having a noticeable effect.
All in all I think yes the war has been revolutionized by drones. But the biggest changes are yet to come.
Elaborating: Current assault tactics (pioneered by Wagner) involve sending in a steady stream of small (<10-man) teams to go forward & get killed, so that enemy positions are revealed to overhead drones and can be destroyed by artillery and other drones. This sort of constant piecemeal infantry pressure is night and day different from the armored columns we saw in Desert Storm and 2003 iraq invasion and early 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
And it’s also different from the bombardment + human wave assaults from previous static wars like WW1 and Korea and Iran-Iraq.
I believe it will, but not in the way described here. What drones facilitate is terrorism, and maybe assassinations. If developed to fruition, they would “rewrite the rules” of irregular, asymmetric warfare.
To elaborate, it’s pretty easy to kill someone important if you are willing to be arrested/executed afterwards; the main thing a suicide drone might enable is killing someone important and being able to escape afterwards. This could already be done with dupes, like the 2017 killing of Kim Jong-nam, but I think the nerve agent involved was more expensive than a handmade gun.
Now I don’t doubt we’ll be seeing incremental changes here, and more uses of drones and autonomy, but I don’t think this is going to rewrite the rules of war anytime soon.
Drones already rewrote the rules of warfare. The recent invasion of Ukraine would have gone very differently without drones. Primary effect they are having is on sensors/surveillance; every assault is seen building up miles before it reaches the front line, and artillery is targeted on it in real time. Big buff to artillery and big nerf to armored assaults.
Secondary effect is kamikaze drones—now the #1 weapon by monthly kills maybe, or maybe #2 after artillery. It says a lot that I’m not even sure which is doing more killing now, since artillery is far and away the obvious contender for a static conflict. Even ww2 which was mobile saw most deaths from artillery I think.
Special mention to naval and long-range drones (bayraktar, shahed, etc.) which are not exactly revolutionizing anything but which are having a noticeable effect.
All in all I think yes the war has been revolutionized by drones. But the biggest changes are yet to come.
Elaborating: Current assault tactics (pioneered by Wagner) involve sending in a steady stream of small (<10-man) teams to go forward & get killed, so that enemy positions are revealed to overhead drones and can be destroyed by artillery and other drones. This sort of constant piecemeal infantry pressure is night and day different from the armored columns we saw in Desert Storm and 2003 iraq invasion and early 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
And it’s also different from the bombardment + human wave assaults from previous static wars like WW1 and Korea and Iran-Iraq.
I believe it will, but not in the way described here. What drones facilitate is terrorism, and maybe assassinations. If developed to fruition, they would “rewrite the rules” of irregular, asymmetric warfare.
What is an example of a terrorist attack drones enable where with the same cost and effort terrorists couldn’t do something similar already?
To elaborate, it’s pretty easy to kill someone important if you are willing to be arrested/executed afterwards; the main thing a suicide drone might enable is killing someone important and being able to escape afterwards. This could already be done with dupes, like the 2017 killing of Kim Jong-nam, but I think the nerve agent involved was more expensive than a handmade gun.
Ok, that makes sense, targeted killings from a distance greater than a sniper rifle does seem like a good choice for a drone.