More people are
becoming aware of just how much warfare has changed, and also how much nations
that have not adopted to modern drone strategy and tactics are being left behind
very quickly.
“I
listened to General David Petraeus this week say something that stopped me in
my tracks: “Combined arms cannot survive. Tanks can’t survive on this
battlefield.”
This
isn’t a blogger’s hot take. This is the man who commanded US Central Command,
ran the surge in Iraq, and led NATO forces in Afghanistan — telling us that the
tactical grammar of warfare since 1945 has just been rewritten, in real time,
in the fields of Donetsk. Here’s why he’s right, and why Ukraine’s genius was
born entirely of necessity…
…For
a century, the logic of land warfare was settled doctrine. Tanks punched holes.
Infantry and infantry fighting vehicles poured through them. Artillery cleared
the way and covered the flanks. Air power sealed the deal. This was combined
arms — the method that took Berlin in 1945, drove Iraq from Kuwait in 1991, and
toppled Baghdad in 2003. Every serious army on Earth built itself around it.
General
David Petraeus — four stars, former CIA Director, the man who literally
co-authored the standard history of warfare since 1945 — has now said, plainly,
that this era is over. In a recent interview, Petraeus described how the war
began in 2022 as textbook combined arms, with Russian armor columns pushing on
Kyiv and Ukraine retaking ground the same way that autumn. But something
changed. Cheap drones, in overwhelming numbers, turned the battlefield into
what he calls a death zone — a zone artillery can barely enter before being
forced to withdraw or die, a zone where, in his words, tanks simply cannot
survive.
The
numbers back him up in a way that should unsettle every general staff in the
world. Reporting this year found that the drone kill zone along the front has
widened to roughly 50 kilometers — not the ten or fifteen originally estimated,
but fifty, thick with fiber-optic-tethered drones immune to jamming. Some
Russian soldiers, according to their own military bloggers, now survive only
twenty to thirty-five minutes once they cross into forward positions. And the
result is a front line that barely moves at all: the US-based Center for
Strategic and International Studies assessed that Russia’s advance on the
transport hub of Pokrovsk — fought over for nearly two years — was slower than
the Allied advance during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. That is not a
footnote. That is one of the bloodiest and most static campaigns in human
history being used as the modern benchmark, and Russia still came in slower.[1]
This is correct.
The rate of battlefield progress has drastically slowed down because of drone
warfare. There have been some good commentators who have been noting the
changes in drone use on the battlefield for several years now. Drones have
replaced artillery as the Queen of the Battlefield, as one put it. They have
completely changed how war is fought. And nations which have not invested in
large quantities of cheap and effective drones, and trained their militaries in
how to use them, are now being left behind by those that have. Even if they
have what is considered a powerful military in conventional terms.
Drones are
quick and easy to produce, are capable of great ranges, and have turned the
rear of the army itself into a kill zone, which has greatly enlarged the
battlefield. This has made logistics much harder and it has also made the
battlefield more dangerous for conventional troops. To be sure, Russia is
winning against Ukraine, but only because it was able to out produce Ukraine's
drone output. But the effectiveness of drones on both sides has made this a
very slow war. Russia is slowly taking ground, but at great cost, because
Ukraine is a major producer of cheap effective drones as well.
The drone is
effectively having the same impact that machine guns + artillery did in WW1, it has
completely changed how infantry can fight. Or more to point, how they cannot fight
anymore in the same way. It is no longer effective to send your troops in behind
the tanks and other armoured vehicles. Drones are just too good at taking both
the vehicles and the men out. Drones are also cheaper than tanks, jets, and
other military equipment, which means that they can be produced quickly and in
large numbers. This also means that less powerful nations can now
counterbalance countries that have invested billions into more expensive
equipment, and have not adapted to changes in technology.
This is also
why the US has lost in Iran. The Iranians can produce some of the best drones
in the world in large numbers, and they are able to use them to effectively
stop any possible invasion force from the US and Israel. They can use them to
counter even advanced jets, and, the most scary thing for us all, they can use
them to annihilate the energy infrastructure in the region which would crash
the world economy. Tech worth a few thousand dollars can do billions of dollars
in damage. This is a terrifying situation for the world. And one we cannot
change at the moment.
The Iranians
have invested in these drones for years, and have many more than Israel or
America, who have focused on classic trinitarian forces (navy, air force, and
army) with expensive equipment, rather than cheap tech like this. While the US
was building F-35's with limited ability, their enemies were building tens of
thousands of drones for a fraction of the price.
This is why
we are seeing the US military fail in the region. Military tech has massively
changed, and because of its funding structures it has been slow to adapt. After
all, if you cut funding to tank building you undermine a congressman's local
economy and seat in congress as a result. This sort of pork barrelling has
effected all western countries in varied ways, and limits our ability to adapt
quickly to developments in modern warfare.
That many
westerns are only becoming aware of this now, when this situation has been
known by others for years, just highlights this problem. Westerners still think
in terms of how war was fought in the 80's. They think of badass pilots in jets
and helicopters. But war has massively changed, and as a result the battlefield
needs a very different approach.
The infantry
man is facing now what the army soldier faced in WW1, the battlefield is no
man's land again.
List of
References
[1]
Lim Tean
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