The advent of drone technology and the amazing advances demonstrated by Ukrainian military units has the feel of déjà vu. Authors have filled the media universe with breathless commentary describing how drones have fundamentally altered modern ground warfare. Considering Carl von Clausewitz’s admonition that warfare changes constantly, readers should not be surprised. But professional soldiers and serious students of warfare should view the highly touted changes created by drones with skepticism; they are nothing we have not seen before. The success of drones has obscured the fact that their use needs to be considered, deeply studied, and then incorporated into combined arms theory.
Everything old is new again. After the introduction of the Gatling gun, and its evolution into the machine-gun, pundits heralded this weapon as the end of infantry. Clearly, that did not occur. There are many parallels between the institutional reaction to the machine-gun at the beginning of the last century and the reaction to drones today. During World War I, these initial reactions were all technical. The widespread employment of machine-guns negated the battlefield mobility that all armies assumed would exist, locking them into a stalemate that they believed only technology would overcome. The same initial reactions are resurfacing regarding the use of drones. In World War I, innovations such as the tank were meant to negate the effect of the machine-gun and restore battlefield mobility. But it wasn’t until armies revisited combined arms theory and integrated tanks, machine-guns, artillery, and other nascent technologies such as airpower that new equilibrium was achieved. By the end of World War II, automatic weapons were nearly ubiquitous on the battlefield, and yet the problem of battlefield mobility had been solved. Western militaries are not yet at the point where it is obvious how the conundrum posed by drones will be solved, but all should understand that it will be through integration of combat systems, rather than through a single technology or countermeasure.
Drone warfare is over a century old, with the first successful test of a remotely controlled aerial drone having been accomplished by the Royal Flying Corps in March 1917. There were sporadic advances made in guidance systems over the next century—think about torpedoes, antitank guided missiles, and rockets—and ironically, the latest innovation is a reversion to the use of optical fiber. Nonetheless, the point is that none of this is new. That said, the use of drones in Ukraine has prompted some wild predictions, some even foreseeing the end of the dominance of the main battle tank in modern warfare. Ukraine has had remarkable success with small first-person-view drones striking tanks from the air, and it’s easy to be mesmerized by the kill videos they produce. But the true situation becomes clearer when one begins to look at drones in the broader context of military and combined arms theory.
Recent concerns over the future of armored warfare have been fueled by reports from multinational exercises in Estonia last May. As part of the Exercise Hedgehog 2025, in Estonia, a small cadre of Ukrainian drone operators acting as enemy forces reportedly inflicted severe losses on a NATO formation. According to a Wall Street Journal article, approximately ten Ukrainian operators achieved the simulated destruction of nearly twenty armored vehicles over the course of a day. Having been on literally dozens of military exercises including major NATO deployments, the authors know that what actually happened needs to be understood in context. Since there is no public reporting of the exercise’s outcomes, most of us are obliged to take as given what the Wall Street Journal reported.
However, the Ukrainian participants are accustomed to battlefields where drone saturation is double that of the exercise. NATO forces, by contrast, rely on tactics that have not been forged in a similar crucible. If armored vehicles move in dense columns with limited concealment, infantry fail to disperse effectively, and routes are not adequately cleared by reconnaissance forces, this is the inevitable result. Designed to test readiness and interoperability, the exercise demonstrated how massed drone employment could disrupt poorly adapted forces. This last point is key, because the lesson from this exercise is that the Ukrainian participants employed tactics adapted for the modern, drone-saturated battlefield, while NATO forces have not been forced by the realities of war to do the same.
These reported results have been widely cited as evidence that drones now dominate the modern battlespace. A short internet search quickly turns up comments where analysts frequently claim that drones account for a majority of casualties in the Ukraine war, and recent British defense reviews have described drones as an essential component of land warfare. Ukrainian officials have echoed this assessment, emphasizing the transformative impact of battlefield technologies, and have expressed a willingness to share their experience with NATO partners. However, these conclusions, although valid, warrant caution. Drones generate significant tactical effects, but tactical success must be considered as part of the tactics/operations/strategy hierarchy. Recall that tactical success does not equate to strategic transformation. To borrow William Shakespeare’s phrase, it might be fair to say that drones offer “more light than heat.” Their main achievement on the battlefield has been to greatly restrict the mobility of both sides. In this respect, drones resemble submarines or antitank weapons: They may be effective at denying portions of the battlespace, but are incapable of controlling it. And like submarines and antitank weapons, drones operate within established military theory. They operate within existing paradigms rather than breaking them. Therefore, as argued in our book Not Dead: A Case for Tanks in the Modern Battlespace, they should be understood as an evolutionary, not revolutionary, development and their employment considered within the broader context of combined arms theory and practice.
From a mechanized warfare perspective, drones represent another antitank threat—one among many. Broad claims of the armored vehicle’s demise or, more specifically, the main battle tank’s obsolescence are familiar to those of us who have served in mechanized forces. Similar arguments accompanied the introduction of the Soviet AT-3 Sagger (9M14 Malyutka) missile, the tube-launched, optically-tracked, wire-guided (TOW) antitank systems, missile-armed attack helicopters, and even remotely delivered scatterable mines. Each new technology, in turn, posed serious challenges to crews and commanders; none rendered the tank or other armored vehicles obsolete.
Drones have undoubtedly increased the threat environment for all armored forces. The threat becomes particularly acute when crews are poorly trained or, perhaps worse, improperly employed. But this increased threat does not constitute a fundamental change in how armored vehicles in general—and tanks in particular—are employed. Throughout history, new technologies have routinely influenced military tactics, doctrine, and force structure, pushing the advantage from one weapon system to another. But no technology has replaced the tenets of combined arms warfare themselves. Drones, as the latest innovation du jour, integrate readily into combined arms teams, but they do not substitute for armor’s shock action, infantry’s ability to hold ground, engineers’ persistent mobility and countermobility functions, or artillery’s sustained ability to suppress. Nor can drones seize, control, or retain terrain. Their full potential will only be realized through combined arms integration, which has not yet been fully achieved. Rather than rushing to integrate drones into NATO formations, the real work is now to determine how to integrate them into the combined arms team to maximize their effect, as well as how to counter their abilities to restore battlefield mobility. All militaries need to perform this necessary doctrinal work in order to adapt current tactics to the rapid spread of this emerging technology.
Ukraine’s innovative use of drones has garnered considerable worldwide attention. That said, for all their successes, drones have produced limited strategic effect—for either side. Rather than restoring maneuver in pursuit of achieving operational and strategic objectives, widespread drone employment by both sides has done the opposite. It has contributed to a static, attritional battlefield reminiscent of 1916. History suggests that such stalemates are broken not by aerial bombardment—manned or unmanned. Instead, breakthroughs have been achieved by the rapid deployment of combat power—by restoring mobility through armored forces. While drones are inexpensive relative to tanks and armored forces, their proliferation has arguably diverted resources from mobile forces capable of decisive action.
Drones have advanced a long way in a short time, but even this trajectory is not new. World War II began with the combatants employing cloth-covered biplanes and ended six years later with the advent of jet aircraft. There is no question that drones are valuable and increasingly important tools, but their limitations are too often overlooked. Like the machine-gun in World War I, they pose a tactical conundrum that must be solved to restore mobility to the battlespace. But they augment existing capabilities rather than replacing them. Flooding the battlespace with drones may delay defeat, but victory remains dependent on offensive action.
Serving military leaders and instructors, as we have argued elsewhere, need to gain better understandings of tactics, how they are taught, and what impacts these better tactics could have in the battlespace. Allow us to end with some key lessons: Numbers are important, but the size of the forces employed is far less decisive than how they are employed; any new technology—or the new application of old technology—may seem revolutionary, but it rarely is; and technical capabilities of weapons are important but pale in comparison to the human factors of leadership, skill, tactics, and training.
Remember, skill, aggression, and smart tactics will always overcome technology.
Retired Colonel Charles S. Oliviero served over thirty years and commanded Canada’s only tank regiment. He taught history and strategy at Norwich University and the Royal Military College and is the author of two novels and six of books on leadership, strategy, tactics, and military theory including Strategia: A Primer on Theory and Strategy for Students of War and Praxis Tacticum: The Art, Science and Practice of Military Tactics.
Retired Lieutenant-Colonel Phil Halton served thirty years and is the author of six books, including Blood Washing Blood: Afghanistan’s Hundred-Year War and (with Charles Oliviero) Dangerous Lessons: The Art and Science of Teaching Tactics. He holds two graduate degrees and is currently completing a PhD.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image: Ukrainian first-person-view drone equipped with with RPG-7 round (credit: armyinform.com.ua)
