Roland Oliphant
The war in Ukraine is stuck in stalemate. Russian forces are making incremental advances at horrific cost. The Ukrainians are being forced back inch by inch. But neither is about to be defeated.
The cause of the deadlock is simple: drone war.
As Valery Zaluzhny, the former commander of Ukraine’s armed forces and its current ambassador to London, wrote last week, drones account for about 80 per cent of casualties and have created a “kill zone” 20km wide where soldiers are vulnerable to deadly attack.
This drone-patrolled “No Man’s Land” has brought Great War-style stasis to the frontline.
So the race is on to find a weapon that can punch through it. The prize could be victory itself. Ukraine, says Zaluzhny, must “escape the positional cul-de-sac before our adversaries do”.
In the First World War, barbed wire, machine guns and massed artillery made operational manoeuvre – the breakthrough and defeat of an enemy – almost impossible. The answer in 1916 was the tank, a mechanised, armoured vehicle that at least provided soldiers with the means to cross the kill zone and engage the enemy.
The new machines were not a silver bullet. When they first lumbered into action on the Somme, many broke down. (Indeed, they really came into their own only two decades later, when armies worked out how to use them alongside attack aircraft and radio.) But today, it is almost impossible to think of wars being fought without them.
And in Ukraine, commanders from both sides are asking what an equivalent breakthrough technology might look like today. Has it even been imagined yet? And who will build it first? As in the First World War, the primary problem is one of protection: in today’s case, defeating the overhead drone threat so forces can mass together and safely cross No Man’s Land.
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