Charles S. Oliviero and Phil Halton
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.
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