All non-drone militaries are now obsolete - Asia Times
AI Analysis
The article argues that drone warfare has fundamentally altered modern conflict, rendering traditional military forces increasingly obsolete. Ukraine's experience demonstrates the decisive impact of drones, inflicting disproportionate casualties on Russian forces with minimal territorial loss. The author predicts rapid advancements in AI-directed drone swarms will further accelerate this shift.
Key Takeaways
- Ukraine's drone usage has increased dramatically, from a few thousand to 60,000 drones per day.
- Drones are estimated to cause approximately 96% of casualties inflicted on the Russian army in Ukraine.
- The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020) was an earlier example of drones proving decisive in conflict.
- Advancements in battery technology and AI are enabling more sophisticated and autonomous drone operations.
- The role of traditional infantry is diminishing, with soldiers increasingly confined to defensive positions due to the threat of drone attacks.
Why It Matters
This signals a paradigm shift in military strategy, necessitating rapid investment in counter-drone technologies and the development of drone-centric warfare capabilities. Nations failing to adapt risk significant disadvantages in future conflicts. The increasing accessibility and effectiveness of drones democratizes warfare, potentially empowering non-state actors.
All non-drone militaries are now obsolete - Asia Times
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Drones are the future of war. Image: YouTube Screengrab
Drone warfare has been a fascination of mine for a very long time. When I read Daphne du Maurier’s “ The Birds” as a kid, I imagined what would happen if the attacking swarms were mechanical birds, controlled with artificial intelligence (AI).
When I read about Japanese kamikazes in WWII, I reasoned that someday we’d have drones do the same. In 2013, I wrote a post about the advent of drone warfare that’s still probably the most prophetic thing I’ve ever written.
It simply made sense that if we could create AI-controlled swarms of exploding artificial insects, then as long as they had enough battery power to sustain themselves over long flights, they’d be an unstoppable weapon.
Thirteen years later, my imagination has mostly become reality. Batteries have gotten good and cheap enough to sustain long drone flights, and AI has gotten good enough to guide drones to their targets (and, often, to select the targets in the first place). All we need now to fulfill my vision is for AI to start autonomously directing large numbers of drones in concert. That’s coming very soon.
The Ukraine war isn’t the first war in which drones are proving decisive — that would be the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020— but it’s the war in which drones have truly come into their own.
Ukraine’s intensive use of drones has allowed them to inflict casualty rates as high as 5 to 1 on the Russian army in recent months, while giving up little or no territory. Around 96% of those casualties are estimated to be caused by drones. In just the past year, Ukraine went from using just a few thousand FPV drones per day to using around 60,000.
You can read lots of stories about how drones represent a revolution in military affairs; the recent Carnegie Endowment piece is a good one, as is the slightly older one by the Army University Press. But to really viscerally understand how deeply things have changed, you have to watch videos from the war.
Here is a montage of drone strikes in Ukraine, including a terrifying final sequence where a drone flies into a Russian barracks and destroys it. It’s difficult stuff to watch, but if you want to understand the changes that have come to modern warfare, you have to see it.
The age of the human infantryman is rapidly drawing to a close. Simply surviving an FPV drone attack has become an almost impossible task for soldiers on the battlefield.
The drone cordon has not yet become so airtight that territory can be held without humans, but these humans’ job is to hide out in dugouts for months at a time alone or in tiny groups, terrified of emerging above ground lest they be instantly droned. And ground robots are developing very quickly, to the point where assaults can sometimes be conducted without humans on th