The unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, first appeared on the battlefield during World War II, when the Germans used a small number of radio-controlled aircraft as offensive weapons. The United States began employing drones for military surveillance and reconnaissance during the Vietnam War, but not until Operation Desert Storm, with the advent of a new suite of precision weapons, were drones capable of making significant tactical contributions.
Drones acquired strategic significance during the Global War on Terror of the early twenty-first century, as the result of new capabilities and new targets. The equipping of American drones with the Hellfire missile in February 2001 gave the United States an armed platform that could monitor targets in real time and stay on station for hours at a time without the risk of losing a pilot. The migration of al-Qaeda extremists from Afghanistan to Pakistan after the fall of the Taliban produced suitable targets. The Pakistani government refused to allow American military forces to operate on their territory, and after an initial period of cooperation it lost interest in helping the Americans capture al-Qaeda members. Hellfire strikes overcame these obstacles and had the added advantage of secrecy, which was beneficial for both operational and political reasons.
The first series of American drone strikes in Pakistan killed many of the intended targets. The tactical effectiveness of the drone strikes sank drastically, however, once the enemy learned the characteristics of the new platform and initiated countermeasures. What may have seemed a quantum leap initially would come to be seen as a modest step.
The Obama administration nevertheless chose to make armed drones the center of its counterterrorism strategy. Obama viewed drones as an excellent alternative to costly counterinsurgency campaigns, one that could achieve results at a much lower cost while still demonstrating presidential toughness. Under Obama, drone strikes surged in Pakistan and Yemen. Most of the strikes eliminated low-level fighters, and hence had minimal strategic consequences. The strategic ineffectiveness of the drones, along with reports of civilian casualties caused by drone strikes, would prevent the use of drones in subsequent conflict zones like Libya and Syria.
The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have seen the proliferation of new drones with new capabilities. The Ukrainians and Russians had been forced to rely especially heavily on drones because of the dangers that advanced antiaircraft defenses posed to manned aircraft. Although the details of some these drones remain hidden, publicly available reports have provided important insights into their tactical and strategic effects. Many of the drones serve the same basic functions as previous drones—surveillance, reconnaissance, and missile launching—but on a much larger scale. Combatants use fleets of drones to obtain live video feeds of opposing forces, and employ ever-evolving jamming techniques and anti-drone weapons to thwart the enemy’s drones.
In the Ukraine War, armed drones have destroyed substantial numbers of trucks and naval vessels. The relatively large size of these drones, however, have made them easy targets for anti-drone weapons, and hence they have become scarcer over time. Most of the drones now in use are smaller and serve mainly to spot targets for destruction by artillery, missiles, or ground attack. Their effectiveness in pinpointing such targets has done much to frustrate the movement of combat vehicles and supply trucks. This tactical effectiveness has yielded strategic results, by thwarting large Russian and Ukrainian ground offensives.
For now, at least, the drone has strengthened firepower and defense, at the expense of mobility and offense. The advent of the machine gun in the early twentieth century had much the same effect. In both wars, the combatants responded in the same way to the technological change—by reducing their vulnerability through cover and concealment. It is for this reason that the static warfare in Ukraine today is so reminiscent of the war on the eastern front from 1914 to 1918.
America’s early victories in the information age—the Persian Gulf War, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the drone war in Pakistan—suggested that technology had brought an end to prolonged wars of attrition, in which each side bled the other heavily. The subsequent insurgent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, revealed that technological advantages could be reduced through low-intensity warfare. The Ukraine War is now showing that America’s adversaries have found ways to negate technological advantages in high-intensity warfare by fielding comparable technologies, including not only drones but also antiaircraft weapons systems, precision munitions, and electronic warfare. More than two years of bloody attrition, with casualties on the Ukrainian side nearly equaling those on the Russian side, is the sorrowful consequence.
The outcome of the Ukraine War seems certain to hinge on the same factors as the outcome of World War I—the ability of one side to outlast the other in terms of military manpower and economic production. In this regard, it would also resemble the American Civil War and the final years of World War II. And hence it would not resemble the early Napoleonic wars or the early Axis victories of World War II when new methods of mobile warfare permitted the rapid encirclement and destruction of the enemy. The drone and other technological advances, like prior advances in aviation and weaponry and communications, have improved the ability of ground forces to fight, but have not changed the centrality of ground forces in determining the ultimate outcome.
