The Ukraine War has been dubbed the first drone war—and the first “StarLink War”—considering the publicly apparent role of advanced technologies in the conflict. However, the issue is what the Ukraine War might teach us about the future of military power. More specifically, is the Ukraine War a watershed moment, after which unmanned, distributed technologies will dominate the battlefield? Or is it a remarkably public display of a broader set of evolutions in the character of warfare?
A clear-eyed assessment of the battlefield realities in Ukraine demonstrates that drones are largely in continuity with the development of military capabilities coherently understood since the late 19th century. Their use in Ukraine is notable, simply because they carry to maturation concepts under long-term historical development. By generating a widespread reconnaissance-strike complex, drones in Ukraine allow both Ukraine and Russia to fight in a truly systemic manner, bringing to fruition the logic of the modern battlefield. There is much to learn from the Ukrainian case—and those that learn its lessons are likely to gain military power. But its lessons are primarily intellectual, not technical or material.
Ukraine has held off the Russian onslaught through a combination of tactical skill and operational competence. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russia held every military advantage. It had a larger, more sophisticated combat force, greater reserves, more ammunition, more numerous and more advanced armored vehicles, and an air force capable of prosecuting a large-scale strike campaign across Ukraine’s strategic depth. Russia’s initial campaign plan leveraged every one of these advantages. Russia sought to execute a large-scale country-wide bombardment followed up by a swift ground invasion that would seize and hold cities within days. The vaunted Russian paratroopers would deliver the coup de grace, hitting Kyiv within 24 hours of the initial attack, allowing Russian armored formations from Belarus to enter the city in force by Saturday, February 26, 2022. Had this happened as planned, the Ukrainian government may well have collapsed. Indeed, it very nearly did. Had Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces not held Hostomel Airport for a crucial few hours on February 24, Russia would have smashed into the capital. Subsequently, it took a tenacious, well-executed defense of Kyiv’s outskirts, combined with resistance in other major cities to Kyiv’s east, to spoil the Russian plan.
Modern military history demonstrates that, barring a decisive initial victory, most wars settle into a long-term positional rhythm, broken only by societal collapse or a well-designed, well-executed series of offensives over months or years. The Great War is paradigmatic in this case. The initial German punch failed to encircle and destroy the French armies, triggering a race to the Channel that ultimately generated a positional stalemate. The Eastern Front had more movement, but even the Brusilov Offensive, the most successful Russian offensive of the war, lacked the momentum to trigger a strategic collapse, and ultimately bled Russia white. The Second World War also had positional characteristics, despite the dominance of enormous tank battles in the popular imagination. The Soviet General Staff’s masterstrokes at Stalingrad and Kursk took months of careful preparation, and brutal breakthrough battles. The exceptions—Israel’s smashing victories in 1967 and 1973—prove the rule. After all, just a year before the Yom Kippur War, the North Vietnamese Army launched an enormous conventional offensive against South Vietnam, which ultimately failed to generate a strategic breakthrough at high cost.
The necessity of the breakthrough battle stems from changes in the character of war that began in the mid-19th century. Indirect fire artillery combined with rail-based long-range transportation and telegraphy to expand the battlespace in width and depth. This necessitated a new military logic that progressed beyond the linear tactical model that dominated early modern warfare, and which Napoleon ultimately perfected. No longer could campaigns be won with a single decisive engagement—Austerlitz was both the apex and the final instance of an age in warfare.
Moreover, the development of the modern bureaucratic state depersonalized military leadership. It is no coincidence that the final personalized battles of the 19th century occurred at the creation of the German Empire, which marked the final ascendance of bureaucratic governance and the destruction of the chivalric model that dominated from the 10th century. Campaigns had to be won over time in a series of engagements, individually disconnected, but made whole through a coherent strategic scheme.
The Great War’s battlefield logic, defined by indirect fire artillery and the need to accumulate reserves for a breakthrough of operational significance, still holds true today, and held true despite the apparent distinctions of combined-arms mechanized maneuver warfare—after all, a tank is a mobile artillery piece, while an aircraft-dropped bomb serves the same purpose as a heavy artillery shell. The logic is identical: winning a campaign requires coordinating engagements across space and time to collapse the enemy systemically, both in physical terms by breaking through defensive lines, and in intellectual terms by overwhelming adversary processing capacity. Space-based assets, long-range precision-guided missiles, and stealth aircraft are simply variations on a theme.
This helps us better understand what we see in Ukraine. Both Ukraine and Russia are undergoing a process of military adaptation akin to that of the Great War. Drones employed en masse, linked to an effective data processing system and a distributed fires network, create an increasingly mature reconnaissance-strike complex. The term originates in Soviet military theory, denoting a system that combines long-range sensors and precision weapons to attack the enemy’s operational depth. Its tactical cousin, a reconnaissance-fires complex, is on display in Ukraine today. In reality, however, these two systems blend into each other, since attacking the enemy at depth on the modern battlefield, replete with sensors and disruption mechanisms, and conducted at scale, requires harmonizing tactical and operational fires employment. Put simply, the close fight and the deep fight must have a synergy to them—a reality that U.S. operational artists understood when developing Airland Battle and Follow-On Forces Attack, and which the most talented of Soviet theorists began to grasp in the early 1920s.
Drones are an integral element of Russian and Ukrainian reconnaissance-strike complexes, since they provide an enormous amount of data and, thereby allow the commander to identify and prioritize targets more efficiently, if he has a fast enough integration and analysis system to separate extraneous information from crucial reconnaissance. The “stalemate” we see on the battlefield today stems from the combination of drone-artillery usage and mine fields. Ukraine and Russia both lack the manpower and materiel for a massive breakthrough punch––Ukraine because of Western drip-feeding of materiel; Russia because of the political choice to backfill units that suffer atrocious losses rather than accumulating a real reserve. The side that properly harmonizes the close and deep fight, and leverages capabilities to ultimately facilitate a breakthrough and exploitation, will be the victor.
Mass employment of drones, particularly at the tactical level, has indicated an evolution in the character of combat. But its logic remains fundamentally identical to that of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An Imperial German artillery commander would be shocked at the amount of data provided to the modern Ukrainian battery, but he would largely understand the tactical logic of engagement decisions.
Air-naval combat has also shown the logic of reconnaissance-strike complexes quite unmistakably since the early 20th century. The difference is the ocean’s vastness complicates the reconnaissance problem. Naval history is replete with instances of “encounter battles,” engagements both sides stumble into by virtue of scouting limitations, but that nevertheless decide the broader campaign. Moreover, even when one side chooses to fight, as the U.S. did at Midway in 1942, far more than half the problem was finding the enemy. The World War’s Mediterranean campaign provides a useful example of the characteristics a mature scouting complex generates: both the British and Germans struggled to break into mutually-competitive anti-access networks because ground-based aviation, considering technical realities, could mass against an enemy surface group with relative speed. The Cold War’s HAYSTACK and UPTIDE programs—U.S. Navy attempts to increase Soviet detection time and allow American carrier groups to launch strikes on advancing Soviet forces in central Europe—also demonstrated this logic.
Ukraine has waged a creative air-naval campaign to break Russia’s hold on the Black Sea and undermine its control of Crimea. Its spectacular employment of naval drones does have a programmatic implication for other navies: in the littorals or enclosed seas, cheap naval drones can be used to hit isolated enemy targets. However, Ukrainian naval drones are only the final element of a much broader system, which includes an air, and likely space-based, reconnaissance network, supplemented with human sources, a concerted strike campaign executed by standard long-range missiles and attack aircraft, special operations forces sabotage actions, and most critically, a coherent operational design that has broken apart the Russian air defense network. Combat lessons must always be put in their broader context. Otherwise, much like on land, supposed implications can be badly misleading.
The U.S. military and allied militaries should undoubtedly procure more drones of all types, an objective for which the U.S.’ insufficiently developed industrial base is woefully and dangerously unprepared. But they cannot forget that the baseline logic of combat remains relatively fixed and has been for just over a century.
Seth Cropsey is president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy Undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of Mayday and Seablindness.
