The Drone Wars
If you think of war, in its infancy, as hand-to-hand combat, you've thought of infantry. If you think of war as throwing things, you've thought of artillery. And if you think warhorses, you've got cavalry. These are the classic forms of war, which can still be used theoretically.
Around 1830, Carl von Clausewitz said “An engagement consists of two essentially different components: the destructive power of firearms, and hand-to-hand, or individual, combat. Artillery is effective only through the destructive power of fire; cavalry only by way of individual combat; infantry by both these means.” This gives us a very broad sense of warfighting to this day. You have to move stuff through space, violently, and that still comes down to individual combat at the end of the day. As Clausewitz said in his five rules,
- “Infantry is the most independent of the arms.
- Artillery has no independence.
- When one or more arms are combined, infantry is the most important of them.
- Cavalry is the most easily dispensable arm.
- A combination of all three confers the greatest strength.”
With this as an extremely rough and effectively ancient theoretical basis, we can discuss what drones are, in the modern context. In short, I don't know, and modern militaries don't either. But we're figuring it out.
What Is Drone (Baby Don't Hurt Me)
What I mean by drones is the smaller, essentially consumer, drones, not the big ones like Shaheds. I'm talking Mavics with munitions. Deadly DJIs. These are usually four or eight bladed and carry small payloads. They can be autonomous, semiautonomous, or first-person operated. They can run wirelessly or wired (fiber-optics). I first saw these drones at an Indian wedding around 2015, but now they're ubiquitous in the “blood-dimmed tide” loosed upon the world. They are consumer technology consuming bodies, constantly now.
These small drones constantly terrorize Palestinian civilians, making daily life intolerable, and are a constant presence across the Ukraine, making massed formations impossible. They have fundamentally changed warfare, but not the fundamentals of war. War is still man throwing things at other man, and drones are just another thing to throw.
At one level, a drone is like an artillery piece, that is, it can carry a mortar. At another level, it is like cavalry, in that “Cavalry increases the mobility of an army” (Clausewitz), and drones are far more maneuverable than artillery. At yet another level, First-Person-Viewer drones are like infantry, in that they can engage in ‘eye-to-hand’ combat at a distance. As you can see, drones combine elements of all three classic forms of arms with their own unique qualities.
How Drones Are Like Infantry
FPV (first-person viewer) drones, for example, project someone wearing a headset through the drone, making them flying infantry. You might retort, yeah, but they don't die like infantry, but they do. Today, both the Russian and Ukrainian militaries hunt drone operators specifically. As Stanislav Buniatov of the Aidar Battalion (Ukraine) said (via Events In Ukraine),
Once again, I want to stress the primary importance of destroying enemy UAV crews. Only a fool cannot see the impact they currently have on both defense and offense. Overall, the trend in the use of high-precision weapons looks very strange. Command is willing to spend HIMARS on enemy infantry concentrations of 30–50 people, but considers it “inappropriate” to target an FPV crew, which in a week can strike about the same number of our infantry or cut off logistics, leading to enemy advances.
By contrast, the enemy considers UAV crews a priority target and, in addition to standard means, regularly directs aviation against ours.
Note that both sides tend to complain about their side a lot (as you'll see). So while Buniatov complains that Ukraine doesn't target drone operators enough, they actually do seem to prioritize them. Ukraine has gamified war, and its e-Points system now rewards killing drone pilots more than tanks.
Ukrainian units now earn 15 points for wounding a drone pilot and 25 for eliminating them, said Maj. Robert "Magyar" Brovdi, the new commander of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, in a video address on June 12.
Tank kills, which previously earned 40 points, now bring in only eight points for Ukrainian units. Destroying multiple launch rocket systems, which could have earned up to 50 points, now net Ukrainian pilots only as many as 10 points.
"We need to stimulate pilots to orient themselves toward destroying personnel," Brovdi, who also founded the Ukrainian marine corps UAV strike unit Magyar Birds, said in the video.
What's the prize in this gamified system? More drones. You can't say that drones are not central to warfighting on both sides, and you can't say that drone operators are not in the line of fire. They are like infantry in this way, but not in other way.
How Drones Are Like Artillery
Infantry can operate on its own and occupy land. Clausewitz says that infantry all the functions of war are inseparably united in infantry and can only be reassembled in the aggregate by combined arms. In a combined arms battle, drones are often used more like artillery, just more targeted and accurate, albeit less destructive. Hence the Ukrainian military analyst Officer (via Events In Ukraine) likens them to ‘auxiliary mortar teams,’ ie artillery. Officer said,
Recently, one of the enemy’s experienced UAV units came into our sector, and we almost immediately noticed an interesting tactic in their use of FPV drones: they actively target our runways, conduct reconnaissance (including with optical drones), pinpoint the positions of our pilots, and aggressively harass us with radio-controlled drones. Meanwhile, around the perimeter of the position, four optical drones take up positions for rapid strikes if anyone emerges from a dugout.
This is exactly what I was talking about: coordinated tactical actions and creative approaches to drone deployment—something we sorely lack (with the exception of experienced units). Right now, most UAV units functionally resemble something closer to auxiliary mortar teams rather than independent combat elements capable of conducting operations on their own.
In this sense, drone teams are like Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad mortar teams, which pop-up in Gaza to harry the IOF forces and then withdraw. But whereas “artillery intensifies firepower; it is the most destructive of the arms” (Clausewitz), drones—even in swarms—are among the least destructive weapons on the field. In that sense it is more like cavalry, highly mobile. Indeed, you can see this from Officer's own description, where drone teams are doing reconnaissance, staking out the perimeter, and then rapidly flanking.
How Drones Are Like Cavalry
Clausewitz called cavalry the most dispensible form of arms, and you can see this in the Ukraine. Ukraine has used drones to audaciously attack Russia deep in its rear (after smuggling them via trucks and releasing them) just as Russia can send drone ‘motherships’ deep into Ukraine, but none of this can move the needle much on its own. Ukraine's relative lack of artillery cannot be overcome with drones, and their lack of infantry even less so. Artillery remains the god of war, men remain its masters, and drones are like angels, forced to bow to both.
Most drone attacks are more akin to the work of light cavalry (or tanks), conducting reconnaissance, blitzing through gaps, causing chaos and withdrawing. This is impressive but ultimately amounts to nothing if you don't push reserves through to reinforce them. Thus we see a lot of drone diversions and invasions in the Russo-Ukrainian War, but the frontline still moves at a grunt's pace. Clausewitz described this when he said,
Where cavalry is plentiful, wide plains will be sought out and sweeping movements preferred. With the enemy at a distance, we can enjoy greater peace and comfort, without his being able to do the same. Since we are the masters of space, we can be daring in the use of bold flanking movements and generally more audacious maneuvers. Diversions and invasions, insofar as they constitute valid expedients in war, are easily executed.
Diversions and invasions are easily executed now, but even harder to consolidate. Everyone's flank is now effectively everywhere, and cyber cavalry can spring out of nowhere for anyone. Drones are neither here nor there, in that sense. They can ruin any situation, but can redeem none.
Order Of Battle
The broader point is that drones have to be part of a combined arms force, but how exactly to combine them? This is still being worked out. Not theoretically, but practically. Russia has its Rubicon force which Ukrainian observers seem to grudgingly praise. According to Events in Ukraine, Maria Berlinska “compares its ‘systematic’ approach to the ‘chaos’ reigning in Ukraine’s army when it comes to the scaling up and integration of drone operation techniques.” However, Russian observers seem to grumble about the same unit, with Andrey Filatov and Svyatoslav Golykov saying “Rubicon is insufficiently well-integrated with the rest of the Russian army.” As you can see, what Clausewitz calls the order of battle is still being worked out.
Whatever drones are, they have acted like a force divider, that is, they make massed formations nearly impossible. Expensive tanks can be harried by the cheap drones almost instantly, and expeditionary infantry can be surveilled and assaulted also. Like the introduction of firearms in the 1600s, drones have made infantry important again, and forced its complete reorientation. As Clausewitz said about the period following the Thirty Years War, “There might have been a general return to cavalry at that time if developments in firearms had not given fresh importance to the infantry.” So it is now.
What drones do (among other things) is extend the range of firearms kilometers away with pinpoint accuracy. This discombobulates the order of battle, because where do you put your stuff? Clausewitz said, “In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the development of firearms caused a great expansion of the infantry and made it possible to deploy soldiers in long, thin lines,” and today their further development forces infantry to turtle up. Infantry (or mechanized units) cannot assemble at all anymore. There is no front at all, just a porous killing field with a few guys and lots of machines constantly watching them.
As Ukraine's 46th Brigade reports (via Events In Ukraine), “There is no front as a continuous line: we have separate islands of defense, between which ‘gaps’ remain. As a result, the enemy is slowly but systematically entering the rear and taking positions. There are Ukrainian Armed Forces units that have already been in practical encirclement for several days.” They also said, “The Russians are not stupid; they don’t advance en masse. The enemy operates in small groups: 2–4 men, 10–20 men, who slip through the “gaps” between our positions. Gradually they accumulate, consolidate in the “grey zone,” and then move into the rear.”
Clausewitz described order of battle as evolving from lines of dudes running at each other, to infantry flanked by cavalry, to infantry backed by cavalry, such that infantry and cavalry could form small units. These changes in how men ran at each other took centuries to develop, but that's happening in months now. But the practicalities have long outstripped theory, and strategy is being hacked together from tactical decisions on the ground.
Many Russian war-hacks that were once laughed at (‘cope cages’ for tanks, infantry riding scooters) have now become norms. The current norm is small infantry units, with mechanized units held back, but who commands them? Are the drone units embedded with infantry, or are they like a cavalry, with a different command structure? This is still being worked out, on both sides and within each side as well. As Maria Berlinska (Ukraine) said, “Often neighboring brigades don’t know and don’t share useful working schemes.”
The situation matches what Clausewitz describes when infantry formed lines because they had firearms now, and cavalry flanked them (to the left and right). If such a formation got cut through the middle, no one knew what was going on. The current front has been cut into a thousand different pieces and hasn't figured out how to reassemble. As Clausewitz said then,
If such an army was split in the middle, it was like an earth-worm cut in half: both ends were still alive and able to move, but they had lost their natural functions. The fighting forces were thus held in what amounted to a bondage of coherence: a minor feat of dislocation and reorganization became necessary whenever a segment had to be deployed separately. When the army as a whole had to undertake a march, it found itself, so to speak, outside its proper element. When the enemy was close at hand, the marching-order called for the utmost ingenuity in order to keep one line or one wing at the proper distance from the other no matter what obstacles it encountered. It was forever necessary to steal marches on the enemy; and this kind of theft was able to escape punishment only because the enemy lay in the same bondage.
Both Russian and Ukrainian armies are stuck in the same situation, the same bondage. They have had to split their armies to survive, now down to sometimes 2-4 man units, but there isn't a clear operational protocol on how to command-and-control this. So they're stealing marches on each other all the time, which Ukraine simply has less of in a war of attrition against a larger, more industrialized party.
As we'll get into, whatever form of war this is, Russia is winning. They have superiority in infantry, ‘cavalry’ (tanks and planes), and artillery, both in quality and quantity. There was maybe a brief period where Ukraine was leading in drones, but that's over. Russia has now more successfully combined drones into combined arms warfare, while Ukraine is flailing around with most of its limbs cut off. The Russians are able to use drones as a force multiplier, while Ukraine is dividing by zero at this point. They simply don't have the men, which is what war comes down to in the end. As Clausewitz also said,
In recent wars the major role has undoubtedly been played by the destructive power of firearms: but it is no less clear that the true, the actual core of an engagement lies in the personal combat of man against man. An army composed simply of artillery, therefore, would be absurd in war. An army consisting simply of cavalry is conceivable, but would have little strength in depth.
This describes Ukraine today, which has no strength in depth. They're using drones like cavalry, for rapid shock assaults, but this is not enough. But they have no choice. They have to throw something at the Russians. Clausewitz said, when you're cornered, an increase in artillery is the fastest way to shoot your way out, but the White Empire (US, Europe, same thing) simply cannot produce enough. So Ukraine has to use drones as artillery also, and substitute them for infantry which is spread thin across a wide front. They're simply asking too much.
Ukraine is trying to use drones to replace everything and—while drones have the qualities of all different forms—they have them in a very low quality form. And now Russia is outproducing Ukraine in drone quantity also. It's a lost cause. Clausewitz said “An army composed simply of artillery, therefore, would be absurd in war,” and an army composed mainly of drones is more absurd by far. But here we are. Ukraine is the first of the drone wars.
It's paid, but Events In Ukraine goes way deeper into this and is highly recommended.