The Kyiv Post today published a video featuring trench warfare via drone, and then a drone-versus-drone battle. It is an interesting war technology development.
As Russia’s war against Ukraine has progressed, almost every aspect of war tactics by modern militaries has been completely disrupted by air-borne, sea-based, and increasingly surface-based drones. Both Ukraine and Russia – and by extension NATO countries and China – are trying to get the upper hand. When battlefield frontline drones are being deployed by the thousands every day, they have become the military equivalent of World War I artillery and even chemical-weapons-delivering artillery.
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Recent reports indicate that Russia has started using banned chemical weapons against Ukrainian troops in trenches. Ukraine is countering entrenched Russian forces with new thermite-spraying drones, where the thermite burns at temperatures that melt metal and ignites anything that can burn. Dozens of long-range Ukrainian drones are penetrating behind enemy lines to attack Russian weapons stockpiles, munitions production facilities, anti-aircraft systems, naval ships, petroleum and gas processing plants, fighter jets and bombers, and military leadership. Ukraine’s cities, civilian population, military bases, industrial facilities, and deployed troops defend against Russian drone attacks.
Now the war is evolving into drone vs. drone. Humans are looped in with the most widely used First-Person-View drones on both sides. However, fast-responding autonomous AI-controlled drone systems, including swarming drones, will win the drone vs. drone, drone-based antiaircraft fights, drone-centered anti-ship attacks, and ground-attack battles probably before 2025 closes.
ISW Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December, 20, 2024
When I say this is interesting, it is not a dispassionate statement. I dearly want Ukraine to win this war. Russia is trying to rebuild the Soviet Union. If they succeed, they will be twice the monster that Russia now is. At the same time, Russia is trying to subvert the Western democracies. If they succeed, they will have global dominance or vie with China for that; democracy will be finished in the world, considering modern surveillance technology. Democracy might not arise again in humanity’s future. Ukraine must win this war.
Hopefully, this war will end soon. The tragedy is just too much on both sides. We see Russian troops being killed in the video linked above. They are a few pixels in a screen. The same happens tens to hundreds of times a day in trenches on both sides. To the fallen soldiers’ spouses and girlfriends, mothers and fathers, children, brothers, sisters, friends, and compatriots under arms, the loss of these soldiers is more than a few pixels on a screen. The Russians’ losses are exactly like Ukrainian families’ personal losses. For this, the world must redouble denunciations of Vladimir Putin and his personal war of choice.
Taking the broader and long-range view, what about “the war to end all wars?” The end of this human competition seems more distant than ever, and the outcome bleaker than ever. The fascination of airborne drone vs. drone blends fully with lament and fear. Trench warfare as seen in the linked video has drones as a new scourge, like chemical weapons in WWI. Could Russia actually win? Are we witnessing a dehumanizing rampage and assimilation by a real-world, almost Borg-like destroyer?
The fear and objective concern are palpable. But there is hope, too. The wanna-be destroyers and assimilators are not all powerful. Ukraine can beat back Russian aggression, defeat the attempted resurrection of the Soviet Union, and resist authoritarianism long enough that the world’s democracies can re-establish civilian pride in self-governance and an abiding sense of responsibility to defend it against enemies, foreign and domestic. If and when democracy is safe globally – in Russia, too – then humanity and civilization will be safe. It is our shared struggle for now and all time.
How will all this end? That, of course, is the big question of our time. Putin is banking on a collapse of Ukraine. However, long-time Russia-watcher and journalist Diane Francis underscores Putin’s increasing dilemma following Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region of Russia. Speaking of Putin, she says, “He’s vulnerable, he’s not invincible… The king kind of has no clothes.” Many well-armed, violent people in Russia have become anxious about the war, and some are now openly opposing Putin, as Francis summarizes. We can only hope that it is Russia’s leadership that collapses. Meanwhile, the battlefield is like 19th- and 20th-century trench warfare, with all its mud, untreated wounds, rodent-borne diseases, and poison gases, mixed with 21st-century apocalyptic incendiary drone-versus-human and drone-versus-drone warfare hitting both sides.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
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