It is a common saying among military analysts that “generals always prepare to fight the last war”. Only later do they realise with painful hindsight (rather than with foresight) that technological and strategic developments have changed the situation on the battlefield so much that they have to scrap their old ideas and start over.

Current developments in international warfare certainly reflect this dynamic. Although the kind of technology that has recently come to dominate the minds of military planners has been around for quite some time, its full military and sociotechnical implications are only now being realised. And as we shall see below, this has deep and far-reaching consequences.

I am, of course, talking about drones. And, by extension, about the remote-controlled and automated type of warfare that they engender. As technological devices, drones have been around for several decades. They emerged as decisive tools in military operations during the War on Terror in the aftermath of 9/11. But it is only with recent developments – more long-range capabilities; new possibilities in software programming; and systematic low-cost manufacturing – that their full military potential is being realised. One might even talk about a ‘drone turn’ in current military thinking. But more on that later.

The automation of warfare that drones represent is not unique to them. One of the more interesting expectations concerning the current generation of fighter jets is that they will be the last generation with a human pilot. This assessment has been made repeatedly several times, perhaps most notably by Rear Admiral Michael Donnelly at the US Navy, who noted that the F/A-XX series could be the last tactical manned fighter to be operated out of the navy.

Yet for now, it’s drones that have had the most remarkable effect. In the war between Russia and Ukraine, specifically, the introduction of automated drones has changed the dynamics of the battlefield in radical ways. From the onset of the war, Ukrainian deployment of cheap Turkish produced drones (notably the Bayraktar TB2) inflicted massive casualties on conventional Russian forces and quickly became a vital component in stalling Russian advances during the initial invasion attempt. A later breakthrough came through Swedish software developments made in conjunction between SAAB and the Swedish Armed Forces. These developments allow a single human combatant to control and coordinate up to 100 autonomous drones from a single mobile device. The drones may be heterogenous in function and capabilities allowing them to divide tasks (such as scouting, identifying threats, mapping roads etc.) without requiring individual pilots.

The military consequences of these technical developments are numerous. For one, it changes the game of camouflage entirely. In the old days, you might hide your artillery and infantry units under foliage or behind buildings. And with a little luck, they would not be found before they chose to reveal themselves. With the emergence of drone-based aerial (and highly mobile) surveillance technologies, such strategies have lost big on efficiency. Persistent surveillance and high-quality loitering munitions mean that the battlefield has become hyper-transparent. Neither rear line logistics, command posts, nor artillery are safe in this setting. The proliferation of FPV drones (drones that are governed by a single pilot with a first-person camera view) have also made traditional trenches highly vulnerable, forcing military strategists to focus heavily on localised signal jamming and electronic warfare.

Another important feature of the so-called ‘drone turn’ is yet another blurring of the front lines. The most spectacular example of this is undoubtedly the newfound ability of Ukrainian drone operators to strike Russian targets far behind the front lines. In this respect, drone warfare may be regarded as a continuation of a development which has been ongoing since the beginning of the militarisation of aviation itself. In his novel The War In the Air from 1909, published years before airplanes were first used in combat, the British Science Fiction author Herbert George (H. G.) Wells correctly predicted that aerial warfare would nullify the protection usually provided by geographical distance to the front line. He also prophesised that a major result of this would be a massive increase of civilian casualties, as flying machines would be used to target urban areas and terrorise civilian populations. All of this came true during the Second World War, including during the London Blitz in 1940, where the German Luftwaffe directly targeted civilian populations in Britain, and, later, with bombing of Dresden by the British Royal Airforce in February 1945, in which the entire city centre was destroyed in a firestorm that also killed up to 25,000 people.

Today, the low cost of drone manufacturing (one Iranian Shahed drone costs between $20,000 and $50,000, according to estimates by the Center for Strategic and International Studies) allows financially weak nations and even non-state actors to ‘flood’ civilian areas, provoking a high-cost military response from missile defense systems.

These dynamics highlight an important feature of the low-cost automation of warfare that drones represent. To a certain extent, they ‘even the odds’. Through a combination of cheap, uncrewed surface drones, aerial drones, and underwater drones, Ukraine has effectively been able to end Russian dominance over the Black Sea. In fact, the persistence and severity of Ukrainian drone attacks have by now more or less confined the Russian fleet to its base at Novorossiysk, located in a mountainous inlet on the Russian Black Sea Coast, about 250-300 nautical miles from Ukrainian held territory. From here, they rarely venture out of port. Even the submarines (whose predecessors during the Cold War were a flagship of Soviet technological achievement) now often stay submerged at their berths to reduce their visibility to drones.

In effect, the base at Novorossiysk is turning into an unsafe cage for the Russian Navy – unsafe in the sense that drone attacks are edging closer to inflicting serious damage, and every loss to an enemy without a formal navy compounds the humiliation. Reversing this situation is not without its dangers either, as that would involve putting new warships within line of fire at the risk of losing them. With the sinking of the Slava-class cruiser Moskva on April 14, 2022, the Russian Black Sea Fleet lost its largest warship in the region. As they have no desire to repeat this event, the stalemate remains. In the Black Sea, drone warfare has come close to fulfilling H. G. Wells’ century old prophecy of an aerial fleet rendering traditional naval vessels obsolete and undermining any traditional naval strategy.

Of course, what is left out in this diagnosis of ‘evening the odds’ is the important role of two adjacent elements. One is access to high-quality surveillance and intelligence. Without it, drone strikes are as blind as any hapless bombing may be. The other is willingness to fight.

The drone turn entails a range of consequence which, taken together, completely change the dynamics of modern warfare. The most important of these changes are not linked to changes in drone technology itself – though advances in longrange capabilities matter. Instead, they are linked to changes in the socio-technical context of drone technology, which includes cheap manufacturing, software development, and swarm intelligence. Good foresight, then, does not lie in an ability to track technological changes alone, but – equally important – also in the settings in which they appear. Paraphrasing an old quote from the American science fiction novelist Frederick Pohl, we might say that a good military strategy should not only be able to predict the car. It should also be able to predict the traffic jam.

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