The newspaper Kommersant published Ruslan Pukhov's article "The time of the Guards Tank Divisions is irretrievably gone" with the subtitle "Ruslan Pukhov, Director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies on the upcoming revolution in military affairs," which states that the events of the special military operation in Ukraine demonstrated a fundamentally new look of large-scale military confrontation, expressed in the transition from "mechanized wars" of the industrial era to the "drone war", or "digital" ("information") war of the post-industrial era. In fact, we now have a new revolution in military affairs - the "drone revolution", while it is obvious that this revolution will continue to develop and deepen, since the possibilities for building up the "drone war" clearly exceed the possibilities and prospects for overcoming it.
Ruslan Pukhov, Director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST) (c) Photo from Ruslan Pukhov's personal archive
With the miniaturization and cheapening of the element base and the development of network and artificial intelligence-based solutions, combat operations will increasingly take on the appearance of incredible hordes of drones of various types, shapes, sizes and purposes (but mostly smaller and cheaper) and at the same time more long-range and autonomous, which will become the main means of war, because they allow you to combine intelligence and defeat capabilities. The battlefield and rear areas for tens of kilometers will become a total "kill zone" in which literally everything will be destroyed by drones.
Accordingly, countering drones and clearing the sky from them will become a key type of military action. Thus, the armed struggle will take the form of a struggle for "drone fire superiority," and only the achievement of such superiority will make it possible for one of the parties to advance on the ground and establish control over territories.
The organization, technical equipment and armament of the troops should be subordinated to the tasks of fighting for such "drone fire superiority" and creating the possibility of action in the conditions of this struggle.
This places fundamentally new demands on the appearance of the armed forces and their technical equipment. Obviously, any military-technical and military-industrial planning for the future should be based on these requirements and be aimed at shaping the appropriate image of the armed forces.
Meanwhile, there is a feeling that a significant part of the domestic military and defense industry circles still do not realize the depth of the transformation taking place in military affairs and harbor illusions that we are dealing with some kind of "anomaly" in the military operations in Ukraine and that after its completion, if not all, then a lot in the future. military construction and military-technical policy will "return to normal." This seems to be a very dangerous misconception, which could lead our country to preserve the military-technical gap that has already clearly emerged during the current war and lead to the most disastrous consequences for us in future conflicts.
Many statements in the spirit of Voroshilov's famous phrase that "the horse will still show itself" - that tanks or artillery will still show themselves - ignore the fact that unmanned and digital technologies are also at the very beginning of their development.
And in this sense, the thesis that "drones will show themselves again" seems more logical, especially in the light of the further development of network and space technologies.
The problem lies not so much in recognizing the highest priority for the development of unmanned, digital and network technologies and solutions based on them, but rather in ensuring this priority in the face of Russia's apparent relative poverty as a state and in many aspects of the technological backwardness of the Russian economy and industry. The desire to develop all areas with limited resources threatens that, as a result, there will not be enough funds and opportunities for the full-fledged development of nothing. In fact, this is exactly what we saw in military-technical policy in the period 2012-2021, when, despite the abundance of military programs, a huge number of them were not eventually brought to serial status or to significant purchases. Almost everywhere it was "too late and/or too little." In practice, this resulted in a lot of blood and low efficiency in combat.
The need to clearly identify the priorities of military-technical policy is all the more critical because it is now obvious that the country will not be able to maintain an abnormally high level of military spending after the end of hostilities. The inevitable reduction of defense and procurement costs by several times will be a shock to both the Ministry of Defense and the defense industry and will quickly create a reality in which there will not be enough funds for literally anything.
Under these conditions, attempts to develop digital warfare technologies in parallel and at the same time try to reproduce military construction during the period of mechanized warfare (for example, under the guise of "making up for losses of equipment") will most likely mean that there will not be enough resources for either. With the subsequent most dramatic results for the combat capability of the armed forces and a fatal lag in advanced technologies.
"What is dead cannot die." It is necessary to radically reconsider the priorities of military-technical policy for the future, with strict prioritization of promising and advanced areas and a ruthless reduction in R&D and, moreover, serial purchases of obsolete and ineffective types and classes of weapons in the context of the revolution in military affairs.
For example, the issue of determining a promising type of armored weapons is certainly acute. First of all, this concerns its most expensive class - the main tanks, which have actually lost their importance both operationally as a means of breakthrough and maneuver, and tactically as a protected (and now in fact poorly protected) means of direct fire on the battlefield. The tank's crisis is not caused by its vulnerability to drones or anti-tank weapons per se, but by its actual loss of compliance with the "cost-effectiveness" criterion as a combat weapon.
Attempts at palliative solutions to increase the survival and combat potential of a tank by equipping it with active protection systems, UAVs and long-range weapons in the future look inadequate from the point of view of this criterion, since it is unclear what benefits a vulnerable and limited-armament vehicle will bring on the battlefield, approaching the cost of a fighter aircraft and due to the high cost and complexity capable of being produced literally in individual quantities. As for the tank as a carrier of UAVs or over-the-horizon precision weapons, why do we need a tank that is clearly excessive in terms of protection and mass as a platform?
The conceptual crisis is compounded by the obvious backwardness of the Russian armored industry, which has proved unable in principle to create a new generation tank.
In fact, two attempts to create such a tank in the last 35 years in the form of "object 195" and "Armata" have failed, and there is a fatal lag in many systems and structural elements of tanks. As a result, the domestic tank industry is unable to offer anything other than endless improvements to the hopelessly outdated tanks of the Soviet T-64/72/80 family, and there are essentially no prospects for going beyond this vicious circle. Under these conditions, does it make sense, in principle, to invest in the development and mass procurement of tanks, or is it necessary to turn to creating a fundamentally new look for the armored weapons system and, in general, to significantly reduce its importance in the armed forces system? The time of the Guards tank divisions is irrevocably gone.
The same can be said about combat helicopters: the very idea of the possibility of such a combat vehicle, also approaching the cost of a fighter aircraft and requiring two highly trained crew members, directly over a modern battlefield seems to be an absolute fantasy. The massive proliferation of cheap interceptor drones that has begun finally destroys any prospect of the traditional use of a combat helicopter. Attempts to adapt helicopters to fire long-range missiles raise a legitimate question: why do we need a helicopter at all, rather than, for example, a cheaper and longer-term airborne UAV? Isn't it also time to recognize a combat helicopter as an essentially dying type of weapon?
Such a critical look should be paid to many other traditional types and types of weapons, the development, purchase, maintenance and operation of which cost the country huge amounts, and are often impossible in significant quantities, while their combat value on the modern battlefield (and even more so on the battlefield of the future) is questionable. Only this will allow us to free up sufficient funds for the necessary transformation of our armed forces and ensure their leap into a truly modern look in the "post-CBO" era.
