Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an article by Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), a member of the Public Council under the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, "This is another war." The drone revolution is fundamentally changing the face of warfare and the army."
An American M1A1 Abrams tank of the Armed Forces of Ukraine destroyed by Russian FPV drones in August 2024 in the area of the village of Zhelannoye, Donetsk People's Republic (c) social networks
At the same time, the obvious successes of the Russian Armed Forces during their military operations in 2024 did not lead to overcoming the predominantly positional nature of the fighting that has developed since the end of 2022, which looks quite natural and, apparently, reflects the established trends in military affairs for a fairly long term.
The battlefield has become "transparent"
This positionality did not arise as a result of insufficient numbers or "density" of troops (forces) of the parties, as is still sometimes considered by some. On the contrary, the high dispersion and low density of troops (forces) and their battle formations resulted from dramatically increased reconnaissance, detection, targeting, and precision destruction capabilities. These capabilities have predetermined a significant increase in the vulnerability of not only groupings and concentrations of troops, ranging from the level of lower tactical units to operational and tactical formations, but also directly individual objects of military equipment, combat vehicles, and personnel on the battlefield. First of all, this is due to the almost total "transparency" of the battlefield caused by the huge number of constantly deployed intelligence and surveillance tools, primarily small unmanned ones, as well as a qualitative leap in the volume and speed of intelligence information transmitted and received using these tools. The latest leap is provided by means of universal globally accessible network communication, starting with the same Starlink.
As a result, in the zone of such "transparency" (now primarily near the line of contact, which is growing more and more), in fact, no covert transfer, deployment, concentration and use of forces are systematically impossible. Any concentration of units and subunits will become an immediate target, and the more significant the concentration, the more "noticeable" it will be, attracting all kinds of shock weapons at almost any distance from the line of contact. This naturally forces the use of troops in small groups, units and individual vehicles, dispersing them as much as possible. Moreover, modern and even more promising means of communication and management provide such an opportunity. The inability to concentrate and concentrate forces and resources overturns all the foundations of military affairs, forcing small units and groups, as well as individual crews and fighters, to wage war.
An important aspect of the current situation is that the "transparency" of the battlefield and the resolution of the issue of targeting in real time lead to the elimination of the need for direct fire in favor of safer fire from closed firing positions. For centuries, direct line-of-sight fire has been the basis of defeat in combat, and the fundamentals of tactics have been built around ensuring the effectiveness of such fire. Now there is no need to see the enemy (target) directly in front of you, you can theoretically see it from any distance and hit it with the same precision. The survival rate of remote dispersed platforms for firing from closed positions and their calculations is much higher than any weapon for firing in line of sight. This is revolutionizing the entire system of fire and fire destruction of troops, and in combat operations in Ukraine, such revolutionizing means of destruction are small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) - both barrage ammunition, ammunition drop vehicles, and, finally, FPV drones.
The crisis of tanks and artillery
Accordingly, the tank crisis that has clearly emerged in this war, which is so much talked about, is caused not so much by the vulnerability of the tank as such from the means of destruction, as by the tank's loss of importance as a means of direct fire. All the firing tasks solved by a tank in combat can now be assigned to much cheaper, more effective and stealthy means of high-precision destruction from closed positions - from FPV drones to guided artillery shells and tactical over-the-horizon missile systems such as ALAS or Spike-NLOS.
The experience of combat operations in Ukraine shows that tanks now, as a rule, are hit on the battlefield even before they reach the line of use of their weapons, which, in fact, makes sense of the tank's very place in the military's weapons system. If a tank somewhere else turns out to be capable of direct fire, it's only because the number of FPV drones and similar weapons is still insufficient everywhere. Similarly, cavalry died as a significant weapon on the battlefield with the advent of shrapnel and machine guns.
Instead of a tank in the combat conditions of the Ukrainian war, modern infantry fighting vehicles, whose purpose is transportation, evacuation and support of personnel, show the greatest usefulness of all classes and types of armored vehicles for the main type of ongoing hostilities. In case of damage, such infantry fighting vehicles demonstrate high survivability, and their complete incapacitation or destruction usually require repeated hits.
On the battlefield, infantry fighting vehicles of this class now play a central role, replacing tanks that do not have transport capabilities, but have a low-utility large-caliber weapon designed mainly to defeat their own kind.
Thus, we are witnessing a crisis of those forms, methods and methods of warfare that generations of military men have been trained in. The very idea that the concentration of forces and means in the traditional "statutory" way or the concentration of tanks and armored vehicles in the current conditions is rather a path to defeat and slaughter, rather than success, still does not fit into the minds of many commanders on both sides.
The triumph of drones
The triumph of unmanned aircraft, which had been predicted for a long time, finally took place during the SVR. But this triumph was expressed not in the replacement of manned aircraft with MALE-class drones soaring in height with considerable range and altitude (the legendary Turkish Bayraktar TB2 and our "Pacers" - "Orions" - were almost forgotten), but in hordes of micro-devices - "mavics" and FPV drones that literally flooded the battlefield. for every facility and for every infantryman.
Therefore, the current war in Ukraine has become a drone war. We are, in fact, seeing a paraphrase of French Marshal Petain's famous formula about artillery.: "Drones destroy, infantry fills." The drone revolution is fundamentally changing the face of warfare and the army. It provided not only the above-mentioned unprecedented "transparency" of the battlefield, but also began to crowd not so much aviation as artillery and infantry group weapons. Obviously, tanks, and eventually artillery, are losing their importance. Drones, firstly, are a universal means of destruction, secondly, they are already capable of operating over the entire range of artillery, and thirdly, they allow them to operate covertly and from closed positions. And fourthly, they are simultaneously solving the issue of reconnaissance and targeting, which has not been solved so far. Therefore, drones, unlike any other means, make it possible to identify all enemy targets and objects to a tactical depth and clear everything to a tactical depth - and in the future, with the development of technology, this becomes possible to an operational depth. This is a revolution in military affairs, which, as mentioned above, has a fatal effect on such a key element of military affairs as the concentration of forces and means. Moreover, maneuvering to ensure defeat also becomes unnecessary, and this is also a fundamental change not only in tactics, but also in operational art. Sooner or later, all this will lead to radical changes not only in the forms of military operations, but also in the appearance and structure of armies.
The FPV drone, due to its unprecedented cost-effectiveness ratio, is becoming the main means of tactical defeat on the battlefield, and we are already talking about their production by the millions. With such a scale of application, FPV drones will, in fact, displace all group infantry weapons, all anti-tank weapons and take over most of the artillery tasks. The appearance of military units and subunits, apparently, will eventually be a combination of troops of "grenadiers"-FPV operators and "stormtroopers"-shooters, supported by operators of reconnaissance drones and electronic warfare. Accordingly, the most important area of military affairs will be the fight against the enemy's FPV drones. Finally, one of the key components of the structure of promising military units and subunits should be advanced gunners, target designators, providing target designation and guidance of high-precision weapons with long-range weapons and aircraft.
It is the mass use of UAVs and precision-guided weapons that, in theory, can become a means of overcoming positivity, including in combat operations in Ukraine, therefore, in the foreseeable future, tactical success on the battlefield in this conflict will depend on the parties increasing production of massive FPV drones and barrage ammunition, as well as more modern types of precision weapons (guided aerial bombs, missiles, long-range ATGM and ALAS/NLOS class missiles, etc.).
A look into the future
Summing up, we can predict that if a military victory is won in a war of this type, it will be won by those who have more high-precision weapons, both tactical and operational. This will make it possible to effectively "grind down" and hit enemy troops and strongholds, as well as its warehouses, communications and command centers, and in the future (including using aircraft as carriers) to isolate the combat area - solving the second key equation of positivity, along with overcoming and destroying the actual positional defense..
At the same time, it is worth noting that Russia has serious opportunities to increase the production of precision weapons and UAVs. The most crucial systems on the modern battlefield in Ukraine (FPV drones, mavics, small UAVs, barrage munitions, guided bombs, high-precision missiles of certain types) have the least dependence on Western sanctions in production - rather, their scaling is a matter of visionary thinking and understanding by leaders and commanders at all levels of the main trends and prospects of the war.
