For three years and more since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s imperial invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, we have become accustomed to referring to Russia’s “war machine.”
The phrase denoted a powerful and malevolent force, big and dark and dirty, capable of grinding down its enemy while uncaringly sacrificing its own infantry in great numbers. That, by the way, is how the Russian army has operated since at least the Napoleonic era, throwing men into the grinder, accepting worse losses than the enemy, but emerging victorious because it is bigger and more numerous than the forces it faces and therefore can outlast them.
But it has recently become necessary to focus on a less remarked but linked aspect of the metaphorical machine. It is that Russia’s armed forces have always been cumbersome and clumsy, lumbering and slow to adapt.
This crucial and fatal quality has just been starkly exposed by the daring, innovative, and devastatingly successful Ukrainian weekend drone attack on Russia’s heavy bombers, which were standing idle on airfields as far away as the Russian-Mongolian border before being turned into heaps of scrap metal by Ukraine’s lightning strike.
Ukrainian drones that had been brilliantly secreted into enemy territory over the past year were released from the back of specially adapted civilian trucks, from where they homed in on their targets. They attacked and destroyed 41 big aircraft, about a third of Putin’s entire fleet. Where there was once a feared war machine, there are now columns of acrid black smoke ascending into the Siberian sky. Russia’s “war machine” is a ruin.
As ever, it is necessary to add the sizable caveat that Russia still has much weaponry, far more than Ukraine, and that a wounded bear is more dangerous than a contented one. But right now, the bear does not know what to do. It is sulking in its den, doubtless plotting a vicious revenge, but nevertheless befuddled and unsure about how to proceed.
The Ukrainian attacks require us to do more than examine the backwardness of Russian forces and their tactics. Last weekend’s events also force us to look forward and understand that the new war machine, the weapon of foreseeable future conflicts, is the military drone. This has been increasingly apparent during the three years of the Ukrainian war, as the smaller but more imaginative nation has used them to inflict humiliating losses on Putin’s infantry, armor, and navy. This is more starkly evident now than ever before.
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Cheap drones, not very different from civilian toys, can now destroy the bulky weapons of yesteryear, big bombers or aircraft carriers, that cost tens of thousands of times as much and have drained the treasuries of great nations, including our own. A massive and urgent debate has been underway for a year or two over whether the U.S. military is buying the right weaponry for the wars of the next generation. Will the costly weapons systems that Congress members want built to bring jobs to their districts even work in a drone war?
The word “drone” is ironic. In its original sense, it refers to a harmless male bee. Its insistent buzz as it moves lazily through the sky gave the generic name to the quadcopters and other drones we now use for work, play, and war.
Like their etymological progenitors in the insect kingdom, manmade drones can also be well coordinated to move in swarms. That capability will make military drones especially potent in future wars. China, America, and others with much smaller economies will be able to produce drones by the hundred thousand, even the millions, more than enough to overwhelm any defense system. In that respect, they are comparable to the Russian infantrymen of the past two centuries; they can be hurled in great numbers against their enemies. Many will be destroyed, but enough will get through to inflict heavy damage.
The irritating buzz of a drone also gave rise to a verb suggesting what is dull and boring; we refer to incessant talkers as “droning” on. The label implies something dreary and unimpressive. That’s why P.G. Wodehouse had Bertie Wooster, the dimwitted aristocrat of many a comic novel, spend time with his equally thickheaded friends at the Drones Club. But in our epoch, drones have emerged as altogether different from that. There is nothing dull, slow, or unimpressive about them. They are nimble, smart, effective, and, unlike the insect drones, they also have a deadly sting. As Jamie McIntyre, the Washington Examiner’s senior defense writer, noted in his newsletter, the Ukrainian destruction of a sizable portion of Putin’s air force was a “tactical masterstroke that has cemented the small disposable drone as the primary weapon of modern warfare.”
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
