The Drone Fighter Fantasy
The Drone Fighter Fantasy
Why tech can only get you so far on the battlefield
After they surrounded the long concrete hut, the shooting began. At least five soldiers had piled up at the front entrance shoulder-to-shoulder, the lead man pushing the door aside with his foot and firing, in bursts, inside.
The other attackers crouched at the far end of the building, the type of nondescript structure which could pass as both a small school building or a large utility store. They watched on, covering their friends and avoiding the windows which began to explode.
The occupants inside were desperately shooting outwards, trying and failing to hit the enemy. Every thirty seconds or so everything would erupt. As the shots went into the hut, a defiant volley came outwards. More glass, more mortar and more metal would fill the air. It was a mess.
A group of Russian special forces operatives, Spetsnaz, were trapped in the hut. There were five, perhaps even seven of them. Maybe they got lost on the battlefield, maybe they were sent over enemy lines on a reconnaissance mission. Either way, they weren’t surrendering.
The back and forth between the windows exploding and the Ukrainians shooting into the building went on for at least five minutes. The attackers of the hut were in no rush to storm the building. That is until one of their comrades, part of the team near the hut's entrance, took a bullet.
Patience turned into anger and hand grenades were soon being lobbed into the windows alongside shouts of “b*****ds”. After six concussive thuds, the shots from inside stopped. But despite their rage, the Ukrainians only went as far as poking their heads further into the concrete hut.
Keen to avoid another casualty, they instead got on the radio and called in more firepower. A good hour or so later, with not even a whisper from inside the building, the ground began to shake again.
This time the rumbling was thanks to heavy armour. In a scene of total overkill, a lone Ukrainian tank pulverised the hut and the bodies of the Russian soldiers were later dragged from its rubble. There were no drones in sight.
This is the grizzly reality of modern warfare. The blood, guts and banality is all still there. Technology hasn’t dampened the ugly nature of the battlefield, but you can now experience it - if you really want to - in your living room via the endless hours of GoPro footage which has found its way onto YouTube.
If you thought future wars would be fought behind a joystick, the world’s most recent conflicts should show you otherwise. Drones may be more sophisticated and abundant, but we still have trench warfare being conducted on the European continent in the 21st century. And someone has to fire those anti-tank missiles, don’t they? In lieu of robots, it will have to be humans for the time being.
This reality has only just truly hit home in Britain, where for years leading members of successive Conservatives governments, most recently former defence secretary Ben Wallace, have been promoting a reduction in Armed Forces numbers.
Instead, we were told, technology would ensure the safety of our nation state and we shouldn’t worry about our military being depleted as part of the ‘Integrated Review’ to 72,000 trained personnel (many of which don’t actually fire guns, captain warships or fly fighter jets) by 2025. This would bring us in line with the likes of Canada, Cuba and Kazakhstan.
The British public sucked it up, buying into the ‘drone warfighter’ fantasy. In many concerns indexes, ‘defence’ did not even rank in the top 10 issues amongst the general public, even with the Ukraine-Russia war on our doorstep.
That was until a non-politician, the outgoing head of the British Army, General Sir Patrick Sanders, called for a ‘citizen army’ and a national debate about conscription started.
Unfortunately, much like the Royal Family, we only hear from our military leaders on rare occasions and that’s usually on the way out.
Recommendation:
‘Why We Don’t Fight’.Note: As an aside, you may enjoy Bob Woodward’s ‘Obama’s Wars’, which focuses heavily on the young President’s embrace of drone warfare as the US faces a ‘constellation of terrorism’. Woodward seems largely sympathetic to Obama, who spoke to him for the 2010 book. But the consequences of these ‘non-wars’, in which nation states don’t officially declare war on others, are still being felt today.
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