How drones are changing warfare

As part of the ongoing war in Ukraine, one night in late November, Russia sent a swarm of 188 drones to attack Ukrainian infrastructure like electrical utilities, as well as residential areas, according to news reports. Ukrainian forces said they shot down 76 drones, but the damage was still extensive. Those kinds of attacks are continuing almost daily now.

The attacks are a sign of the growing importance of the use of unmanned aerial vehicles—the more technical name for drones—in conventional warfare.

Military drones started being used by the U.S. in the 1990s for airborne reconnaissance, and in the early 2000s, U.S. Predator drones were also used to target Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders following the 9/11 attacks.

Now drones are being employed as weapons in conventional warfare between countries, and their use is evolving rapidly. “Ukraine is the laboratory for all of this,” says Richard Shultz, Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of International Security Studies at The Fletcher School, referring to the nation that Russia invaded in February 2022, creating Europe’s largest armed conflict since World War II.

Tufts Now recently spoke with Shultz, who is also director of Fletcher’s International Security Studies Program, to learn more about the history of drones in warfare, how they are used now, and what the future holds.

How were drones used early on by the U.S. military?

The U.S. military in the 1990s had a fleet of UAVs—unmanned aerial vehicles—for intelligence purposes, not attacking. As drones evolved in the aftermath of 9/11 and the war in Iraq, one UAV could watch 24 hours a day for several days, some 60 targets in a small city. With two, you could watch 120 targets.

In the counterterrorism world, that was tremendous, because you could monitor many sites—was this an IED [improvised explosive device] factory, a terrorist unit headquarters, and so on.

These things collected an amazing amount of data. The big challenge was having enough people to watch the video and images created, which became a problem as the drone fleet proliferated. Around 2014 or so, these UAVs were collecting so much video that it couldn’t be used. You just didn’t have enough eyeballs to go through it.

If military staff couldn’t analyze all the drone reconnaissance data, what did they do with it?

This is where the first attempt to use artificial intelligence in war fighting comes into play, training algorithms and putting them on those UAVs to help identify counterterrorism targets. That sounds straightforward, but it was very hard to do. It meant distinguishing between different kinds of vehicles and between people—is this a fighter or a farmer? Is he carrying a gun or is he carrying a hoe?

You need a lot of data to train the AI. But first, you need people to develop specific types of targets for the AI. Then the algorithms have to train on that data to be able to look at large amounts of full motion video to identify all sorts of targets. In Ukraine, this means training algorithms to find tanks, missile launchers, fortifications, headquarters.

When were drones first used to attack targets in battle, rather than to conduct reconnaissance or targeting individuals?

We first saw UAVs or drones having a strategic impact in the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, also known as the second Nagorno-Karabakh war, in 2020—it was the weapon that shaped the outcome of the war, giving Azerbaijan victory.

The Azeris more or less took the Armenians by surprise. They launched drones that were able to obliterate Armenian armor and artillery, and they quickly took back the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, and could have gone into Armenia. The Armenians suffered a lot of casualties for a small country.

The Azeris were so successful because the drones were used as strategic weapons—it took away the Armenian defense. That was really the first example of what was coming.

What is the combat role of drones now, and how might it be evolving?

Imagine you’re a combat force defending territory. Drones allow you to hit behind the enemy lines, hit critical supplies for the attackers, like gasoline. Likewise, a unit in the field can send drones forward to directly attack the enemy.

Don’t forget they are also still very much used for intelligence gathering. Think about the war in Ukraine—the combatants have to watch a large number of areas. If you have UAVs that can do that, and the AI is trained to find specific assets, then you can target them. This is evolving in the Ukrainian case—Ukraine is the laboratory for all of this.

The future of land warfare is really changing, not just because of UAVs, but a number of developments that have taken place in the war in Ukraine, including what’s called electronic warfare. Electronic warfare gives you the capacity to disrupt the communications of your enemies’ fighting-forward forces and their rear-area commanders, using things like jamming their command-and-control systems.

Does this mean that the nature of war is changing?

Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian war theorist, said that the nature of war never changes, but the characteristics of war are always changing. We are in a period—which started before the Russia-Ukraine war—when new technologies are really affecting the characteristics of war.

The big question is, will it advantage the offense or the defense? Who comes out best in this? It’s an age-old question. In the case of the Azeris, they used UAVs offensively to map the Armenian defenses, identify key capabilities like artillery and armor, and destroy it. But it can be successfully used defensively, too.

Is it easier to launch a drone offensive or defend against a drone offensive?

I think that’s a big question. What does effective drone defense look like? We tended to think that an attacker could swarm the enemy with drones, but the other side always gets a vote in this. There’s no question in my mind that there’s obviously a lot of attention to how you defend against some of this.

Is the U.S. military changing its ways to adjust to this new reality, where unmanned vehicles—via air or sea—could take out large military equipment like tanks and warships?

Well, to an extent. But don’t give them too much credit for being innovative, because large organizations change slowly. All we have to do is look back to the Iraq War and how long it took the U.S. to adapt its military strategy to the war that they were fighting versus the conventional war that they first fought against Saddam’s army.

I think it comes slowly, but certainly there’s a lot of attention to this on both sides of the house, for fighting and for intelligence-gathering.