The dangerous delusion of modern warfare

The Wayback Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20260528213706/https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2026/05/28/the-dangerous-delusion-of-modern-warfare It has never been a great time to be an infantryman. But today’s conditions are especially pitiable. In the “kill zone” imposed by both sides’ drones in eastern Ukraine, the risk of finding yourself inside a lethal video game is omnipresent. In February Ukrainian troops trying to join the small number of their comrades still inside Myrnohrad, a town in Donetsk, knew that Russian drones operated by well-hidden pilots would make it impossible to do so in vehicles. They had to infiltrate gingerly through the forests. It could take weeks. They might not get out for months. The after-effects might last years. Soldiers returned from the front keep their windows covered and lights dimmed even when hundreds of kilometres outside the zone. Trapped in what psychologists speak of as hypervigilance and hyperarousal, the sound of a drone can trigger fear and a feeling of helplessness. They glance up as they walk. As the battle for Myrnohrad was grinding on, American and Israeli jets taking part in the other great-power war of the moment were bombarding Iran at will. Their pilots had everything they needed to pound, assess and pound again, all the sensors the world’s most advanced military forces could bring to bear—on-board infrared and radar, back-up from drones nearby and radar farther off, satellite oversight and more besides. Israel hacked traffic cameras in Tehran to track Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, as it closed in to kill him. Such different wars in their prosecution. But in other ways oddly similar. Both the war in Ukraine and the war over Iran are shaped by technology which has introduced a new transparency to the places and situations in which armies fight. This transparency is not complete. It is always partial, always sporadic, always subject to challenge. But over the eight years since your correspondent left the world of think-tanks to become The Economist’s defence editor, a post he is now leaving for pastures new, it has been warfare’s defining technological trend. There are other similarities between Ukraine and Iran.

Both are wars instigated by the leaders of great powers in the apparent belief of easy victory. Both have developed in ways those leaders did not anticipate into something like a stalemate—stalemates in which, for Russia and America alike, a lack of victory looks increasingly like defeat. Are technological changes making the role of the defender easier? Or systematically encouraging big powers to start wars they cannot win? Or is this merely a case of business as usual—great powers blundering into ill-advised wars that reflect the prevailing technologies of the day? The question matters because war is a somewhat booming industry. The Uppsala Conflict Data Programme recorded 65 active state-based conflicts—wars where at least one belligerent is a state and which result in at least 25 battle-related deaths in a year—in 2025, the highest level since its records began in 1946. They included eight wars categorised as state-on-state, two with annual battle-death rates over 1,000. The Peace Research Institute Oslo identifies a similarly bleak trend. “Despite a sharp decrease in battle-related deaths from 2022 to 2023,” it observed, “the past four years have been the most violent period since the end of the cold war.” armed conflicts involving states, 2010-25 Tactical transparency boils down to three things: more and better sensors; precision firepower; and networks that convey actionable data from the first to the targeting systems of the second. To reduce all this to drones is an oversimplification. There are all sorts of robust sensors that can be scattered across battlefields or mounted on the soldiers and vehicles traversing them. There are other sorts of smart projectiles, not to mention dumb projectiles that can be smartly used. And none of this matters without the networks, technical and human, which join all these sensors to the various shooters, providing analysis and decisions as they do so. The drone, which can combine sensor and shooter under the control of a single operator, invites the imagination to collapse all that complexity into a simple package. To attribute to weapons the advantages that accrue to the systems which use them best has misled military minds in the past. It could do so again. That said, the drone is an undeniably powerful avatar of change.

It hovers like a sentry in the sky; it pursues with hideous intimacy. It captures how this new warfare can at the same time seem delocalised and hyperlocal; how it can be everywhere and also in each specific somewhere. How it can be controlled from afar—but right in your face, right now. At the same time as it is strange and new, it is curiously everyday. Its manufacture uses supply chains much more similar to those which produce consumer electronics than to those which produce tanks or high-end missiles—or, for that matter, artillery shells. This allows rapid evolution through endless innovation and counter-innovation. “You update code every few days,” says Air Vice-Marshall Simon Strasdin, who leads Britain’s Integrated Warfare Centre. “In six weeks, you typically need to do some sort of larger upgrade to your software. And in six months, you’re probably looking at doing a hardware change as well.” New generations of technology can rise and fall without the lines moving more than a few metres. America began using drones—Predators, then Reapers—to kill its enemies within weeks of 9/11. But the drone that changed things for the non-superpower world was the Bayraktar TB2, developed and built in Turkey. The TB2’s first major outing was countering the Libyan National Army’s advance on Tripoli in 2019. In 2020 it showed its prowess against armour—first in Syria, then in Armenia—and armies around the world began to take note. Then, in February 2022, Ukrainian TB2s played a role in stopping Russian tanks from reaching Kyiv. Their success was partial—artillery mattered more—and short-lived; but it was amplified by the propaganda value of the videos it produced. The TB2s, though, were only the first of the drones with which the two sides would bring the war to its current grisly standstill. Smaller, smarter and sneakier drones appeared in 2022; by 2024 many varieties were in mass production. Along with artillery, fortifications, satellite communications and a huge amount of pilot training these created a lethal “attrition belt” that was once 5km deep and is now often closer to 30km.

Today, drones originally designed to act as bombers deliver food and water on both sides—an innovation that appreciably lessens the hardship of soldiering. The wounded are taken away by uncrewed ground vehicles, which Ukrainian forces used for more than 24,000 missions in just the first three months of 2026. And between the meals and the medical evacuations come the attacks.Drones originally designed to act as bombers deliver food and water on both sides Every day each side produces thousands of “first-person view” (FPV) drones used to hunt and kill one-on-one. Their use accounts for a significant fraction of the 1.1m-1.4m Russian soldiers whom The Economist estimates to have been killed or wounded in the war: one in 25 of the country’s men under 50. Ukraine’s losses are lower, in part because it is costlier to attack than to defend, in part because Ukraine has gone further in substituting robots for humans. Ukraine’s losses equate to one in 16 of its pre-war 18- to 49-year-olds. Some say this is now the future of wars in which states seek to capture territory: two sides endlessly pinned down by small, cheap and all-seeing killers. General Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s ambassador to London and formerly its commander-in-chief, says that large-scale manoeuvre warfare—armies moving with speed and shock, in contrast to frontal, attritional battles—is now “unattainable”. It will become possible again only when wars evolve into robot-on-robot fighting at machine speed. Others treat this as fanciful. Stephen Biddle, a professor at Columbia University, argues that the scale of the sensor revolution is “easy to exaggerate”. As new counter-drone systems—lasers are especially promising—appear, and as jammers and dazzlers blind satellites, the balance may tilt again, bringing some relief to ground forces. Jamming was one of the reasons the TB2’s early success in Ukraine did not last; Russia’s electronic-warfare specialists got their measure. The same fate befell American Excalibur GPS-guided shells, whose hit rate fell from 70% to 6% in just a few months.

In the battle over Kursk province, Russia pioneered the control of drones through fibre-optic cable—a modern twist on second-world-war technology which both sides now use. William Owen, the editor of Military Strategy Magazine and an adviser to the British army, says that better trained and equipped armies would not be tied down in the first place. If first-rate Israeli kit and training were used against an opponent of the standard of Russia or Ukraine, he argues, $3,000 FPVs would be “mostly, if not completely, irrelevant”. In a speech to Chinese military cadets last year, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, Britain’s then chief of defence staff, said Britain’s way of war would be fundamentally different from that seen in Ukraine anyway: its model would be “Israel’s strikes on Iran [in 2024], which wiped out the entirety of the country’s air defences in a single sortie, on a single night, using long-range, stand-off weaponry, exquisite targeting and fifth-generation technology”. But armies rarely get the wars they want. Sir Tony is almost certainly correct that in a war between, say, NATO and Russia, the alliance would establish something like air superiority (providing, that is, that America committed itself to the fight). What then? Air superiority has not just become harder to establish and maintain, says Franz-Stefan Gady, an Austrian military expert; it also buys you less than it used to. Below 4,000 metres (13,000 feet) the battlefield is increasingly “decoupled” from what happens above that ceiling. It is dominated by mass-produced drones of various sorts and defences which, though not able to deal with the profusion of drones, can still trouble larger, high-value aircraft. Some have started calling it the “air littoral”. Just as big navies are increasingly challenged when bringing their advantages to bear against mines, shore batteries and small craft in the confined shallows at the edges of the oceans, so big air forces must worry about the shallows at the bottom of the atmosphere.Air forces must worry about the shallows at the bottom of the atmosphere. This means air power might offer little escape from messy and lethal close fighting at short range. Mr Gady points to the Israel Defence Forces’ experience over their past two years of operations in Lebanon as evidence of this. “