How Combat Drones Ended a Decades-Long War in 44 Days

He showed me a photo of him and his rifle-wielding platoon, all crowded onto an armored personnel carrier from 1993 that had helped with the capture of the strategic Nagorno-Karabakh town of Shushi. Now, he explained, anything like this would be quickly blown to bits.

For Armenia, there is a dour irony that its defeat in this war was built on Armenian victories in previous engagements. Azerbaijan had tested out many of its new drone tactics, albeit with less advanced equipment, in a brief “four-day war” in 2016, during which Armenia immediately repulsed the attacks. According to Jack Watling, a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, the U.K.’s leading defense think tank, “They learned the wrong lessons from their victory in 2016. Drones may not make a huge difference in small tactical engagements, but used at scale, they can radically transform the battlefield.”

The dispute over this bleak, beautiful mountain land is the most enduring conflict to emerge from the Soviet Union’s collapse. More than 20,000 people died in fighting over the region in the early 1990s, and some 7,000 were killed in this recent war, which lasted just 44 days. Azerbaijan used its oil money to build the superior arsenal of modern military technology and was able to crush its underequipped opponent as a result. While the Azeris had been fighting a determined Armenian force on the front line, their drones had been able to roam the rear, causing extensive human and munitions losses. When the destruction of the Armenians’ supply lines caught up to the losses on the front lines, the Armenian position collapsed. Once Azerbaijan had conquered the high ground above Stepanakert, the Armenian government was forced into a surrender.

Military strategists have long noted the potential of drones to revolutionize modern warfare in state-on-state warfare, and now we’ve finally seen it play out. If the U.S. or NATO were ever drawn into a war with Russia, China, or Iran, they would face similar capabilities. According to the Teal Group, an industry-leading aerospace analyst, worldwide procurement spending on drones will increase 30 percent over the next decade. The Pentagon has invested heavily in drone warfare, and this trend is expected to continue. Between 2018 and 2019, Department of Defense allocations for unmanned systems rose from $7.5 billion to $9.39 billion.

Not all details of the Armenian-Azeri conflict apply: Armenia’s air defenses were almost entirely sourced from outdated Russian technology, optimized to face fast jets and helicopters. Typically, there is an imbalance between the cost of the air defense systems and the cost of the aircraft — it’s a lot cheaper to shoot down a jet than to build a jet. But when it came to drones, their defense systems could not engage something that small and that maneuverable. “Azerbaijan has a military budget of only $2 billion a year,” says Watling. “The idea that you can make a campaign like that for so little cost is a genuine change. What we are witnessing is the democratization of the use of very sophisticated technology that allows one party to control the skies.”

Yet analysts are still more concerned about a shortfall in the United States’ SHORAD (short-range air defense) capabilities than they are impressed by the offensive capabilities they possess. The Department of Defense has experimented with a variety of sci-fi-sounding technologies, such as concentrated laser beams and sonic guns, but its experts have yet to find a workable and reliable solution to SHORAD. Russia and China, meanwhile, have been taking their short-range air defense extremely seriously.

Still, Watling says, it is possible to blow the value of drones out of proportion. “There are ways of dealing with combat drones, and it has been proved in Syria. There are ways to stop these systems, and the best-equipped militaries are investing heavily in them.” The Bayraktar TB2, for example, is fairly easy to defeat with modern electronic warfare tactics, he notes. “You can deny the link between the drone and the ground control station. You can also locate the ground control station, which can then be struck.” Armenia simply lacked these capabilities.

Producing hardened electronics that can evade these advanced anti-drone defense systems are expensive and require robust command links and complicated support infrastructure. In a way, it is just another factor in the arms race.

And in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Azeris’ advantage in owning the skies extended only to the flat, open terrain in the south of Karabakh. They made much less progress in the heavily forested area north of the region. They also did not attempt to capture Stepanakert, the regional capital, as drones are much less effective against an adversary that is dug into a city and can hide in deep, well-concealed bomb shelters.

The terrain parallels with U.S. deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq are striking. When NATO was in Afghanistan, the uneasy balance between it and the Taliban was largely based on the terrain in which they fought. Overwhelming U.S. air power — increasingly from drones — kept the Taliban from approaching major population centers. But the Taliban retained strength in areas such as the valleys of Helmand or the Hindu Kush mountains near the Pakistan border, where air superiority meant very little.

In the first Gulf War, the U.S.-led coalition exploited the incipient GPS system in order to navigate its forces and target its air strikes against Iraqi forces. The aerial advantage contributed to the rapid destruction of Saddam Hussein’s once-mighty army. Now, 30 years later, Azerbaijan used a similar revolution in aerial technology to reverse a decades-long stalemate in just 44 days. The defensive advantage of Armenian forces meant nothing against an opponent that owned the skies. While drones will not completely revolutionize state-on-state warfare, they can quickly turn the balance of combat in the favor of those who possess them and can mobilize them. It is a development that America’s enemies are closely watching.

(This article initially appeared in the magazine Arts on October 29.)