Astonishing how much drones have transformed warfare in just 10 years, along with shorter-range missiles and a new kind of backend “war cloud” capability. It’s a kind of a slowing and localization of war, with devolution of control to local units. Drones also blur the distinction between army and air force ops, and between professional and irregular combatants. The result is a kind of cyberpunk neo-primitivist dragged out hot war. Combatants have long-range and heavy strike capabilities (including aircraft and nukes) but are restrained from using them by international pressures and financial threats. So the heavy lifting is done by slow, small to medium drones, short-range missiles, and loitering munitions. This op apparently took a year to plan, and was as much army and special forces style as air. The drones were apparently the smaller fpvs, smuggled into Russia, which took off from very forward-staged disguised vehicles (“wooden cabins in trucks”??).

This is weird. It’s not WW1 style stagnant fronts, it’s not WW2 type properly supported maneuvering columns driving deep into enemy territory, it’s not even special forces style (the delivery/staging is special forces style, but the mission is more a traditional mission — instead of doing support stuff like target designation or blowing up a radar or something, the actual full assault was the “payload” delivered).

Notably, this is also not Afghanistan/Vietnam style asymmetric warfare of occupying conventional vs endemic guerrilla militaries. This is not AK-47s, IEDs, and bamboo stakes, with a few SAMs thrown in. This is border-centric, guerilla-scale but much higher-tech “teeth” with conventional-scale “tail” (backend capabilities ranging from satellite reconnaissance to fairly technical professional military training). Ie I don’t think farmers put through a 2-week bootcamp can keep up this kind of conflict. They may fight like guerrillas but the methods call for deeper professional military style training. There’s too much high-tech involved everywhere.

Two other data points. The Iran-Israel tit-for-tat strikes have largely been theater. And in the recent India-Pakistan flare up, conventional air force planes didn’t cross the border.

My postdoc was on this kind of battlespace. Or what we thought this kind of battle space would look like circa 2004-06, based on wars from 1991-2006 or so. We got many things right, but plenty wrong too. The ideas that I think we got wrong were:

1. There would be meaningful air supremacy/persistent area denial for the more conventionally powerful side

2. Heavier, longer-range assets would be more meaningfully in play — piloted fighters, predator class drones

3. The smallest drones would mostly be used for things like reconnaissance, not as mass suicide attack munitions (I didn’t think little drones would get cheaper than artillery shells)

4. Army units would behave more like Boydian maneuvering units a la gulf wars, not WW1 style attrition on diplomatically constrained border

5. Information environment would be much cleaner for superior side (ie not this much “fog” of gps denial, jamming, starlink)

6. Didn’t think iron dome type defensive shields would be this effective for mass DDoS type attacks, creating a kind of financial bleeding logic for the attackers rather than physical damage ($2m air defense missiles shooting down $60k rockets, though that appears to be changing with cheaper defense models)

7. While USS Cole and Van Riper millennium war games had demonstrated the potential of low-tech (fishing boats, motorcycle messengers), we didn’t think conventional militaries would rely so much on dumbtech

8. Didn’t think social media wars for global public opinion would matter this much, to the point of being a separate front

9. Didn’t think the higher stakes deep cyberattacks like stuxnet would end up being much less important than lower-tech IT supply chain attacks on enshittified consumer grade tech (like the exploding pagers, ransomware)

10. Perhaps most importantly — didn’t think we’d go back to this much reliance on bloody, low-tech brute force. Earliest sign I spotted was the barrel bombing by Russia in support of Assad a decade ago