Every generation of military strategists produces its share of prophets, men and women convinced they have finally witnessed the weapon that will end the age-old calculus of land warfare. After the trenches of the Somme, it was the machine gun. After the Russia-Ukraine War, it is the drone. Today, a chorus of defense commentators, Silicon Valley evangelists, and think tank scholars are converging on a consensus: Aerial drones will define the next century of conflict. They are wrong—or rather, they are asking the wrong question entirely.
The right question is not What can drones do? It is What can drones not do? And the answer to that question is both ancient and decisive: Drones cannot seize ground. They cannot hold it. They cannot compel a population to submit. They cannot plant a flag on a hilltop and mean it.
The Ukrainian Test Case
Consider Ukraine today. The conflict there has become the world’s most intensive laboratory for drone warfare in history. Drones hunt tanks in the open. Loitering munitions strike artillery kilometers behind the line. Commercial quadcopters drop grenades into trenches with terrifying accuracy. Both sides have deployed drones at a scale and sophistication that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. And yet, the front line only moves in increments measured in hundreds of meters per month.
Why? Because after every drone strike, after every armored column destroyed from above, someone still has to walk across that field. Someone still has to occupy the tree line, clear the basement, and stand in the rubble and say: This is ours now. The drone cannot do that. It likely never will.
The war in Ukraine has not produced a decisive outcome precisely because airpower—drone or otherwise—is a tool of attrition, not decision. It degrades. It disrupts. It delays. Indeed, it kills. But the Clausewitzian logic of war remains stubbornly intact: To compel the will of an intransigent opponent, you must ultimately confront him on the ground, in the physical space he values, and take it from him.
Drones have made maneuver more costly. They have not made it less necessary. That distinction is everything.
The Machine Gun’s Lesson
We have been here before. In August 1914, the armies of Europe marched into a world that had been quietly transformed by the machine gun and industrial artillery. Tacticians who had spent careers studying Napoleonic maneuver discovered that open-field infantry assaults against interlocking fields of fire were simply suicidal. The Western Front ground to a halt. Some observers—understandably, watching the carnage—concluded that offensive ground warfare was finished. Trench warfare, they argued, was the future.
They were wrong. The machine gun was not the future. It was the problem. And within four years, British engineers had built a lumbering, underpowered, mechanically unreliable iron box on tracks that could cross no-man’s-land and suppress a machine gun nest from close range. The tank did not eliminate the problem of the machine gun. It solved it well enough to restore what the machine gun had stolen: the ability to move, to exploit, to break through and pour into the enemy’s rear. Maneuver returned. Decisive outcomes became possible again.
The drone is analogous to the World War I machine gun. It has dramatically raised the cost of movement in the open. It has forced infantry to dig deeper, disperse further, and move only at night or under electronic concealment. It has made the tank—and indeed every surface platform—newly vulnerable in ways that demand urgent solutions. But it has not repealed the principles of war validated over centuries. It has not invented a new theory of victory. It has created a new problem for maneuver forces to solve.
What Comes Next
The answer will not come from more drones. It will come from whatever restores the ability to maneuver under drone threat—just as the tank restored maneuver under machine gun threat. That may be electronic warfare systems—and the agile management of them—that can blind and jam swarms. It may be directed-energy weapons that can cheaply defeat mass drone attacks. It may be more innovative, affordable counterdrone technologies that exploit the vulnerabilities of light aircraft. It may be autonomous ground systems that can move forward without risking human lives, drawing drone attention and depleting enemy munitions before human forces exploit the gap. It is certainly some combination we have not yet fielded at scale.
What it will not be is the drone itself. History is not kind to the school of thought that mistakes the current dominant problem for a permanent feature of warfare. The machine gun theorists were not ignorant men—they were simply extrapolating from what they saw rather than from what war requires. What war requires has not changed since Thucydides first recorded it as a fact of political life: the capacity to take and hold what your enemy values, and to do so at a cost he finds unsustainable.
Until a weapons system can do that from the sky—until a drone can knock on a door, secure a city block, and look a population in the eye—the boots will have to follow. The drone is a remarkable and lethal tool. But remarkable and lethal tools have always been the prelude to the next problem, not the solution to the last one. The visionaries who understand that will win the next war. The ones who don’t will be building drone factories while their enemy figures out how to own the ground beneath them.
Lieutenant General Eric Wesley (USA, Ret) is the former director of the Futures and Concepts Center and deputy commander of Army Futures Command. He currently serves on a number of boards for companies developing drones and counterdrone technology, advanced nuclear power, combat vehicles, and next generation artificial intelligence. He serves as a senior advisor to ARCYN Defense, a counterdrone company.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image: Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System (LUCAS) drones are positioned on the tarmac at a base in the US Central Command operating area, November 23, 2025.
