On today’s battlefields, drones are undeniably lethal. They kill with precision, shape movement across the battlespace, and impose a constant psychological presence. Their hum has become synonymous with modern combat, and combat footage from Ukraine appears to suggest that their sound is a defining feature of 21st-century war. Analysts and policymakers increasingly speak of drones as transformational weapons as they appear to have fundamentally altered the character of ground combat
But history urges caution.
In Rethinking Military History, Jeremy Black cautions against technological determinism, suggesting to us that “the age of cavalry was really the age of bad infantry — a political, not a technological, phenomenon.” According to historians like Black and Stephen Morillo, cavalry did not dominate medieval battlefields because it was inherently superior. It dominated because the Roman institutions that once produced disciplined mass infantry had collapsed.
The question we face today is not whether drones matter — they clearly do. We seek here to recognize the genuine innovation of modern unmanned systems — their rapid iteration, accessibility, and integration into kill chains once reserved for states now exists at the squad level. However, innovation does not necessarily constitute a revolution. And in making this argument, we are revising some of our earlier views. The real question is whether their apparent dominance signals a true revolution in military affairs or if it simply exposes more familiar issues: institutional failure, fragile maneuver culture, and the lack of combined arms.
History suggests that when armies falter, new weapons often rise to compensate: not because they transform war, but rather because they expose the weaknesses of those fighting it.
Why did Cavalry Dominate in Medieval Europe?
Why cavalry appeared to dominate European warfare from the late Roman period through the Middle Ages has long tempted technological explanations. Older historiography pointed to the stirrup, arguing that it transformed the horse into a stable weapons platform and unified rider and mount into a shock force capable of decisive action with the couched lance. In this telling, cavalry rose because technology made it superior.
Modern scholarship is far less convinced.
While the stirrup did enhance rider stability and facilitated certain fighting techniques, it explains remarkably little about the broader ascent of cavalry over infantry. The stirrup appeared in Europe sometime between the sixth and 10th centuries, but its presence alone cannot account for battlefield outcomes. Well-trained infantry repeatedly defeated stirrup-equipped cavalry. Swiss pikemen, using formations and tactics fundamentally similar to the Macedonian phalanx, shattered mounted elites across Europe. Anglo-Norman knights themselves often dismounted to fight. Technology, in short, was not decisive.
Cavalry’s real advantages lay elsewhere. It excelled in pursuit, exploitation, and the management of retreat, which were critical in pre-modern warfare. More importantly, cavalry was a profoundly psychological weapon. Its success depended less on physical destruction than on fear. Infantry that broke formation, lost cohesion, or panicked soon became vulnerable, as scattered soldiers could be ridden down and killed with ease.
For infantry to withstand a cavalry charge, it had to be more than just armed. It needed to be dense, disciplined, and psychologically resilient. That required trust, drill, cohesion, and confidence in comrades to hold the line. Such qualities could not be improvised on the battlefield. Instead, they were the result of sustained training and institutional support.
And this is where medieval infantry faltered.
Drill and discipline can only be imposed by a central authority strong enough to assemble large bodies of men and wealthy enough to maintain them once trained. The breakdown of the Western Roman Empire destroyed precisely that capacity. As Vegetius lamented even before Rome’s fall, infantry training had already decayed. Without regular pay, standardized instruction, or logistical depth, the infantry lost its offensive capability and became unreliable even in defense.
Cavalry forces and knights did not dominate because they were inherently superior. They dominated because the infantry became worse.
Feudal societies could sustain small numbers of well-equipped mounted warriors bound by personal obligation, but they could not generate or maintain the mass disciplined infantry formations that once anchored Roman power. The age of cavalry was therefore not a technological revolution, but an institutional regression. Cavalry rose to prominence because it filled the vacuum left by the collapse of systems that once made infantry decisive.
When capable infantry institutions re-emerged, most notably in the Swiss cantons, the balance shifted again. Dense, disciplined infantry formations restored battlefield dominance without any technological breakthrough. What changed was not the weapon, but the institution behind it.
The Fall of the Roman Legions: Institutional Collapse, not Tactical Innovation
The Roman defeat at Adrianople in 378 C.E. is often remembered as a dramatic battlefield loss to Gothic forces. But its deeper significance lies not in tactics, terrain, or technology. Adrianople symbolized the erosion of a system. The defeat exposed how far Roman military effectiveness had already decayed before the battle was joined. The catastrophe was not sudden, but the culmination of long-term institutional hollowing.
The Roman legions were more than just groups of soldiers. They reflected a complex governmental system that oversaw taxation, logistics, standardized training, discipline, and command. When that system weakened, the legions didn’t just lose battles: They disappeared. The legions relied on bureaucracy as much as courage, and when the machinery of the state faltered, tactical unity naturally faded. What vanished wasn’t Roman courage but Roman capacity.
As imperial authority fractured in the West, Rome lost its capacity to create large, disciplined field armies. Recruitment became localized and informal. Supply systems deteriorated and training standards declined. What followed was a transition that reflected the political and institutional realities of the age. Military service increasingly reflected the influence of regional power brokers rather than the centralized state. Armies became patchworks of units rather than a unified instrument of state power.
European warfare adapted to what was available. In the absence of state-sponsored mass infantry, violence was organized around feudal relationships. A small number of highly trained mounted fighters — knights and men-at-arms — became decisive. They did not dominate because cavalry was a superior arm, but because they faced opponents lacking cohesion, protection, and training. Feudal systems could support elite warriors bound by personal obligation, but not the mass discipline needed for infantry dominance. The battlefield increasingly rewarded quality over quantity because it could no longer be organized effectively.
The so-called “age of cavalry” emerged not from innovation, but from absence. Cavalry filled a vacuum left by the collapse of institutions that once made infantry dominant. This distinction matters. Weapons rose to compensate for weakness, not to redefine war itself. The prominence of cavalry was therefore a symptom, not a cause, of transformation. It marked what states could no longer do, rather than what technology suddenly allowed them to achieve.
Power Without Trust: The Limits of the Russian Way of War
Russia’s modern military experience illustrates this pattern with particular clarity. For decades, Soviet and Russian leaders have understood the importance of technological change and have repeatedly sought to modernize their forces in response to perceived revolutions in military affairs. The lessons of the 1991 Gulf War were not lost on Moscow. Precision strike, rapid maneuver, joint integration, and information dominance were recognized as decisive features of modern combat.
What Russia struggled to internalize was that these capabilities rest on more than platforms and firepower. They require institutions that cultivate trust, initiative, and decentralized decision-making under stress.
Modern warfare amplifies these weaknesses. Precision fires, pervasive sensors, and contested airspace punish hesitation and reward initiative. Units that cannot disperse, adapt, and synchronize in real time become targets. Technology can enhance combat power, but it cannot substitute for trust between echelons or compensate for brittle command cultures.
This gap between technological aspiration and institutional capacity helps explain why Russia entered the war in Ukraine with modern equipment, ambitious plans, and a theory of victory, yet struggled to translate any of them into sustained operational victories.
Russian War Culture Since 1945: Endurance Without Elegance
Russia’s modern military history fits this pattern uncomfortably well. Since World War II, Soviet and later Russian forces have demonstrated a persistent capacity to absorb punishment and continue fighting — but often through methods that emphasize mass, firepower, and endurance over flexibility, initiative, and integrated maneuver. Tactical competence exists at the margins, but institutional adaptability has remained uneven.
Afghanistan revealed the limits of Soviet operational art outside a traditional European setting. Soviet forces depended heavily on artillery, airpower, and search-and-destroy missions, but struggled to combine intelligence, maneuver, and control in complex human terrain. Adaptation primarily occurred among airborne and special forces units, but it was slow, fragmented, and insufficient to address weak civil-military cooperation and rigid command structures.
Chechnya revealed similar flaws at a sharper intensity. Russian forces entered Grozny with poor reconnaissance, inadequate coordination between infantry and armor, and fragile command-and-control, resulting in high losses in urban combat. While Moscow eventually imposed control through overwhelming firepower and coercion, victory came at the cost of massive destruction, high casualties, and limited institutional learning beyond the narrow context of counterinsurgency through attrition.
Georgia in 2008 demonstrated Russia’s willingness to use force rapidly, but also highlighted enduring structural weaknesses. Tactical successes were enabled by numerical advantage and Georgian unpreparedness rather than by refined joint or combined arms operations. After-action assessments revealed poor inter-service coordination, outdated communications, and limited real-time command integration. These problems were acknowledged within Russian military reform efforts.
Crimea in 2014 appeared to mark a qualitative shift. Russian forces employed deniability, information operations, and rapid seizure of key nodes with discipline and restraint, achieving political objectives at minimal cost. Yet Crimea was a permissive operation against a paralyzed state, requiring little sustained maneuver, contested logistics, or high-tempo combined arms coordination. It demonstrated Russia’s skill at exploiting ambiguity — not its ability to fight a modern, resisting opponent.
That test came in 2022.
The Collapse of Russian Maneuver
Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine exposed deep institutional failures. The advance on Kyiv was operationally incoherent. Units outran logistics, infantry failed to protect armor, and fires were poorly synchronized. It appeared that Russian command structures proved brittle and centralized.
Additionally, Russian airpower failed to provide sustained close support to ground maneuver. Despite possessing numerical and qualitative advantages in the air, Russia proved unable to integrate aviation into advancing formations or to suppress Ukrainian defenses at scale. The result was an army advancing largely without the air umbrella modern maneuver warfare assumes.
The Russian push toward Kyiv revealed a lack of coordination. It was speed separate from combined arms tactics. While the Russian Federation attempted a bold airborne operation to seize Hostomel Airport, its ambition did not match its capability. Its failures stemmed from its inability to effectively integrate follow-on ground maneuver and logistics into a coherent system. On the ground advance, Russian forces reached the city limits of Kyiv, but the burned-out remnants of armored vehicles along its edges exposed fragile command structures, weak cohesion, and an inability to adapt once the initial attack stalled. After the forward armored units were destroyed, a force experienced in modern ground warfare would have changed its tactics, dismounting infantry to clear urban approaches and regain momentum before sending in armor again. Russian forces did not do this. Anti-tank guided missiles have been around since the Arab–Israeli wars, and they did not mark the end of the tank era. Still, anti-tank missiles such as the Javelin are particularly effective against armies that lack institutional competence. The wrecks outside Kyiv are not fossils predicting the death of the tank, but rather serve as the tombstones for an army that did not know how to fight in the 21st-century battlefield.
This was not simply poor execution. It reflected a deeper problem: Russia lacked the institutional capacity to synchronize infantry, armor, fires, engineers, logistics, and airpower at scale. The result was paralysis. When Russia failed to achieve a decisive victory, it resorted to attrition.
Staying Power Without Operational Excellence
Russia’s endurance should not be underestimated. It continues to generate manpower, firepower, and hold ground. But endurance is not operational excellence. However, since the failure of its early offensives, Russia has demonstrated little capacity to conduct large-scale combined arms maneuver. Breakthroughs are rare, localized, and costly. Instead, Russian forces have chosen positional warfare: digging in, fortifying, and trading space for time.
This choice reflects not strategy but limitation. Russia fights below the expected standard of a modern great power. Its inability to maneuver effectively has forced it into a defensive stance even when nominally on the offensive. It is within this static, attritional environment that drones have flourished.
However, as modern military thinkers continue to reflect on the ever-emerging lessons from this ongoing conflict, we should always use caution before cementing assessments, as the ash from this volcanic explosion of warfare has yet to settle. In the West, we should take care about declaring what doing well in combat even means. It is possible that Western analysts, including us, may have been too quick to judge Russia’s performance through a maneuver-centric, casualty-phobic lens. There might be, in fact, a possibility that high casualties and drone-enabled attrition and endurance, rather than elegance, may come to increasingly define the character of modern combat.
Static Battlefields and the Drone’s Advantage
Drones thrive where maneuver is limited, and airspace is contested unevenly. Russia’s failure to maneuver and to establish air superiority has created a permissive environment for unmanned systems. The drones on the battlefields of Ukraine have been lethal. However, without effective integration with doctrine and culture, they appear to have contributed to a stalemate rather than introducing a fundamentally new way of war.
Without a sustained air campaign and ground maneuver to displace drone operators, Russian units remain exposed. Fixed positions become targetable and logistics nodes become vulnerable.
Ukrainian drones exploit these conditions ruthlessly by scouting and striking at will. But they do so because Russian forces cannot move, suppress, or integrate the air domain.
Against an army capable of maneuver and employing traditional airpower, drones would likely remain dangerous but limited. They would supplement combat power rather than replace missing functions. Their effectiveness would depend on integration rather than substitution.
If future forces lose the ability to maneuver under fire, drones will appear decisive there as well: not because the technology changed, but because the institutions did.
The Counterfactual: When Lethality Meets Competence
If drones are thriving primarily because they compensate for poor maneuver and institutional weakness, then their effects should look markedly different when employed against a force that retains strong combined arms integration, decentralized command, and adaptive troops. Against such a force, drones would remain lethal but far less decisive. Their targeting windows would shrink, their survivability would decline, and their operational effects would become episodic rather than systemic.
History suggests this pattern is not new. The English longbow demonstrated its lethality against French cavalry at Crécy in 1346, yet decades later, mounted assaults at Agincourt were again slaughtered under arrow fire. These defeats did not end cavalry as a battlefield arm: They ended its repeated misuse. Longbowmen required specific conditions — open ground, prepared positions, and time to set up — that disciplined opponents could deny through dislocation and rapid maneuver. It is never wise to attempt to stick one’s arm into the wood chipper in hopes of stopping it, regardless of how strong a belligerent believes that arm is.
The character of drone combat is somewhat similar: dangerous and persistent, but reliant on secure launch sites, control nodes, and sanctuaries. The world has witnessed the influence of first-person-view drones in static trench warfare. However, there has not yet been a drone-enabled meeting engagement in which opposing large-scale combat elements make contact prior to the establishment of fixed defensive positions.
A force capable of sustained rapid maneuvering would likely displace drone operators, disable launch and control nodes, integrate traditional airpower to challenge the air domain, and disrupt drone operator support zones. Drones would still boost reconnaissance and firepower, but they would no longer replace missing institutional functions. Against a modern, well-trained, and well-led maneuver force, drones would likely not appear revolutionary but would continue to serve as deadly nuisances.
Drones as Symptoms, Not Causes
It is beyond question that drones are of the utmost and lethal importance on the battlefield of today. However, it appears that drones are slowly and incrementally transforming combat, further reinforcing the point that — as military history has demonstrated — it is institutional adaptation, not the arrival of technologically novel weapons, that determines revolutionary change on the battlefield. The temptation is to view drones as the driver of this new battlefield reality. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Drones are thriving because they compensate for institutional weakness. They substitute for absent airpower, inadequate maneuver, and brittle command structures. Their effectiveness is magnified not by novelty alone, but by the absence of systems that would normally constrain and integrate them.
This mirrors earlier historical moments. Cavalry once filled the gap left by vanished legions. Drones appear to provide a means of decision-making when ground forces falter. In each case, technology advanced while institutions retreated.
The lesson is not that drones are unimportant. It is that their prominence may tell us more about failure than transformation. What appears revolutionary may, on closer inspection, be diagnostic.
Western thinkers should also be wary of treating drone-enabled combat in Ukraine as a universal truth. The character, constraints, and grammar of combat on this display reflect those of this conflict. The applicable lesson observed may not apply to all future wars.
The Stakes: Time, Institutions, and Modern Ground Combat
New weapons take time to matter — not only to build and field them, but to transition from tactical novelties into instruments of decision. The Russo-Ukrainian war has demonstrated that capable drone technology has already arrived. However, what remains unresolved is whether modern military institutions can effectively absorb them and deploy them effectively in the art of modern combined arms maneuver warfare. Handgonnes and early cannon appeared on European battlefields in the mid-14th century, yet they did not immediately transform warfare. Only after decades of experimentation and centuries of institutional adaptation — culminating in formations like the Spanish tercio and later Dutch battalions — did firearms reshape how armies fought. Weapons arrive with instruction manuals, not with doctrine or the institutional habits required to use them decisively.
Drones may represent a similar moment. Their lethality should send tremors through modern military thought, but tremors are not earthquakes. Adaptation today will proceed faster than the long transition from arquebuses to linear warfare, but it will still take time for unmanned systems to be integrated into the deeper grammar of maneuver, command, and combined arms. Treating drones as a finished revolution risks freezing force design around premature conclusions. The age of drone-enabled large-scale combat maneuver may come, but it has not yet arrived.
Western militaries should continue to study, train with, and use drones aggressively — but not lose sight of the fundamentals of land, sea, and air combat. Drone-delivered munitions have proven deadly against individual soldiers, vehicles, and small units, but they are not yet capable of destroying brigades, divisions, or corps. What can do so are integrated combined arms formations built around infantry, armor, fires, airpower, and — perhaps most importantly — well-led, motivated, and disciplined soldiers. Drones may hum overhead, but decisive 21st-century modern ground combat is still decided in blood, steel, and maneuver — and institutions that forget that rarely get a second lesson.
Beyond the arena of conventional combat, the affordability, portability, and concealability of drones make them especially dangerous tools for irregular warfare. Unlike traditional heavy weapons, drones can be cached, dispersed, and reassembled in urban neighborhoods or remote rural terrain, allowing guerrilla forces to harass, surveil, and strike occupying armies at low cost and persistent risk. In this context, drones threaten not decisive battlefield victory but endurance — complicating control, undermining security, and stretching forces tasked with stabilization and governance. Western militaries should therefore invest in doctrine, training, and imagination for drone-enabled irregular warfare as well.
Changing Our Mind
Our views on the character of drone warfare have changed over the past year, from seeing drones as the forefront of a military revolution to viewing them as part of a more cautious, institutional development. In 2025, we made bold arguments in these pages and elsewhere. Like many military thinkers, we were influenced by the shocking casualty numbers linked to drones and by the constant stream of combat footage that made drone employment appear ever-present and transformative. As veterans of ground combat, the idea of hunting, stalking, and fearless machines layered onto an already deadly battlefield felt new, deadly, and revolutionary.
What changed our thinking was not the character of the Ukrainian conflict itself but an understanding of the factors that may have amplified the use of drones within it. While preparing for his doctoral comprehensive exams at Georgetown — immersing himself in the breadth, depth, and context of military history over the past 2500 years — one of us (Antonio) encountered a constant truth, if such a thing exists in the annals of military history. While weapons definitely matter — whether made of stone, steel, rifles, tanks, or drones — history repeatedly shows that what matters most is who wields them, how they are trained, how they are led, and whether supportive institutions exist to sustain them and integrate their unleashed violence into coordinated action. The war in Ukraine underscores this lesson. Drones seem most vital when maneuvering breaks down, combined arms tactics fail, and institutions cannot adapt. The real danger in war isn’t new weapons but the misguided belief that they can replace institutions and the soldiers they shape.
The Danger of Misreading History
The rise of drones in Ukraine should give us pause: not because it heralds a clean break with the past, but because it fits an old pattern. When institutions fail, weapons rise to compensate.
Drones have not yet fundamentally changed the character of war. Instead, perhaps they have revealed the costs of poor maneuver culture, weak infantry institutions, and the absence of combined arms. They have exposed what happens when armies cannot move, integrate, or adapt.
If history teaches us anything, it is that revolutions in warfare are institutional before they are technological. The danger lies not in drones themselves, but in mistaking symptoms for causes.
The age of drones may yet arrive. But today’s battlefield suggests something more familiar: the hum above a hollow army.
Antonio Salinas is an active duty U.S. Army officer, professor of strategic intelligence at the National Intelligence University, and a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Georgetown University. Salinas has twenty-seven years of military service in the U.S. Marine Corps and Army as an infantry officer, an assistant professor in the Department of History at the U.S. Military Academy, and a strategic intelligence officer, with operational experience in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is the author of Siren’s Song: The Allure of War, Boot Camp: The Making of a United States Marine, and Leaving War: From Afghanistan’s Pech Valley to Hadrian’s Wall.
Jason P. LeVay teaches joint doctrine at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth and is a doctoral student in the Security Studies program at Kansas State University. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington and holds graduate degrees from Yale University and the National Intelligence University.
The views and opinions presented here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
Image: ArmyInform via Wikimedia Commons
