New technology rarely arrives with a manual. The needle gun, the machine gun, the tank—each appeared on the battlefield long before the generals understood what to do with them, and the side that figured it out first won.
Drones are following the same arc.
KYIV—Russia’s war on Ukraine has forced militaries around the world to confront a question they have largely avoided so far: not whether drones will shape future warfare, but how drones can be integrated into military doctrine.
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Gunpowder weapons reshaped medieval warfare long before European armies fully understood how to organize around them.
Western armed forces already understand that unmanned systems will play an expanding role on the battlefield. What remains strikingly underdeveloped, however, is a coherent strategic doctrine for how those systems should be used in large-scale combat. The United States military, despite its technological advantages, still lacks a comprehensive framework for how autonomous systems should operate together on the battlefield: How they should be coordinated with manned platforms, how they should function in degraded electronic environments, and how large numbers of drones should be employed as part of a unified operational concept.
America’s war on Iran has made the drone-doctrine deficit strikingly clear. For years, Ukraine has told Western militaries that drones have revolutionized the way wars are being fought—and yet, NATO countries insisted their Cold War doctrines and beliefs in air superiority were still applicable. This is now being exposed as false.
History suggests that this situation is not unusual. Major technological shifts in warfare rarely arrive with neatly prepared doctrines. Instead, they tend to emerge in the chaos of conflict, forcing militaries to adapt under pressure. Gunpowder weapons reshaped medieval warfare long before European armies fully understood how to organize around them. The industrial revolution introduced railways, telegraphs, and mass-produced artillery decades before commanders developed doctrines capable of exploiting those technologies fully. The same pattern appears to be unfolding today with drones and autonomous systems, with a giant exception: Ukrainians, in order to survive, are rapidly folding in the latest tech into their everyday doctrine.
At the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866, Prussian forces used their superior technology to fire into the disintegrating Austrian lines from cover.
