One of the bigger things that happened in 2020 was that two countries - Azerbaijan and Armenia -
fought a war. The war lasted for about 6 weeks, and it has set the air defense world ablaze.
For the first time, the world got to see a national army bring a fleet of
armed drones to the battlefield. And the impact those drones have made was huge.
Using a swarm of cheap Turkish drones and Israeli loitering munitions,
Azerbaijan swept aside Armenia's air defenses and paved a road to victory.
Cheap armed drone technologies are spreading like wildfire across the world. In this video, I want
to look at how such drones add new wrinkles, opportunities and challenges to modern warfare.
For many years, Azerbaijan and Armenia have contested the mountainous region
of Nagorno-Karabakh. The region's population is majority ethnic Armenian.
The two countries fought a brief war in the 1910s after the Bolshevik Revolution.
But then both countries were incorporated into the USSR in
the 1920s. Nagorno-Karabakh was thus assigned to Soviet Azerbaijan in 1921.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Armenian and Azerbaijani forces fought the
first Nagorno-Karabakh War. That ended in a cease-fire in 1994 and an Armenian victory.
Some 20,000 people died and over a million were displaced from their homes.
A definitive peace deal was never secured. So until 2018, the two countries maintained
an unsteady peace, punctuated with the occasional bout of violence. Nagorno-Karabakh
was left in a state of legal limbo - de facto independent but internationally unrecognized.
Before we move on, I think we need to introduce two new players into the mix:
Russia and Turkey. The two countries have long had geopolitical interests in the area.
Armenia has long had ties with Russia. The two have a military alliance,
and there is a Russian base in Armenia. Many Armenians see the
Russians as a security guarantee against Azerbaijan and Turkey. The latter of which,
the Armenians have a strained relationship - something that dates back to World War I.
On the other hand, Azerbaijan has long ethnic, cultural and historical ties to Turkey.
The two have referred to each other as "two states, one nation". This relationship - along
with Azerbaijan's oil wealth - helped the Azerbaijanis bulk up their military budget.
The Stockholm International and Peace Research Institute notes the military
disparity - with Azerbaijan military budget over the past 10 years totaling $24 billion
and Armenia's at just $4.7 billion.
Tensions ramped up starting in 2019. Then on September 27, 2020, the two countries sparked a
new conflict. How it exactly started is disputed. Regardless, the next six weeks demonstrated a
brand new type of war. A really interesting one imbued with the latest technologies.
In terms of troop numbers, the two countries' forces were numerically equal.
The Azerbaijanis had about 57,000 troops while the Armenians had 62,000 when taking
into account those stationed within the Nagorno-Karabakh region itself.
Prior to the war, Turkish officials ramped up their sales of military equipment to Azerbaijan.
$123 million of defense and aviation equipment in the first 3 quarters of 2020,
with $77 million in September alone.
These include Turkish-made Bayraktar drones, rocket launchers and ammunition.
Azerbaijan augmented these Turkish weapons with weapons
from Israel - including Orbiter armed drones and Harop loitering munitions.
Both sides had a great deal of Russian-supplied armaments, since the Russians sold stuff to
the both of them. These include Smerch multiple-launch rocket systems, tanks,
combat vehicles, and helicopters. Russia for their part did not choose a side in this conflict.
The First Nagorno-Karabakh war left the Armenians with control of the region's
high ground. Which means for this new conflict, the Second Nagorno-Karabakh war,
the Azerbaijanis would have to come up the mountains and through the chokepoints.
The goal of the Armenian forces would be to make that advance as costly as possible.
In most cases, this would be a powerful force amplifier. You
would need to outnumber the enemy something like ten to one in order to come up and take
the high ground. The Armenians should be pretty happy with their position.
But armed drones and loitering munitions helped level the battlefield.
I think it is worth pausing here to give a brief overview of armed drone technology.
Drones describe basically any flying machine technology
that does not have a pilot or passenger on the load up.
There are many types of drones out there. You have the little four engine
quadcopters that you can buy off the shelf for photography. They are generally small,
cannot stay in the air for too long, and require synchronization with a phone or tablet.
Military drones have stricter requirements. And that puts greater demands on the overall system.
Critical points of technology include the engine system,
the automation technology, and the sensors.
Engines are the single most important component for any advanced weapons system.
They also happen to be the most technically difficult part of the system to manufacture.
After that, we have the sensors and automation. These are critical to deliver
up-to-date information between the device and headquarters. For instance, cameras. Having
cameras and available bandwidth capable of sending high quality footage over hundreds of miles.
Loitering munitions are kamikaze drones that straddle the lines been cruise missiles and
armed drones. They hang around an area for a certain time period. If they don't see anything,
then they come back to base. If they do see something, well, they go down and try to hit it.
Azerbaijan's strategy first targeted the Armenians' air defenses. They retrofitted a
number of Antonov An-2 single-engine biplanes back from the Soviet-era with remote control systems.
Then, they flew these unmanned biplanes over the Armenian lines. As expected,
these slow planes were shot out of the sky with man-portable surface-to-air missiles.
More advanced armed drone strikes began shortly thereafter,
with Turkish Bayraktar TB2s attacking the short range air defense.
After the air defense and radars were removed, the Azerbaijanis switched to targeting tanks,
artillery, and vehicles moving along the battlefield.
Once all those were gone too, the drones started targeting individual infantry units.
Azerbaijan attempted to take the town of Lachin but failed to do so after heavy fighting.
They then changed their focus to capturing the town of Shusha,
which overlooks the highway connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia.
Then a combination of Azerbaijani special forces and light infantry,
supported by artillery and drone strikes, captured the city in November 2020.
Afterwards, the Russians negotiated a cease-fire between the two countries.
Turkish rapid competencies in armed drone technology and tactics are not only because
they wanted independence from American technology. There’s a whole political kerfuffle that I’ll side
step for now. But also because they needed to use these systems in nearby theaters of war.
First in Southeast Turkey against the Kurdish party PKK guerrillas,
where they first appeared in 2016. Then in Syria, where Turkey has run military
operations against the Islamic State or ISIL and Kurdish fighters, and then Libya.
The brutal multi-sided Syrian civil war was a laboratory for irregular warfare and ISIL got
really good at using armed drones. The terrorist group creatively used modern
technology to generate the element of surprise and blended it into their fighting tactics.
For instance in 2015, they developed a heavy armor bulldozer that cleared the terrain for
their soldiers. They used suicide car bomb attacks at an unprecedented rate.
And they modified off-the-shelf commercial drones to allow them to drop grenade-sized bombs.
These drones were used in conjunction with ground
attacks for greater effect - echoing the tactics of national armies.
ISIL used shell companies to purchase standalone components like GPU units and cameras from Asia.
They were then activated and assembled in the US or Europe before being shipped to ISIL affiliates.
During the battle for Mosul in 2017, ISIL ran over 100 powered drone attacks
against the front lines each month.
In addition, they pioneered the use of drones to fight the information war.
They streamed video footage of the drones live or shared clips on social media.
It became an effective recruiting tactic.
Years later, Azerbaijan would do the same - tweeting out hundreds of clips of their TB2 drones
and IAI Harop loitering munitions hitting enemy armor and artillery.
It helped Azerbaijan win the information war, and at the same time demoralized the enemy.
I really mean it. Lots of these social media comments especially on Reddit
are ridiculous. Hot takes abound.
Azerbaijan used its TB2 drones like attack helicopters in "fast air" attacks.
So the tactics are familiar. The reason why armed drones are so disruptive is that they are cheaper
and more expendable and thus have an asymmetric impact on expensive air defense systems.
The US and other nations are spending millions of dollars on short ranger air defenses
or SHORAD to deal with threats like missiles. But inexpensive armed drones
bring a different type of threat to the table.
Current SHORAD defenses are not equipped to handle these. In September 2019,
a swarm of drones and cruise missiles attacked the Saudi Aramco oil facilities in Saudi Arabia.
The oil facilities were protected with three Skyguard short range air batteries
and at least one Patriot missile system.
But the drones flew too low for the Patriots to detect them, and too fast to be targeted by
the Skyguard. The attacks destabilized global oil markets and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Furthermore, these drones are cheap. The Turkish TB2 costs about $1 to 2 million to make
and sells for $5 million each. The Israeli IAI Harpy costs just $300,000 per munition.
For the estimated cost of one $14 million Apache, you can blanket the sky with these drones.
On the other side, each Patriot missile system costs some $1-6 million to produce.
Probably more to buy and run. Spending so much on something so cheap feels like
financial overkill - even without taking into account its efficacy.
Where the military spends its budget shows you where its concerns are.
In a recent round of budget cuts, just two segments got budget raises.
The first is cyber warfare. And the other is air defense.
They really care about this. And that is because there is no currently existing air defense system
reliably capable of dealing with this.
As with everything in this world, there is no golden bullet.
There should be a comprehensive strategy and that first starts with protection.
During the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, the Armenian military attempted to camouflage
their artillery and tanks. But since many of these drones have
advanced imaging capabilities - including infrared - it did not work all that well.
The concept of a fixed headquarters would be a dangerous one. In the coming years,
units are going to need to be more mobile.
I think ISIL back in its urban warfare days never had a traditional base of their own.
Next up is detection. Armed drones are hard to detect and it’s getting harder.
Many of them are now equipped with radar stealth technologies and are in general pretty small.
3D LIDAR technologies use a focused light beam to search for aerial threats.
These are very precise. But at the same time, they require
a line of sight which limits their range and usefulness in urban environments.
You can try to detect their electric signatures or
try to listen for the sound of their engines. But again, these drones are
rather small and it might be hard to hear their audio signature over the background.
Once you detected the drone swarm, you have to destroy it. Armies are
experimenting with a number of different methods.
I already discussed the shortcomings of modern SHORAD systems, but there are a few others.
One method is to jam the radio signals, disrupt their operations with erroneous information,
and attempt to take control away from the drone teams.
These do work, but can also be countered by the adversary.
I have seen the idea of laser and microwave weapons brought up. But a laser's effectiveness
is dependent on weather conditions and can be hard to target. They are also very expensive.
And in the case of loitering munitions, once it has identified its target and
started spiraling towards its target, it's too heavy to bring down with a laser.
Other less feasible ideas include using nets and training eagles and falcons to attack drones.
I am not quite sure if that is going to work too well.
One idea that I really like is a bit of a throwback. In Vietnam,
the United States employed M42 Dusters - armed with big quad-50 caliber machine guns. They were
deployed to defend convoys against low flying North Vietnamese aerial attacks and infantry.
These Dusters have guns that shoot at high velocity, which extends their range and makes
them easier to aim. They shoot at a massive rate of fire. They basically fill the air with lead.
And have high caliber, which gives them extra firepower for suppressive fire.
The Dusters were versatile, able to strike down low flying targets and
then immediately pivot to address concurrent infantry attacks. It makes a lot of sense in
an era where the strategy calls for drone strikes to be followed by infantry attacks.
The technological impact of this war will spread far beyond its immediate impact. Fighting forces
around the world - national or otherwise - are going to want a drone strategy now.
With everything that I have said so far about how amazing these drones are,
you also have to understand some of the context. While armed drones played
a large role in Azerbaijan winning the war, people still had to fight.
Note that the city of Shusha fell by special forces, not drone strikes. Official tallies
said that 2,820 Azerbaijanis soldiers died in the war, almost as many as the
3,360 Armenians per their official tally. Who knows what the real numbers are.
So yes, the Azerbaijanis won the war. But it was not only because they had drones. They also
had a well trained, well equipped, and well-led army. And it still cost them nearly 3,000 lives.
You cannot drone your way to a victory.