Drones vs artillery firepower: Is the relevance of conventional artillery declining?

In 2020, a series of videos appeared on social media timelines as Azerbaijan’s MoD began publishing its videos of drone-strikes in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. The Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2s seemed to range freely, striking targets deep in the Armenian rear, including Air Defence (AD) systems and frontline defences.

These, it seemed, were true game changers, representing war-winning capability. As if as a harbinger to this, the spectre of droneswarm threats was portrayed in a 2017 YouTube video ‘Slaughterbots’, and its 2021 sequel, portraying the lethality/unpredictability of AI-enabled drones and drone-swarms, especially in the hands of inimical elements!

The world, with unabated fervour, continues describing the exploits of drones in the Russia-Ukraine War (RUW), the Israel-Hamas/Hezbollah standoff and most recently, in the extensive bilateral use of these Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) during Operation Sindoor, India’s moniker for the four-day India-Pakistan conflict that unfolded in May this year, as a fallout of the heinous Pahalgam massacre.





While such interest or obsession with drones in modern warfare is understandable, it may not be out of place to state that drones have been participants in combat since the beginning of the 20th century! While the ambit of drones now extends into all three domains of land, sea and air, this article will restrict itself in scope to attributes/trends of aerial drones, and their comparison with the facets of another, more revered, and indispensable facet of warfighting i.e. Artillery firepower, based on the overwhelming usage of both these assets in modern combat.

This article was originally published on chanakya diaries.