As the war in the Ukraine grinds on toward a Russian victory, many videos have emerged in which drones zero in on and then kill hapless soldiers in the field. The scenes are often ghoulish and pathetic. A man curls up in a foxhole and begs the robot floating above him for forgiveness as it drops a grenade into his lap. Or a truck driver runs circles around his destroyed vehicle as a drone chases him — mocks him by speeding up and slowing down — and then the machine rushes in to detonate in the man’s face. Both sides have been doing this kind of thing, though the Ukrainians seem to relish the videos more on the internet since they are more Westernized and media-brained. It’s vicious and dishonorable and adds yet another dash of horror to what has been a very nasty war. But the use of these “hunter-killer” drones to finish off wounded men in the field also seems foolish from a tactical perspective.
There’s a reason the term “casualty” refers to those wounded and missing in addition to those killed. All of these mean troops removed from the battlefield equation. But the grim reality is that in modern warfare where you’re engaging the enemies total logistical machinery, grievously wounding soldiers is even more effective than killing them. More men risk injury or death by removing the wounded from danger, transporting them is a heavy task especially if their wounds are severe, and medical treatment and rehabilitation consume enormous resources behind the lines. Seeing their comrades crippled and disfigured also demoralizes the troops that remain. Dead men are silent, while the wails of wounded infantry in the “No Man’s Land” of the First World War drove those in the trenches to insanity.
The Viet Cong understood this. Their booby traps of choice — punji sticks, snake pits, “Bouncing Betty” mines and the like — were designed to injured more than kill. If they did prove lethal to some, that was fine, especially if the death was slow and soaked up medical resources beforehand. But the goal was to discombobulate and terrify the American soldiers that were fighting in foreign territory under the constant anxiety of an all-encompassing battlefield with no true front. VC snipers would shoot to wound in the hopes that other GIs would expose themselves to help them, which they often did until there were enough veterans in the ranks that knew better. The goal was to instill fear and to stress the American military’s capacities and morale, goals toward which wounding the enemy was as effective as killing them. Meanwhile the American military focused on “body counts” in order to appeal to the Pentagon’s framing of the war to its supplicants, which was itself influenced by the framing by the media. The VC were adept at denying them even this victory metric, as they pulled their own dead from the field whenever possible so they couldn’t be counted. In the end, the Americans became demoralized and lost the war.
So while these drone attacks may inspire terror, that terror would still exist if the soldiers feared losing their eyes or their legs or their testicles. After they’d been in the trenches for a while, soldiers in the First World War often said they feared maiming more than death. The new weapons ripped men’s groins apart with shrapnel and burned their eyes with poison gas, and after seeing this over and over many men would opt for the quick shot to the head. So while these hunter-killer drones taking men out with merciless lethality is create new nightmares on the battlefield, the future will likely feature more drone versions of punji sticks. Designed for maximum suffering with minimal immediate death so as to stress and demoralize the enemy’s combat potential. One can imagine whizz-bang drones that explode with thousands of shards of glass coated with debilitating chemicals, or swarms of flying blades programmed to target men’s limbs or their eyes. Some of this may already be taking place in the Donbass as the war careens into that always-nasty final chapter.
These are not recommendations. More a vision of where drone warfare will take us as its practitioners sharpen their approach, and focus less on Mortal Kombat-style ‘Fatalities” primed for the internet.