Aditya Ramanathan
In 1898, the Polish-Russian banker Ivan Bloch published a prophetic six-volume study on the future of war. His work not only predicted the profound political and economic effects of a war involving European powers but also the horrific battlefield stalemate that would ensue because of machine guns and long range artillery.
It would take two years of carnage in the First World War’s Western Front to painfully birth new technologies and tactics that could break the deadlock. By the end of that war, the victorious armies had learnt to employ tanks, artillery, and heavily armed infantry in a carefully orchestrated symphony that would bloodily restore movement to land warfare.
It was a lesson in the transformation of warfare that would echo well into the twenty first century. Today, more than two years into the Russia-Ukraine war, onlookers in India have much to learn. If analysts of the First World War turned their attention to tanks and submarines, we must consider the impact of that broad category of systems we call drones.
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