- Infantry’s heaviest weapons like mortars and machine guns are obsolete, a Russian strategist argues.
- He believes drones will replace them, making infantry units smaller and lighter.
- Light machine guns are the centerpiece of infantry squads.
Infantry troops today typically carry machine guns, an automatic grenade launcher, mortars and anti-tank missiles. Yet everything but their assault rifles is about to be functionally obsolete as infantry small units get lighter and faster, a Russian military strategist argues.
First-person view, or FPV, drones “will essentially displace all group infantry weapons, all anti-tank weapons, and will take on most of the tasks of artillery,” argued Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies think tank, in an essay for the Russian state-run newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
Pukhov believes that combat will be waged by squad-sized units comprising FPV attack drone operators and infantry, backed by reconnaissance UAVs and electronic jammers. “Accordingly, the most important area of military affairs will also be the fight against enemy FPV drones,” he warned in a provocative reassessment of land warfare. What the drones can’t reach, such as targets deep in the enemy rear, will be targeted by long-range guided missiles.
Since the First World War, when riflemen were decimated assaulting enemy trenches and machine gun nests, the infantry have been armed with their own portable heavy weapons to reduce their dependence on artillery and other external fire support. Starting with light machine guns around 1915, grunts have been equipped with light mortars, anti-tank rocket launchers, grenade launchers, guided anti-tank missiles, and most recently drones.
Light machine guns such as the US M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) made by FN Manufacturing LLC or the World War II German MG42 are the centerpieces of infantry squads. With their high rate of fire, they form a base of firepower for riflemen to maneuver. However, these are typically direct-fire weapons that require a line of sight to the target. The problem is that if you can see the enemy, they can see you, which invites counterfire.
However, tactical drones can be launched and operated from miles behind the front line, out of sight of the enemy. In Ukraine, troops don’t maneuver much in the open anymore, especially in large groups. Instead, the combatants stay under the protection of their entrenchments, while launching thousands of drones every day to patrol the front lines for targets, and what they spot is targeted with exploding drones and artillery.
“For centuries, line-of-sight fire was the basis for destruction in combat, and the foundations of tactics were built around ensuring the effectiveness of such fire,” Pukhov wrote. “Now there is no need to see the enemy directly in front of you.”
“They can theoretically be seen from any distance and destroyed with the same high accuracy. The survivability of remote dispersed platforms for destruction from closed positions and their crews is much higher than any weapon for conducting line-of-sight fire.”
The thought of infantry giving up their machine guns and mortars — and relying exclusively on drones — leaves American defense experts aghast. “If someone had told me, ‘Hey, we’ll give you all these drones, and you’ve got to give up your .50-caliber and M240 machine guns,’ I would have told them they’re crazy,” Gian Gentile, a RAND Corp. researcher and a retired US Army colonel who commanded armored cavalry in Iraq, told Business Insider.
Drones are vulnerable to jamming and aerial attack, and are hampered by bad weather or smoke. An infantry squad whose only heavy weapons were drones would be putting all its eggs in one basket. But those eggs are expendable: Ukraine reported losing 10,000 drones per month in 2023, mostly to Russian jamming. A heavy machine gun that fires more than 100 rounds a minute, by contrast, makes two soldiers able to create a killing zone within 2,000 feet of their position.
Pukhov also believes that drones and other indirect fire weapons have made tanks obsolete. “All fire missions performed by a tank in combat can now be assigned to much cheaper, more effective and covert means of high-precision destruction from closed positions — from FPV drones to guided artillery shells and tactical over-the-horizon missile systems,” wrote Pukhov, citing weapons such as Israel’s non-line-of-sight Spike tactical missile.
Drones will also replace artillery, Pukhov argues. “They are already capable of operating at the full range of artillery.” Indeed, FPV drones controlled by fiber-optic cables — which can’t be electronically jammed — have been hitting targets 10 miles behind the front lines, which historically has been a zone covered by artillery.
In theory, this creates a devastating double punch. Massive numbers of cheap FPV drones can flood the front lines. Longer-range weapons, such as the American-made ATACMS ballistic missile (200 mile range) and HIMARS guided artillery rockets (50 mile range) can hit targets farther in the rear.
However, Gentile is dubious that small drones dropping small bombs or grenades are equivalent to the firepower of howitzers and multiple rocket launchers. “The kind of mass effects that you can create with artillery” is what enables the attacker to create decisive penetrations of enemy defenses, said Gentile, who also believes that tanks can still be effective if properly supported by air defenses and jammers.
Still, most experts would agree that drones are transforming warfare. Pukhov predicts that operations will devolve to “the use of troops in small groups, subdivisions, and individual vehicles, dispersing them as much as possible. The impossibility of concentrating forces overturns all the foundations of military affairs.”
This has grave implications. The concentration of force is considered one of the basic principles of war. Great commanders like Napoleon achieved stunning victories because they massed their troops where the enemy was weak. If Pukhov is right, and the future is highly dispersed operations by small units, then armies may have difficulty achieving decisive results.
Yet the history of military affairs suggest the dominance of drones may be fleeting. The longbow, the armored knight, and the tank all seemed ascendant for a time until some other weapon or tactic ended their reign of terror. Drones have revolutionized warfare, but they won’t be the last revolution.
Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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