Have drones changed the nature of war?

'No', argues Lieutenant Colonel Matt Wilks, RA

Matt sent me this recently, and was persuaded to let me put it up on the blog. He captures brilliantly the challenge posed to military thinking by the advent of something new on the battlefield. Drones in Ukraine have prompted much excited comment about how drones have changed the nature of warfare: read Matt’s response to disabuse yourself of such a silly idea. We still need artillery, and lots of it, to be able to achieve decisive manoeuvre and thus secure an operational advantage on the battlefield, as we have always done.

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Inna Varenytsia/Reuters

Today, Hesketh-Prichard would have been a drone operator

What Ukraine’s War Really Tells Us About Firepower

Today, it seems many in our Army are rushing to frame Ukraine’s war as a window into an enduring revolution in the conduct of combat on land - they see a battlefield defined by drones, not artillery; by networks, not shells. But their conclusions, selectively drawn from a handful of seemingly compelling data points, and driven by groupthink, miss the deeper pattern.

Ukraine’s front lines more often resemble the static trench warfare of 1915 than any future scenario of sweeping manoeuvre warfare. And the drone, rather than heralding an age of ubiquitous mobility, has become a modern answer to a very old tactical problem:

How to kill the enemy when the battlefield will not move.

In truth, what we are seeing is not something new. It is exactly what Hesketh-Prichard - the man who revolutionised British sniping in the First World War - would have done had he been able to trade his accurised Lee-Enfields for quadcopters.

From Loophole to Lens

Hesketh-Prichard, a big game hunter turned soldier, arrived at the Western Front in 1915 at a time when German snipers, killing from concealed positions with telescopic rifles, were utterly dominating British trenches. The British, lacking sniping training, doctrine, or even equipment, were suffering avoidable casualties and had ceded the initiative.

Prichard responded with practical innovation: he established the first dedicated sniper school, he drove technical development of telescopic sights and accurised rifles, introduced camouflage and decoys, and emphasised rigorous observation. Over time, his snipers became not just a reaction to German sniping, but established dominance and delivered lethal offensive pressure.

In a war where movement was near impossible, precision sniping became power.

The parallels with the use of land tactical drones in Ukraine is striking. Ukrainian drone teams -typically small, dispersed, and operating with a high degree of autonomy - are using drones not to conduct deep strike or to support fast manoeuvre, but to exert control over static sectors of the front; much like snipers dominating a stretch of no-man’s-land from a concealed loophole; they:

• perform persistent ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance)

• deliver munitions with precision and

• deny the enemy the ability to move freely

In this static reality, lethality comes from the persistent ability to watch and punish.

Challenging ‘Wrong Lessons’

Many analysts and commentators here, eager to draw future conclusions from present events, and perhaps appear ‘can do’, or simply conform to such groupthink, point to the prevalence of drones in Ukraine and assert that they herald the decline - or even the obsolescence - of conventional artillery. The logic goes: why field expensive, logistically intensive artillery (particularly as we barely have any), when small drones can deliver small precision kills on demand?

But they are confusing context with trajectory. The current war in Ukraine is not a theatre of manoeuvre warfare. It is a theatre defined by deep entrenchment, long-term positional defence and an operational tempo dictated by artillery availability, minefields, and overwatch. Thoughts of ‘freedom of action’ or ‘exploitation’ are aspirational rather than ground truth. In such an environment, it is entirely logical that small drones thrive. But to suggest that they replace the artillery fires element of combined arms manoeuvre warfare - the massed, suppressive, shaping fires that enable breakthrough and mobility - is to (mis)project the tactics of static defence onto the doctrine of manoeuvre.

Against a massed enemy, a drone delivering a grenade into a trench is not a manoeuvre-enabling artillery fire mission; it is a small, static act of tactical attrition.

Then and Now

In the spring of 1916, Prichard’s snipers were achieving kill ratios of over 20:1. Trenches that had been sniping death traps for unwary British soldiers became lethal zones for the enemy. Decoys drew fire to reveal enemy sniper positions; mirrored scopes allowed sniping from cover, rifle accuracy was revolutionised. It was a meticulous, patient, and clinical approach to combat, driven by the needs and conditions of static trench warfare.

Fast forward to 2025, and Ukrainian drone operators in Bakhmut or Avdiivka are fulfilling the same tactical need. A single quadcopter team working from a bunker or tree line can fix and destroy an enemy anti-tank position, drop munitions into trench shelters, or fly bait drones to draw out enemy positions. Just as German snipers once forced British troops to crawl below the parapet, so too have Ukrainian drones forced Russian soldiers underground.

But none of this has generated manoeuvre. Ukrainian forces still struggle to exploit breaches due to dense minefields, rapid artillery responses, and lack of massed mobile assets. The fight remains - like the 1915 Western Front - a grim grind of metres. There is no meaningful manoeuvre.

The Real Future of Fire Support

The temptation to declare a doctrinal shift - from artillery to drone, from massed firepower to precision strike - is explainable. But it is wrong. Artillery is not obsolete; it is constrained by logistics and geography (and, in the case of the British Army, lack of platforms). ‘Conventional’ firepower is not redundant; there’s no binary ‘artillery or drones’ argument, what we are seeing is the additive delivery of lethal fires through new means in a highly specific context. Drones are not redefining the fight; they are adding to it tactically, because the fight is static.

The truer interpretation is that drones are a new instrument of precision killing in positional warfare - just as sniper rifles were in 1915. Drones enable tactical initiative in a static context where operational initiative is rare. They dominate, they attrit, they punish. But they do not replace the firepower that enables manoeuvre.

Institutionally, if we continue to fail to challenge ‘wrong lessons’ - that this is the future of all conflict - the risk is that we disproportionately invest in capabilities tailored to stalemate and neglect those that can win freedom of action.

The true lesson from Ukraine may be more modest:

when you cannot move, you must fight smart. And when the front will not bend, you must innovate to dominate.

Conclusion: Tactical Innovation in Strategic Stasis

The Ukrainians are not rewriting the rules of warfare. What we are seeing is not a transformation in combined arms manoeuvre, but a modern reincarnation of trench sniping - updated with commercial drones, thermal cameras, and digital targeting.

In 1915, it was Hesketh-Prichard with a telescope and a steel loophole plate. In 2025, it is a Ukrainian drone operator with a joystick and a GoPro. The tools have changed; the tactical logic has not.

To misread this as a revolution in offensive fire support is to ignore the fundamental nature of the battlefield. The drone is not the death of artillery, nor a substitute for the suppressive, shaping fires required to unlock mobility. It is the sniper rifle that flies.

And if Hesketh-Prichard were alive today, he would not be behind a scope. He would be in a dugout, eyes on a monitor, sending precision strikes downrange - one flight at a time.