A recent report highlights the central role that drones now play on the battlefield in the war Russia is waging against Ukraine. The way battles are currently being fought on the front lines bears little resemblance to the combat scenes witnessed in the early days of 2022. The question the report's authors try to answer is whether the Russian army is learning the lessons of drone warfare and adapting its tactics and plans accordingly. The overall assessment, made by military specialists who have published articles on the war and been interviewed, stated that planners in Moscow are still hampered by the Russian army's old organizational structure, which is unsuitable for this type of warfare. Experts like Dara Massicot of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington say this is one of the main reasons the Russian army is unable to 'keep up with the way the war is being managed.' This rigid approach was confirmed by a report from the American Foreign Policy Research Institute about three years ago, titled 'The Roots of the Russian Army's Dysfunction.' The report detailed how 'a reluctance to decentralize decision-making is a symptom of more than five centuries of absolute rule in Russia, which is why Russia lacks effective junior officers and has a hierarchical command and control system that is slow to provide timely guidance to troops on the front lines.' This raises the question: what will happen next in the conflict? Moscow has historically relied on a consistent approach to war based on numbers. Since the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), Moscow's battle plan has been to amass forces that outnumber the enemy in terms of soldiers, tanks, and artillery, believing that sheer numbers would eventually overwhelm enemy positions. American historian Stephen Kotkin, a specialist in Stalin-era Russian history, described how the Soviet army was eventually able to defeat the Nazi German army through this very practice, noting that the Kremlin did not care about the number of casualties, just as Russian President Vladimir Putin does today. Kotkin explained how Stalin defeated Hitler on the battlefield by saying: 'In this way, Stalin sent these soldiers, who were essentially enslaved collective farm workers, to face the German units, and when they were all killed, Stalin had a simple solution: he would gather another million collective farm workers to replace them.' To the Russian army's misfortune, the Ukrainians discovered how to turn these traditional practices on their head, in what many are now calling the 'drone game.' Large Russian formations are now so vulnerable to drone attacks that the Russian army has been forced to completely change the way it deploys its troops, sending out small teams of three to five soldiers to try to seize territory. However, these tactics have not yielded any significant territorial gains for the Russian army, have not helped capture much land, and Russian units are barely advancing amidst heavy losses. Under more normal circumstances, military experts and analysts could engage in a public dialogue that might lead to changes in Moscow's plans. However, as veteran Russian military analyst Alexander Golts noted, these commentators 'cannot directly blame the Kremlin' for any problems, and instead clarified that their criticism should be limited to blaming Russian military experience.
