The Economist January 29th 2022 Technology Quarterly Defence technology 3
Waramong the sensors
T
he warwhich began when Azerbaijan attacked its neighbour
Armenia on September 27th 2020 was a bloody affair, with over
7,000 lives lost. The previous war between the countries, which
dragged on from 1988 to 1994, had left Armenian forces occupying
much of NagornoKarabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave within
Azerbaijan. When, in 2020, the guns fell silent after just 44 days,
Azerbaijan had taken back threequarters of the territory those
forces had held in and around the enclave—a victory as decisive as
any in recent years.
Azerbaijan had some advantages at the outset. It had a larger
population and a bigger military budget, far more artillery pieces
and a better equipped air force. That said, much of its equipment
dated back to the Soviet era, which is to say to that previous war
where it had proved ineffective. And it is a military dictum that,
other things being equal, an attacker needs a force perhaps three
times larger than the one under attack to prevail.
But the Azeris also had a fleet of drones which included tb2s
procured from Turkey and Harops bought from Israel. The tb2s,
with a wingspan of 12 metres, were remotecontrolled, could
launch either bombs or missiles, and stayed in the air for up to 24
hours at a time. The Harops were smaller, stealthier, more autono
mous and designed for kamikaze attacks on radars. Between them
they blew up more than twodozen airdefence systems and
scores of artillery pieces. Hundreds of armoured vehicles were de
stroyed. A similar bonfire of armour had played out in Syria’s Idlib
province earlier that year, where Turkey’s tb2s obliterated the Syr
ian tank fleet in a twoday blitz.
Military leaders across the world paid close attention. “The
hallmarks of a different form of land warfare are already appar
ent,” General Sir Mark CarletonSmith, Britain’s chief of general
staff, told a conference which took place a year after the conflict.
“Small wars...are already throwing up some quite big lessons.”
The drones themselves were only a part of the curriculum. The
rest looked at the command, control and communications sys
tems that gathered information on what needed to be hit, decided
priorities and brought them about. Satellite communications let
tactical commanders see what the drones saw and feed them tar
gets identified by other means. In Azerbaijan Turkish radarspot
ting spy planes seem to have provided some spotting; Turkey’s
groundbased koralsystem, which detects and jams enemy ra
dars, helped the tankbusting drones over Idlib.
Joo joo eyeball
This sort of highly networked warfare is something military tech
nologists have been working on for decades. Its true believers
imagine a “battlespace”—think of an oldfashioned, seen
throughbinoculars, twodimensional, shipssoldiersandtanks
battlefield, but extended vertically all the way up to orbit and elec
tronically well out into infrared and radar wavelengths—in which
ubiquitous sensors can pass targeting information to all sorts of
“shooters” through seamless communication networks.
Huge investments have provided the great powers—preemi
nently, America—and developedworld allies with some of these
wished for capabilities. As General Mark Milley, America’s top mil
Is it possible to survive on a battlefield where every weapon has the sensors of a smartphone
and they all talk to each other? Shashank Joshi reports
Hide and seek