Is the age of drones really the age of poor maneuver?

On today’s battlefields, drones are undeniably lethal. They kill with precision, shape movement across the battlespace, and impose a constant psychological presence. Their hum has become synonymous with modern combat, and combat footage from Ukraine appears to suggest that their sound is a defining feature of 21st-century war. Analysts and policymakers increasingly speak of drones as transformational weapons as they appear to have fundamentally altered the character of ground combat

But history urges caution. In Rethinking Military History, Jeremy Black cautions against technological determinism, suggesting to us that “the age of cavalry was really the age of bad infantry — a political, not a technological, phenomenon.” According to historians like Black and Stephen Morillo, cavalry did not dominate medieval battlefields because it was inherently superior. It dominated because the Roman institutions that once produced disciplined mass infantry had collapsed.

The question we face today is not whether drones matter — they clearly do. We seek here to recognize the genuine innovation of modern unmanned systems — their rapid iteration, accessibility, and integration into kill chains once reserved for states now exists at the squad level. However, innovation does not necessarily constitute a revolution. And in making this argument, we are revising some of our earlier views. The real question is whether their apparent dominance signals a true revolution in military affairs or if it simply exposes more familiar issues: institutional failure, fragile maneuver culture, and the lack of combined arms.

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