The changing economics of war
From our UK edition
On 15 September 1916, at Flers-Courcelette, 49 Mark I tanks rolled into no-man’s land. Most broke down. The ones that kept going shocked the German line and took three villages by lunchtime. Douglas Haig wired London for a thousand more. Building armoured vehicles in volume shaped the next century of wars. An even bigger shift is under way. The drone has done to the tank what the tank did to the trench. But not only the tank is affected. Drones are changing almost every capability and domain of warfare. Roughly 90 per cent of battlefield casualties in Ukraine now stem from drones. Colonel Al Carns, minister for the armed forces and a former special forces officer himself, notes that one drone now delivers the lethality of 22 artillery shells.
