When Azerbaijan took over the skies in its fight with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh last fall, winning the air war with commercial Turkish and kamikaze drones, one thing started to become clear to U.S. Army strategists: it is becoming easier to hunt and kill troops than ever before - and to do so on the cheap, Foreign Policy
reports.
With inexpensive, combat-ready drones proliferating on battlefields all over the world, in the not-too-distant future unsuspecting soldiers might get killed just by getting out of their positions for a moment to go to the bathroom.
What has become apparent after last fall is that not only will the U.S. military no longer enjoy uncontested air superiority against peer rivals like China - something Defense Department officials have long resigned themselves to - but that poorer nations can buy themselves a respectable air force mostly off the shelf.
What is clear in that conflict is that a less funded nation can do combined arms warfare. You do not have to be the United States or Russia. The price point to entry into combined arms warfare is lower than initially thought. You do not need something like the United States Air Force, a superbly trained, spectacular capability, in order to conduct potentially a local air-to-ground or air-to-air activity.
During the six-week conflict, Azerbaijan deployed Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones and loitering munitions, many of them Israeli-made.
Many experts think that the war in Nagorno-Karabakh is another sign that the days of the U.S. military relying on overwhelming ‘shock and awe’ bombing campaigns, like those that marked the start of both Iraq wars, are over.
