When drones stop being fun...

A forgotten war

There was a war that took place in 2020, and I am fairly sure you did not know much about it. After all, we were all caught in the middle of the Covid19 pandemic, so news about a small war declared between two little-known countries located in Southwest Asia, over the possession of an ever less known region in between them, surely would not raise our interest.

From a Western perspective, the Middle East and the places nearby are synonyms of armed conflict. Either initiated by ethnic, religious or land possession disagreements, the public feeling is that it is a place of the world where people had been fighting amongst them since the beginning of history. So, the level of interest that those conflicts create in the Western world only raises when its energy supply is endangered.

Nagorno-Karabakh?

Let me introduce you to the conflict known as the 2020 Second Nagorno-Karabakh war which took place between September 27 and November 10, 2020. Why the Second war?

Because of course there was a First Nagorno-Karabakh war, which took place between 1988 and 1994.

Let us go back in time and to the end of the eighties and try to understand the reasons for this conflict.

Some historical background

After the collapse of the USSR, which started around 1988, the coalescent factor that had been the Soviet Union's role in the coexistence of the Southern regions of the Soviet Empire started to melt away. And the consequence was that several long-time rivalries between ex-members of the USSR reappeared both suddenly and stronger than ever.

Nagorno-Karabakh is an area of 4400 square km located between the boundaries of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Republic of Armenia. Both countries are in the Caucasus, which is the region that separates Turkey from the Russian Federation. You can think of it like the Balkans, version 2.0.

The Caucasus

The countries located in the Caucasus are Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and include parts of Russia, Iran, and Tukey. Three countries are not fully recognized or even recognized at all: Abkhazia, Artsakh, and South Ossetia. And, in between these countries, numerous regions are aspiring to be autonomous or independent, although they currently belong to the Russian Federation’s North Caucasus region: Adjara, Adygea, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Krasnodar-Kai, Nakhichevan, North Ossetia-Alania, and Stavropol Krai.

The Caucasus

The contenders

Like in the Balkans, the Caucasus countries' history is a tale of continuous fights for independence, which are followed by new conquests by other countries, which eventually cause new fights for independence. In its current iteration, Azerbaijan’s independence was achieved in April 1991 and Armenia’s was proclaimed in September 1991. Both are Parliamentary Republics; Azerbaijan has a population of about 3.8 million people and Armenia’s population is roughly 3 million. Their GDPs are mostly similar, with Azerbaijan’s reaching about 16 billion USD and Armenia’s reaching about 13.5 billion USD.

Azerbaijan’s population is 97 % Islamic and 3% Orthodox Christian. It is a bi-cultural society influenced as strongly from its ancient traditions as well as from modern Western popular culture.

In sharp contrast, Armenia’s population is 98% Orthodox Christian (following the Armenian Apostolic Church), it has a western-oriented culture and has undergone steady economic progress that has received the support of international financial organizations.

Between these two countries lies the region of Nagorno-Karabakh which, as you may already have guessed, wants its independence. It is governed by the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh, which was first established after the first Nagorno-Karabakh war.

Nagorno-Karabakh

The conflict about Nagorno-Karabakh lies in the fact that its population of 142000 persons is composed of around 76% of Orthodox Christians that feel more affinity for Armenia than to Azerbaijan and 23 % of Muslims, who feel more favorable to continue being a part of Azerbaijan.

The area of Nagorno-Karabakh

The result of this situation is a great level of tension among the parts involved that now and then explodes into armed conflict.

The 2020 conflict started with an Azerbaijan offensive, which was followed by a call to total mobilization and martial law by both the Armenia and Artsakh governments. Azerbaijan had the assistance of Turkey and Armenia received help from Russia.

An age defining war

And after this somewhat long introduction, necessary to get a clear image of what and why is going on between these countries, we arrive at the reason for this article’s existence:

The 2020 Second Nagorno-Karabakh war will pass to history as the first one where the main weapon system employed by both rivals was based on the use of drones.

A Harop hitting its target

Both countries' militaries featured a hodgepodge collection of equipment from the Soviet era that, especially in their Air Forces, was showing their age. Ground forces equipment is more up to date and both countries based their forces around their missile forces. But instead of using ballistic and artillery-type missiles, this time both countries based their offensive and defensive strategies on the massive use of military drones, both sides having accumulated a few hundreds of them in the years before.

Attack of the drones

The Turkish made Bayraktar TB2 attack drone

Azerbaijan had acquired a considerable number of low-priced, Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones. These autonomous vehicles can fly up to 24 hours and can be equipped with light munitions for surgical attacks, and they are used in combination with Harop suicide drones acquired from Israel. The country employed these drones to inflict heavy damage against Armenian forces. Both countries had a limited stock of long-range missiles, and the conflict did not last long enough to force both armies to resupply and increase their respective missile arsenals.

The IAI Harop suicide drone

Armenian drones were less sophisticated than the ones employed by Azerbaijan and were mostly designed for reconnaissance purposes. Azerbaijan drone forces were mostly offensive ones and were used with deadly accuracy. Azerbaijan managed to gain control of the air space, being able to attack Armenian lines of supply and reserves without practical resistance.

Making high tech war on the cheap

In previous engagements, this kind of mission was performed by multi-role combat airplanes with a replacement price of a few ten million USD, cost tens of thousands USD per hour to operate, and require a pilot whose training costs a few million USD. Therefore, to perform an attack on a convoy of armored vehicles, with such a plane means to risk a system that will cost 30 to 40 million USD per unit to replace if it is lost in combat.??

In comparison, a Harop suicide drone with a cost of 2 to 3 million USD is in fact a much cheaper alternative. A force of ten multi-role fighter planes represents an investment of 400 to 500 million USD, with the same amount of money you can acquire two hundred Harop drones plus the control stations and the training and still have some change for spares. Your pilots are safe operating the drones from behind the lines and if the drone he is piloting is shot down he simply goes to have a cup of coffee until a replacement drone is ready.

A Harop drone delivery truck

Another benefit: drones' delivery is a precision task, even more with suicide drones. There is no personal risk in carefully targeting the weapon’s delivery. A suicide drone does not have to perform any targeting, it just must be aimed at the target.

Additional advantages are easy maintenance, keeping fighter planes in mission-ready status is a complex task that requires well-trained personnel and expensive stocks of spare parts. Jet fuel is expensive and difficult to transport. Airbases are expensive and vulnerable.

Armed combat-capable drones give small armies with scarce budgets the capacity to perform the same precise strike warfare ability that, just a few years ago, was exclusive to world-class powers.

A Harop hitting its target

After the conflict

Azerbaijan's combat strategy was successful, its drone forces caused heavy losses in equipment and personnel in the Armenian military that forced Armenia to reach a cease of fire and disappointing peace agreement which forced the cession of sizeable areas of its territory. Nagorno-Karabakh remains under Azerbaijan's control.

Final thoughts

If these facts seem to belong to a science fiction story, you are right. I remember reading some Philip K. Dick short stories and novels that described such combat environments, typically featuring killer drones running amok after their human controllers are dead. We are not at that level of technology yet, but given the current speed of development of AI technology, it is not difficult to imagine AI-driven drones in the battlegrounds of the near future, making “traditional” weapon systems such as multi-role fighters, main battle tanks, and armored personnel carriers a thing of the past.

Battleground as seen from a TB2 drone's camera

Whether this is an advance towards war without human losses, or the ability to declare war without the need to risk your troops, and at the same time being able to perform surgical precision attacks in deep enemy ground, is something that we will only know after this tech has been used. And that moment may be too late.

Mirko Torrez Contreras?is a Process Automation consultant and trainer with a love /hate relationship with all things military. He is fascinated by the technology employed but horrified by its use. The opinions exposed in this article are strictly personal. No affiliation exists between the author and the companies, organizations, and countries mentioned. All the information required for and employed in this article is of public knowledge.