What happens when 'precision effects' from the air are available to everyone? Nagorno-Karabakh is now the latest conflict where a new way of remote war is evolving with cheap persistent UAVs, micro-munitions and loitering anti-radar drones, striking tanks, vehicles, artillery pieces and even SAM sites with lethal precision. The use of these Turkish-made armed UAVs by Azerbaijan against Armenian ground forces, follows similar results in Northern Syria and Libya this year, where even the presence of the latest Russian-built air defence systems like Pantsir S-1 SA-22s made little difference to countering these air strikes from armed UAVs. Even if destroyed, the low-cost and ultra-rapid development of such platforms means that a newer version, with lessons learned, will likely be heading for the battlefield in short order. Though technically not classed as an integrated 'swarm' of co-ordinating UAVs, the number of drones being used in this latest conflict, as judged by the sheer amount of target video footage released in a short time, is a measure of the damage that these drones can inflict on fielded forces when used in significant numbers at once to overwhelm and disrupt the enemy. For countries like Azerbaijan, which fields a squadron of MiG-29s and Su-25s each as its main offensive air power, using cheap, disposable drones and loitering munitions in this way gives them a precision strike and a SEAD capability that even some NATO countries may envy. For Western forces, that have enjoyed almost uninterrupted air superiority since Korea, this should be a critical wake-up call to invest in long-neglected organic air defences and to think anew about camouflage and concealment from these unblinking eyes in the sky - and how to counter these threats. It will not be the last time we see this - as the use of drones expands from hunting insurgents to state-on-state war.
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