Traditional manoeuvre warfare built around tanks, infantry, engineers, air defence and electronic warfare can no longer survive on the modern battlefield, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director General David Petraeus (retired) told NDTV at an interaction on Friday.
"Look, this is, as you just said, the most profound period of change in warfare in our lifetimes," General Petraeus, who previously commanded American and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, said at the NDTV World Summit when asked what India should do about the changing battlefront.
"Every military in the world needs to recognise the urgent need for revolutionary institutional change," he said.
General Petraeus highlighted the need to know the difference between a complete overhaul and routine defence upgrades.
"Institutional change is different from modernisation or procuring new weapons systems. This means everything changes and it has to start with the entire concept of warfare. This is totally different."
On the ground in Ukraine where General Petraeus recently completed his "10th or 11th trip" since the war with Russia began, legacy combat formations have been wiped off the surface, he said.
"Warfare is totally transformed. Traditional manoeuvre warfare, tanks, infantry, engineers, air defence, electronic warfare, all of that, it can't survive," General Petraeus said. "You basically have what could be called a kill zone or a death zone, which extends from wherever the frontline of troops is, which is not a line anymore. By the way, if you have trenches, you can fly a drone into a trench. Anything that is exposed will be seen."
With the surface rendered uninhabitable, combat forces have been forced to go underground and they can't even see out except because they have observation devices, General Petraeus said, adding they are resupplied by remotely driven ground vehicles and remotely piloted air vehicles but not by humans anymore.
Above them, Russian troops trying to advance have abandoned massed assaults and started sending a single soldier or two darting across a street to the next building to establish a foothold, or sprinting to the next treeline to dig in quickly before the drones respond, the former CIA chief said.
"They see it immediately," said General Petraeus, who spent hours inside Ukrainian operations centres observing the feeds. "I've spent hours sitting in operation centres covered with screens and you can see a little red light come on when they actually see a Russian soldier. They'll put that on the big screen and follow it until the end and it does not end well for a Russian soldier, I can tell you."
The number of unmanned systems used in this war has dwarfed every other active conflict with Ukraine deploying "over 10,000 drones per day" while Russia is catching up with a "very large numbers" of ballistic missiles, General Petraeus said.
"In fact, I don't think Iran has probably used more than 10,000 drones in the entire conflict and they have been very, very problematic. Imagine if there were 10,000 drones coming across the Gulf each 24-hour period?"
According to General Petraeus, however, even with 20,000 drones filling the skies daily "we're not yet at truly autonomous warfare." Systems that operate without a human to pilot or drive them are still in early experimentation and the world would likely see "greater numbers of that maybe by the end of this year or sometime next year. That will be another transformation because now you have drone swarms coming at you."
All of these factors combined have necessitated a dismantling of legacy procurement and force structures.
"You relook your entire force structure and do away with a lot of the legacy systems. You have to change, obviously, how you train, how you educate your leaders, what you buy and how you buy it," he said.
"The whole interaction with the military-industrial complex is very, very dramatically different. You have to be able to do software changes every week, hardware changes every few weeks, and then even your personnel policies and the facilities for all of this... Many of our (American) bases in the Middle East have been heavily hit and have to be re-examined. We're going to have to go underground or take other measures and provide much better protection, especially against drones."
On his own tenure reshaping the US military's doctrine in Iraq and Afghanistan, General Petraeus said they thought they had conducted quite a substantial institutional change for the era of counterinsurgency.
"I was privileged to play a big role in that. That was nothing compared with what needs to be done now," he said.