George Friedman, chairman of Geopolitical Futures, has argued that two ongoing conflicts - the US-Iran war and Russia's invasion of Ukraine - have together proven that drones have fundamentally changed warfare, making large-scale ground invasions effectively obsolete.
Speaking on the Geopolitical Futures podcast, Friedman told host Christian Smith that strategic depth - once measured in tens or hundreds of miles - no longer protects an army from the enemy, "Hvylya" reports.
"It is no longer infantry on infantry combat. It is no longer an artillery range. It is now a thousand miles, two thousand miles," Friedman said. "And therefore what does it mean to be able to invade and occupy a country, when from a thousand miles away massive bombs can be targeted at you?"
Friedman drew a direct line between the Russian experience in Ukraine and the American posture in Iran. Russia's massed infantry assaults failed because Ukrainian drones - guided by Western intelligence - made troop concentrations suicidal. The US is now learning the same lesson. Threatening to deploy 10,000 or even 100,000 troops into Iran while Iranian drones remain active and intelligence from Russian satellites flows into Tehran would expose massed forces to precision strikes.
"One of the mistakes the Russians made is they didn't realize how much intelligence the Ukrainians were getting from the Americans and the Europeans, on precisely where the Russians were massing troops," Friedman said. "This is the second war based on this, and the Americans are experiencing the same thing the Russians did."
Friedman noted that small-unit tactical combat - the kind of village-by-village fighting in the Donbas - still relies on riflemen. But the large armored thrusts and massed infantry offensives that defined wars from World War II through the 2003 Iraq invasion are no longer viable against a defender armed with cheap precision drones.
Also read: how the CEO of Europe's biggest arms maker described the drones reshaping modern battlefields.