Thinking about the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, part two: so what were the drones good for?

So. To be clear, this was actually the thing I wanted to write about, but as usual I got distracted by the question of whether drone warfare has rendered tanks obsolete and had to split that off into a separate post. But then, if they haven’t made tanks obsolete, just what have they done instead?

Well, to begin with, I guess an overview of the previous conflicts over Nagorno-Karabakh is in order. Let’s just say that since the first war in 1988-94 established the front lines of the frozen conflict, the war had settled down into an affair of static lines akin to the Western Front of World War I. This is by no means unusual; many mid-sized regional wars towards the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st have gravitated in this direction, including the Iran-Iraq War during the 1980s, Indo-Pakistani clashes in the 1990s and 2000s, and the ongoing conflict in Eastern Ukraine from 2014 onwards. This tendency has been attributed to a variety of factors, but in most cases it’s either a lack of capacity to break the static stalemate or — where the capacity wasn’t lacking — a lack of political will to escalate the conflict to a degree that would justify bringing forth the capacity to break the stalemate, often partly due to fears of intervention by stronger neighbouring powers. As I understand it, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict from the end of the first war in 1994 had largely been seen as a case of the former, since that war’s conclusion left the Azerbaijani government and military forces in disarray; indeed, the first few days of the war actually followed the familiar pattern of conflicts that had been observed before in 2016 and again in July 2020, where Azerbaijani forces mounted limited offensives against a relatively small section of Armenian (or Artsakh) trench lines and managed to secure small gains at the start of the fighting, but the Armenian/Artsakh forces would then mount counterattacks (often facilitated by the initial withdrawal from the territory gained by the Azerbaijanis, which allowed their artillery to fire more freely at pre-registered targets in the captured trench lines) that wiped out most or all of the Azerbaijani gains. Even after Azerbaijani offensives started pushing back the front lines by a significant extent in the south, their advance was still slow and gradual compared to the heavy casualties they were inflicting (and taking), and some external observers still had grounds to express skepticism that the invasion would lead to any lasting operational or strategic results two weeks into the war.