Modern military doctrine was really defined by Nazi operations in WW2, but what's missed is that the Nazis failed (and for good reason). The depth of supply lines required for an occupation (not just a decapitating strike like France) are immense and infeasible. That's been proven time and time again by both the US and USSR, and now by Russia.

After the attempted decapitation strike on Kyiv failed, the Russian offensive faltered and had to regroup.

I can't find the link, but I saw a video of a training exercise where an F-35 dropped a shit-ton of autonomous drones, and they circled until they each had an individual target, then plunged right into them.

Fuck that. You have zero warning because you can't see the F-35 and you can't see the drones until they turn your lights off.

I think the whole concept of air superiority is also under question.

How do you have air superiority when hundreds of drones can be launched without airfields or any real infrastructure required?

How do you gain it when SEAD type missions would be constantly needed against hundreds of drones which cost a fraction of the cost of the munitions used against them?

Thing is, modern drones that can take out tanks don't really need staging areas. You can fit one in your backpack and operate it out of a hole in the ground.

With the freedom of the Internet though, open-source drone development might be able to achieve far lower costs than what government procurement can.

Hardening of communications isn't THAT complicated, after all.

There are no real game changers, only smaller steps of adaption. You won't suddenly stopping using soldiers because drones are better. You will equip the soldiers with with more capabilities to defend drones.

Drones aren't efficient in Ukraine on both sides because they are more capable but because neither side has much in terms of defenses against drones.

There are no more lines of battle. A drone could attack anywhere. A drone could drop a grenade bouquet down the hatch of oil tankers. It's weird the fighting is contained in Ukraine at all.

A report by Natalia Bugaynova on the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) now says that the infamous pictures of rows of destroyed Leopard tanks and Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFV) that marked Ukraine’s disastrous counteroffensive were owing to the Western/NATO warfighting style that it trained the Ukrainian army in.

“(Large-scale) mechanized breaches that NATO trained Ukraine’s counteroffensive brigades to execute are incredibly difficult and are not the only option available to Ukrainian forces,” said her report on ISW.

https://www.eurasiantimes.com/ukraine-dumps-nato-us-military-doctrine-russias-impregnable/

Drones won't get rid of men on the ground... But it gets to the point where a war is just sending men into a swarm of drones, and that just sounds unpleasant.

Drones don't conquer areas. Drones don't search for explosives or hidden defenders. So no, this will not change the number of soldiers but just be an andditional wave before them taking over the job that precision-guided artillery is fullfilling now.

Also there are only very few situations where a new type of weapon actually replaced older ones. Not without decades and decades of the existing ones being adapted to new tech and tactics.

Your "we don't need forward deployments other than limited air defense anymore"-argument is the same wrong simplification we heard about the end of tanks after every single bigger engagement since ww1.

Some advanced stuff like F35 has EW mitigation and is designed to withstand some jamming.

Tiny little drones definitely don't have that shit. But they might one day.

autonomy

Lasers or fast firing small calibre weapons can hit drones. We already have weapons with enough accuracy to hit drones, what's missing is a system to detect them. But with AI, cameras should be able to do that soon. Drones should then increase their camouflage. But they also are noisy, so sound detector might be another solution (probably not alone).

I did see some stuff about lasers destroying drones