VAZHA TAVBERIDZE: “No humans crossed the conflict line – yet the enemy trench was taken.” Writing about the conflict of Lyptsi in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region in May last year, this is how you describe what may have been the first full robotic assault in modern warfare. Where does it rank among the battles in past that have changed the way of warfare?
I may not go as far back as Alexander the Great, but I will go a couple of generations back. I think there are strong parallels between the Spanish civilian War and the war in Ukraine. There are the apparent larger ideological parallels – what it means to stand up to rising authoritarian forces, and the consequences of letting them get distant with it. But if we look at military doctrine and technology, the parallels lie in how a series of technologies that already existed were brought together in powerful fresh ways. That not only changed how battles were fought and won, but besides raised fresh questions for the military and for politics – not just about what was possible, but what was proper. So, if you go back to the 1930s, you had technologies like the tank, the airplane, and the radio, all of which had been utilized in the First planet War. By the 1930s they had advanced, but in the Spanish civilian War they were brought together in a way that became known as a Blitzkrieg, or combined arms. That was a game-changer. It introduced a fresh way of fighting that forced armies to reorganize, and it raised profound questions of law and politics. Aerial bombing and the communicative of Guernica are a perfect example, they didn’t just spark debates about the rules of war, but besides gave emergence to entirely fresh forms of art. We’re seeing the same thing now with drones, robotics, AI, and networks. All of these have been utilized before in wars, but present they are being combined in powerful fresh ways. The data show that about 80 per cent of casualties, possibly more, right now are caused by these fresh technologies. That is why I think the closest parallel is the Spanish civilian War. That may be how we’ll look back on this moment.
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