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.
“Warfare is totally transformed. “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.
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, with the surface rendered uninhabitable, combat forces have been forced to go underground and they can’t even see out except.
“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. 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. Traditional manoeuvre warfare, tanks, infantry, engineers, air defence, electronic warfare, all of that, it can’t survive,” General Petraeus said. 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.
