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Changing Methods of Warfare at the Beginning of the 21st Century, 2000-2011 » Drone Wars and Unmanned Land Vehicles

What you'll learn this session

Study time: 30 minutes

Edexcel spec: Paper 2 Section B, Breadth study B6, Key topic 5

How armed drones were used in Pakistan from 2004
How unmanned robots helped soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan
The arguments for and against these new weapons
How land, sea, air, weapons and guerrilla warfare changed from 1919 to 2011

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Drone wars in Pakistan

This lesson is part of the Paper 2 Section B breadth study on the changing nature of warfare, 1919-2011. After 9/11 the USA led a war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Many of their fighters hid in the mountains of north-west Pakistan, close to the Afghan border. This was hard land for soldiers to enter, and Pakistan was not at war with the USA. The USA turned to a new weapon.

Key terms:

Drone: an aircraft with no pilot on board. It is flown by an operator on the ground, so it is also called a remotely piloted aircraft.
Unmanned ground vehicle: a robot on wheels or tracks, controlled from a distance by a soldier.
Drone war: a campaign in which armed drones are used to find and kill chosen enemies.

Drones were first used to watch the enemy. In the early 2000s the USA fitted its Predator drone with Hellfire missiles, so it could also attack. Armed Predators were flying over Afghanistan by late 2001. In June 2004 the USA carried out its first drone strike in Pakistan, aimed at a Pakistani Taliban leader in South Waziristan. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the USA's spy agency, ran most of the strikes there. From 2007 a bigger drone, the Reaper, carried more weapons. The number of strikes rose sharply after 2008 and reached its highest in 2010.

Drones worked in a new way. The operator sat in a control room, often in the USA, and flew the aircraft thousands of miles away using a satellite link. The drone could circle over a village for many hours, sending back video, until the target was in a good position to be hit.

Unmanned land vehicles

On the ground the main danger was the IED, the cheap roadside bomb that you met in the lesson on 'surgical' air strikes. Finding and defusing one by hand was deadly work. Armies began to use small tracked robots, such as the PackBot and the TALON, which were used in Afghanistan from 2002 and in large numbers in Iraq. Each had cameras and a robot arm. A bomb-disposal expert could drive the robot up to a suspect object from a safe distance, look at it and then disarm it or set off a controlled explosion.

These robots were controlled by a person all the time. They were not 'thinking' machines, but they saved lives by putting a robot in the place of a soldier. By the end of the 2000s the US armed forces had thousands of them.

The arguments about unmanned weapons

✅ For

No pilot or soldier is put in danger. Drones watch for hours and can strike at a moment chosen by commanders. They can reach places where ground troops cannot go. Robots save bomb-disposal experts from IEDs.

❌ Against

Strikes in Pakistan killed civilians as well as fighters, and estimates of how many differ widely. Many Pakistanis were angry that the USA was attacking inside their country. Some people said that killing from far away made war too easy to start.

Common mistakes

Saying a drone has no human involved. A person flies it and decides when to fire.
Mixing up drones and 'surgical' air strikes by manned aircraft. Drones fly without a pilot on board.
Saying the robots were used to attack. The bomb-disposal robots were for finding and disarming bombs.
Thinking drones ended the need for soldiers. Ground forces were still needed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Drawing it together, 1919-2011

This breadth study follows five themes. Here is what changed and what stayed the same.

Land warfare: in 1917 at Cambrai nearly 400 tanks attacked together; in France in 1940 tanks, aircraft and radio worked together in Blitzkrieg; by 2003 soldiers had satellite navigation, and robots helped them against IEDs.
Sea warfare: aircraft carriers replaced battleships as the main ships, and later nuclear-powered submarines became key, able to fire cruise missiles at land.
Air warfare: from bombers in the 1930s and the Battle of Britain to satellite-guided bombs and drones.
Weapons, technology and communications: radio and radar, atom bombs in 1945, then satellites, GPS and remote control.
Guerrilla warfare: from Spain in the 1930s to Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Guerrillas were still hard to beat, so this theme stayed the same.

Exam-style question

How far did the way wars were fought change in the years 1919-2011? [16 marks]

You may use the following in your answer:

tanks and aircraft
drones and robots

You must also use information of your own.

Model answer

Overall, I think the way wars were fought changed hugely in its weapons and methods, but not in every way, because some of the hardest problems stayed the same.

The biggest change was in land warfare. In 1917 at Cambrai, nearly 400 tanks attacked with infantry support, but they were slow and few. By 1940 in France the Germans had combined tanks, dive-bombers and radio into Blitzkrieg, and defeated France in about six weeks. This was a different kind of fighting from the trenches of 1918.

The air changed even more. In the 1930s bombers were thought to be unstoppable, and in 1945 the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed that one aircraft could destroy a city. By 2001 satellite-guided bombs allowed 'surgical' strikes, and from 2004 drones in Pakistan could be flown from the USA. Operators were no longer in danger, and a drone could watch a target for hours. This shows technology changing where and how wars were fought. At sea, too, aircraft carriers replaced battleships, so air power shaped fighting on every front.

My own knowledge adds nuclear weapons. After the Soviet Union tested its own bomb in 1949, both superpowers built thousands of warheads, and the fear of Mutually Assured Destruction meant they never fought each other directly. This was a huge change, because the biggest weapons were mostly used to deter war, not to fight it.

However, much stayed the same. Guerrilla warfare in Spain in the 1930s, Vietnam in the 1960s and Afghanistan in the 1980s showed that a weaker side could survive against a stronger army. In 2003 insurgents in Iraq used cheap IEDs against high-tech forces, and robots were needed to defuse them. Drones also killed civilians and made many Pakistanis angry, as bombing had earlier done in Vietnam. Soldiers on the ground were still needed to hold territory.

In conclusion, the change was very large if judged by the weapons used, because tanks, aircraft, nuclear weapons and drones changed the speed and distance of war. But if judged by whether technology could win against guerrillas, there was less change. So the way wars were fought changed greatly, but not completely.

What lifts it to the top level: change and continuity are both explained across the whole period, with four aspects (land, air, nuclear weapons and guerrilla warfare) and a judgement based on a stated criterion.

Exam tip

For 'how far' questions on change, cover the whole date range in order, give the case for change and the case for continuity, and finish with a judgement that names your criterion, such as weapons used against results achieved.

Recap

Armed drones such as the Predator and Reaper were used by the USA in Pakistan from 2004, flown by operators far away.
Bomb-disposal robots such as the PackBot and TALON helped soldiers against IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The arguments: fewer risks to the user's forces, against civilian deaths and anger over attacks inside another country.
From 1919 to 2011 weapons and technology changed hugely, but guerrilla warfare stayed hard to beat.

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