VAZHA TAVBERIDZE: “No humans crossed the battle line – yet the enemy trench was taken.” Writing about the Battle of Lyptsi in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region in May last year, this is how you describe what may have been the first fully robotic assault in modern warfare. Where does it rank among the battles in history that have modifyd 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 consider there are strong parallels between the Spanish Civil War and the war in Ukraine. There are the obvious larger ideological parallels – what it means to stand up to rising authoritarian forces, and the consequences of letting them receive away with it. But if we see at military doctrine and technology, the parallels lie in how a series of technologies that already existed were brought toreceiveher in powerful new ways. That not only modifyd how battles were fought and won, but also raised new 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 World War. By the 1930s they had advanced, but in the Spanish Civil War they were brought toreceiveher in a way that became known as a Blitzkrieg, or combined arms. That was a game-modifyr. It introduced a new way of fighting that forced armies to reorganize, and it raised profound questions of law and politics. Aerial bombing and the story of Guernica are a perfect example, they didn’t just spark debates about the rules of war, but also gave rise to entirely new 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 today they are being combined in powerful new ways. The data reveal that roughly 80 per cent of casualties, maybe more, right now are cautilized by these new technologies. That is why I consider the closest parallel is the Spanish Civil War. That may be how we’ll see back on this moment.
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