In Ukraine, drones have made rescuing the wounded very hard to do

Ukraine is building a small ground vehicle designed to crawl toward a wounded soldier, pull a metal cover over him, and roll him back, with a team of small aircraft flying above to watch for attacking drones.

Walter Russell Mead, a foreign-policy writer and historian, heard about the machine on a recent visit to Ukraine. He was told that in one case it took 63 days to bring a wounded soldier out after he was hit.

That long wait is what the drone war has done to rescue. Drones watch the front so constantly that soldiers move only one or two at a time through what Mead describes as a gray kill zone, and pulling out the wounded has become very hard.

On an earlier trip, Mead had visited a Ukrainian drone factory where workers rebuilt children's toy trucks to carry land mines toward tanks. Battlefield reports came back in real time, and the designs were changed in response. By his later visit, he said, the advances were far larger.

People he spoke with said they no longer treat bullet wounds. It is all drones. The fighting, he said, is no longer one battalion shooting at another battalion.

Even rescue now needs an escort. The ground vehicle is designed to move with guard drones because other drones hunt it, so a team must go with it to block an attack.

The advantage in this kind of drone war shifts about every six months, Mead said. Right now Ukraine holds an edge, but that could reverse.

That pace worries him for American forces. Mead asked how fast the Pentagon, the headquarters of the American military, is learning, and whether "the tank and the rifle are becoming as obsolete as the cavalry charge and the sword." The United States, he argued, has the most to lose because it owns so many of the weapons that could lose value.

The same shift is visible at sea. Ukraine has almost no navy, only a few small boats and no battleships, yet its drones have held Russian warships out of much of the Black Sea.