Fighting a land war in the digital age: How armies must reinvent themselves—or be destroyed by those that do

Digital-age warfare has already started

In 2020, Azerbaijani forces completed the recapture of Nagorno-Karabakh in a war that lasted just forty-four days. Opposing positions, however well-fortified, operated with an industrial-age mindset, and thus were spotted, tracked, and obliterated before defenders could understand and react. The weapon responsible was not an F-35 or a cruise missile, but a drone, as analysts at Defense One were among the first to document. The age of industrial-era land warfare had not merely evolved. For those caught unprepared, it ended.

The battlefield has entered the age of algorithms. Across modern conflicts, especially in the war in Ukraine, machines increasingly detect, identify, track, and help destroy targets faster than human decision-makers can fully comprehend the battlespace. Persistent surveillance by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), AI-supported targeting systems, electronic warfare, cyber operations, and space-enabled communications have transformed the character of land warfare fundamentally.

Yet many of the world’s land forces continue to train, organize, and equip themselves as though it is still 1991. Recognizing this reality is difficult in some military circles. Industrial-age mindsets persist in structures, doctrines, and—most dangerously—in the minds of commanders. The war in Ukraine has only reinforced evidence of a radical shift in the character of land warfare. The nature of war—the organized application of force to impose political will—has not changed. How it is conducted has changed profoundly.

Understanding this transformation requires an analytical framework rigorous enough to capture both technology and tactics simultaneously. An analysis based on war fighting functions (WFF)—the core operational categories that many armies perform to fight—offers precisely this structure. Traditionally, these functions comprise six categories: command and control, maneuver, fire support, intelligence, protection, and combat service support. The digital age demands a seventh—electromagnetic (EM) spectrum control and cybersecurity—alongside a cross-cutting variable of digitalization, artificial intelligence, and big data.

Table 1: The 7+1 War fighting functions framework

Command and control: The race of the algorithms

Every engagement in history has ultimately been a race. The side that could observe, decide, and act faster than the enemy gained advantage. Military theorist Colonel John Boyd formalized this as the OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, act. In the industrial age, the speed of this loop was bounded by human cognition and radio bandwidth. In the digital age it is bounded by algorithm quality.

Consider what this means in practice. A Ukrainian drone detects a Russian artillery position. That image is processed by an AI targeting system—Ukraine’s Geographic Information System Art for Artillery (GIS ARTA) platform—cross-referenced against signals intelligence and prior strike data, and a firing solution is generated within minutes. The crew, operating under industrial-age command procedures, may not know they have been detected before the first round hits them. The side with efficient sensors and the stronger algorithm wins the exchange before either commander has spoken.

Survival demands that headquarters become dramatically smaller, faster, and harder to locate. Advanced detection systems and precision strikes have made large, static command posts into high-value targets. Strategic and operational headquarters must distribute themselves across concealed locations; tactical headquarters must be mobile and reduced to their essential minimum. Digitalization, artificial intelligence and big data are not luxuries in this environment — they are what allow a smaller staff to process more, decide faster, and live longer.

The broader communications infrastructure must also be redesigned. The concept of tactical internet and an “Internet of Battlefield Things” (IoBT)—integrating sensors, unmanned systems, vehicles, and command nodes into a real-time tactical network—is becoming operational reality. Ukraine’s experience with Starlink demonstrates how space-based communications can maintain operational connectivity and command functions when terrestrial communications infrastructure is damaged or unavailable. Communications architecture must prioritize redundancy over single-point efficiency.

Maneuver: Moving below the eye of the drone

The industrial-age image of maneuver, with armored columns surging through breaches, closing with and destroying the enemy in concentrated mass, is not obsolete. It is, however, extraordinarily dangerous without radical adaptation. The challenge is simple to state and difficult to solve: How do you move large formations when the sky above the battlefield may host up to 15,000 enemy drones at any given time?

The answer emerging from the Ukrainian front is dispersion, stealth, and the integration of unmanned systems into combat operations. Infantry and armored units must operate in smaller, more dispersed formations. Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) conduct reconnaissance, logistics, engineering, and evacuation missions in high-risk areas, reducing the exposure of personnel to enemy fire. Electronic warfare, cyber operations, and drone swarms are no longer “enablers,” they are the maneuver itself, integrated from the first moment of planning.

Perhaps the most significant shift is this: Land forces increased the efficiency of their close air support. Organic UAV capability at brigade and battalion level means that close air support—once the exclusive province of fixed-wing aviation—can now be provided by small tactical drone teams. This demands recognition of unmanned systems as a branch of the army in its own right, alongside infantry, armor, artillery, and engineers. This capability is likely to expand rapidly in the coming years.

Fire support: When algorithms pull the trigger

Artillery has always been the king of the battlefield. In the digital age it has acquired a new prime minister: artificial intelligence. Target detection systems—satellite imagery, UAV feeds, signals intelligence (SIGINT) intercepts, acoustic sensors—can now transmit precise target coordinates to AI-supported fire control systems in real time. Engagement timelines that once required twenty to forty minutes have been compressed to less than five.

This compression brings genuine peril. If AI systems are given autonomous authority to engage targets without human confirmation, the potential for catastrophic error grows dramatically: striking civilian infrastructure, hitting friendly forces, or triggering unintended escalation. International humanitarian law requires that a human with legal authority remains responsible for the decision to apply lethal force. Balancing speed and accountability is one of the defining challenges of digital-age warfare.

Artillery use and survival tactics have been transformed. The old doctrine of massed batteries is suicidal when UAVs can spot, fix, and coordinate a strike within minutes of a gun firing its first round. Ukrainian and Russian artillery units have independently converged on a “shoot and scoot” doctrine: displacing within moments of firing. Increased spacing between guns, the use of UAVs as forward observers, and AI-computed firing solutions are now standard operational requirements.

Intelligence: The end of the linear cycle

The classical intelligence cycle—task, collect, process, analyze, disseminate—was designed for a world where information moved slowly and sensors were scarce. In the digital age intelligence is a continuous, AI-mediated ecosystem in which sensors, data stores, analytical engines, and decision-makers interact continuously.

AI can now process satellite imagery (IMINT), SIGINT, telemetry from unmanned systems, open-source social media data (OSINT), and cyber traffic simultaneously—finding patterns that no human analyst could identify. The result is what some theorists call “decision dominance”: an intelligence advantage that can disrupt an adversary’s decision-making process so overwhelmingly that the adversary is effectively blinded.

The collapse of the traditional linear intelligence cycle demands new software, revised command relationships, and intelligence personnel trained to work alongside advanced data systems. Intelligence officers no longer compile a morning briefing. They manage living sensor networks.

Protection: Defending the commander’s mind

Survivability on the digital battlefield extends far beyond armor thickness and field fortifications. A unit must now protect itself from threats that are invisible, weightless, and move at the speed of light: electronic warfare jamming, cyber intrusions into command networks, autonomous drone swarms, and most insidiously, information operations designed to corrupt the commander’s perception of reality.

The phrase “hacking the commander’s brain” may sound metaphorical. It is not. The doctrine of “reflexive control”—feeding adversaries false information to cause self-defeating actions—has been practiced in Ukraine through psychological pressure campaigns delivered through compromised communications. Protecting decision-makers from manipulation is now as critical as protecting them from direct fire.

Counter-UAV capability must now be organic to every offensive unit—not merely an asset maintained by rear-echelon air defense units. This requires integrating counter-UAV systems into integrated air and missile defense (IAMD) to create layered protection against threats ranging from ballistic missiles to small first-person view (FPV) drones that provide the pilot with the actual aerial view).

Combat service support: Logistics for a Ttansparent battlefield

Napoleon’s maxim that an army marches on its stomach remains true. But delivering rations to the front line when every vehicle is visible from above and targetable within minutes requires a complete reinvention of forward logistics. Russian logistical failures in the early weeks of the 2022 invasion—fuel convoys stranded on the Kyiv axis, destroyed by drone-directed strikes—demonstrated what the transparent battlefield does to industrial-era supply systems.

The emerging solution is unmanned logistics: resupply drones capable of delivering ammunition, medical supplies, and battery packs to forward positions without exposing drivers. Experience in Ukraine suggests that 80 percent of frontline resupply must be conducted by unmanned systems, with that figure expected to grow. For medical evacuation, unmanned systems offer a partial solution, supplemented by small mobile surgical teams.

Maintenance doctrine is being transformed by predictive analytics and digital-age lifecycle systems. As battlefield improvisation and unit-level procurement become more important, logistics systems must also support rapid technological adaptation and decentralized problem-solving.

EM spectrum and cybersecurity: The invisible domain

There is a war within the war, fought entirely without bullets. In the electromagnetic spectrum, the contest between jamming and anti-jamming, now determines whether every other system functions. An army that loses control of the electromagnetic spectrum cannot communicate reliably, cannot guide its precision munitions, and cannot operate its unmanned systems. Spectrum dominance is operationally critical, though still often overlooked in traditional military thinking.

Cybersecurity has ceased to be the exclusive concern of information technology departments. Command networks, tactical internet infrastructure, unmanned system control links, and data centers are all active targets. The Sandworm group’s attacks on Ukrainian power infrastructure and the Viasat satellite communications attack demonstrate the integration of cyber effects with kinetic operations. A successful cyberattack on a brigade’s systems or air defense networks can be more operationally effective than an artillery strike on its command post—and far cheaper to execute.

Conclusion: The only constant is the change itself

The debates triggered by Ukraine’s war are understandable: Has firepower permanently overtaken maneuver? Are tanks obsolete? Has the defensive operation become insurmountable? History suggests these are the wrong questions—framed prematurely. Military revolutions have repeatedly appeared to make offensive action impossible until adaptation restored the balance. The digital age is no exception.

Tanks and mechanized infantry are not obsolete. They remain irreplaceable for the one thing no drone currently can do: approach the target, physically occupy, and hold terrain against a determined enemy. But they must be redesigned with active protection systems, reduced electromagnetic signatures, and hardened networks and also be reintegrated into combined-arms teams that treat unmanned systems as a peer branch of the army. An Unmanned System Branch is now a necessity rather than a choice.

The 7+1 WFF framework is a map of the adaptation challenge: seven functional domains, each being transformed by digital-age technology, all unified by the cross-cutting engine of digitalization, AI, and big data. The main framework of WFF is enduring. Its content changes. The most critical factor, cutting across all seven domains, is the capacity to adapt faster than the adversary. In an era when the algorithm is a decisive weapon, the greatest vulnerability is a mind unwilling to adapt and prepare for the next war, not the last.

Yavuz Türkgenci, PhD, is a retired three-star general in the Turkish Armed Forces whose career spanned several offices, including western European Union and NATO posts and as the commandant of the Turkish Third Field Army. He holds a doctorate in security strategy design and management.

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Image: US Air Force Staff Sgt. Michael Foldes, 39th Civil Engineer Squadron Explosive Ordnance Disposal supply noncommissioned officer in charge, left, Staff Sgt. Tori Payne, 39th CES EOD training NCOIC, middle, and Staff Sgt. David Bowles, 39th CES EOD munitions NCOIC, ruck to their exercise drill coordinates during Operation Deterrent Viking II at Baumholder Military Training Area, Germany, May 4, 2026. Exercises like Deterrent Viking II are a part of a long-term training plan to maintain readiness and interoperability in the European theater. (US Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Kadielle Shaw)