The sputter of a propeller dragging an ungainly aircraft across the sky. A soldier leaning out of the cockpit, rifle in hand, as it passes a battlefield crisscrossed with abandoned trenches, craters and shredded trees.
It’s not a World War I movie set.
It’s modern war.
Over Ukraine.
“There is such great new technology now, yet I am still hanging out of the cockpit shooting at drones with a shotgun,” one mechanic-gunner previously told the Wall Street Journal.
It has been happening for seemingly endless months now – Ukrainian soldiers defending their homeland with shockingly old school tactics.
And it’s a trend that’s not going anywhere, with recent unverified viral videos once again showing Ukrainian soldiers shooting down Russian drones in prop planes with shotguns as they fight tooth and nail to repel Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
Don’t knock it.
It’s working.
Drone after drone is seen trailing fire and falling from the sky before they hit their seemingly random assortment of civilian and military targets.
It’s a scenario that is seeing multimillion-dollar missiles fired from exotic US and Israeli combat jets over the Persian Gulf. The drones they target, costing a few thousand dollars each, can destroy billion-dollar oil refineries and supertankers.
It has the military-industrial complex clutching at profit-loss statements.
And strategic analysts are returning to their drawing boards.
How can such old equipment, long since discarded by “sensible” militaries, be so effective?
“Stop calling them obsolete. Start asking what problems they can still solve,” argues Captain Lukáš Dyčka of the Czech Armed Forces Training Command.
“None of this is an accident, and it’s not pure desperation either … Globally, there are more than a few examples when yesterday’s weapons still solve today’s problems.”
But it isn’t as easy as sharpening sticks and slinging stones.
It’s evidence that war is now a fully fledged spectrum of hand-to-hand struggles in the mud to artisanal technological contests.
“Combat has never been more complex,” warns Arizona University’s Small Wars Journal.
What’s old is new again
The first known air-to-air combat is believed to have taken place in August, 1914.
Serbian reconnaissance pilot Miodrag Tomić was flying his unarmed timber, string and canvas contraption over the Battle of Cer. There, he encountered an Austro-Hungarian counterpart.
At first, the pair waved at each other.
Then, the Austro-Hungarian is reputed to have pulled out a pistol.
Tomić returned the favour.
Neither was shot down nor harmed.
But aerial combat soon progressed from rifles and machine guns to forward-facing weapons synchronised to fire through propellers.
The rest, as they say, is history.
The modern AIM-9X Sidewinder missile, a “cheap” short-range guided missile favoured by Western air forces, currently costs about $750,000 each. Only 1600 are built each year.
The longer-range AIM-120 AMRAAM starts at about $AU3 million. The annual production run is about 1200.
Man-portable, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft Stinger missiles cost more than $500,000 and take about 18-30 months to deliver.
So Ukraine’s pressing need to find cost-effective (and sustainable) means of taking down Russia’s Iran-supplied drones is understandable.
It is producing “Frankenstein” anti-aircraft missiles where pieces are cut from Western types and grafted onto Soviet units to keep them effective. It can do this only because a hodgepodge of nations has donated leftovers dug out of the dark corners of warehouses.
But it’s saving even these to use against advanced Russian missiles and aircraft.
Not drones.
Ukrainian Colonel Mykola Lykhatskiy, who commands a unit of patched-up vintage Yak-52 training aircraft, says his pilots and gunners are responsible for shooting 120 drones attempting to cross the no man’s land marking the front lines of the four-year-old war.
He says his pilots use the same tactic developed by British Royal Air Force pilots struggling to defend their island from Nazi Germany’s V-1 Doodlebug flying bombs.
They fly alongside, slip a wing underneath, then flick the terror weapon into the ground.
Russia, however, is also adapting.
It is reportedly adding rearward-facing webcams to its drones. That way, its operators can see threats approaching and take evasive manoeuvres.
An unnamed Ukrainian Yak-52’s gunner told the Wall Street Journal that, in one recent incident, his pilot engaged in a 40-minute aerobatic contest with an Orlan drone before he could shoot it down.
Zombies in the Dead Zone
Timber-lined trenches. Museum-piece crank-wound Maxim M1910 Gatling guns. Eighty-year-old battle tanks. Sixty-year-old Geopard anti-aircraft vehicles.
“These scenes are not nostalgia; they are everyday reality on a battlefield that is reminding us that modern wars are often waged with obsolete weapons,” says Captain Dyčka.
It’s not a concept that fits well with an era of slick marketing animations of modern super-weapons sweeping the skies, space and battlefields clear of all opponents.
“Some one hundred years later, the trench-bound, casualty-heavy, attritional fight that seemingly defines the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War has sparked many comparisons to the war to end all wars,” the Small Wars Journal states.
“However, just as such statements fail to capture the true tactical complexity of World War I, so too do they overlook battlefield adaptations that have emerged throughout the duration of the Ukrainian conflict.”
Trenches featured in the Ukraine-Russian war, for a time.
Now they’re abandoned.
“Initial manoeuvre in 2022 gave way to fortified belts, then to a battlefield transformed by persistent reconnaissance and strike systems,” the authors state.
“By 2025, fixed positions grew increasingly untenable. Both sides shifted toward small, concealed elements serving as sensors and triggers for fires. Infiltration and counter-infiltration spread across wider zones, producing a fragmented form of manoeuvre embedded within attrition.”
Action. Reaction. Adaptation.
“All these approaches illustrate that technological obsolescence is not the end of usefulness,” argues Captain Dyčka.
“It is, rather, an invitation to move the old tool into a different role where its residual strengths still matter.”
The world’s militaries know this.
The DC-3/C47 Dakota combat transport aircraft remained in the air for decades after World War II. Not because it was the best at its job. But because it was available. It was cheap. And war stockpiles meant there were plenty of spares about to keep them flying.
The same is once again happening with the famous A-10 Warthog. It’s too vulnerable to serve in its original role as a tank killer. But it is proving effective against air and land-based drones.
Western militaries usually dump, scrap, bury and burn old equipment.
Only the best will do, after all.
“The hard truth is that our ability to predict future conflicts is limited, and prematurely discarding conceptually obsolete weapons can backfire,” warns Captain Dyčka.
“Yet, in the face of budget cuts, such warnings are too often ignored.”
