In a video released this summer by Ukraine’s 68th Jaeger Brigade, a Ukrainian drone destroyed a Russian tank trapped in a crater on the front lines of Donetsk. It’s a scene that’s become increasingly familiar over the last three years—as Ukraine has deployed an astonishing 1.2 million unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs) to its armed forces in 2024 alone. The modern battlefield is clearly in the early days of a new paradigm. As unmanned systems, electronic warfare, and true autonomy transform the front lines in Ukraine, emerging capabilities not only offer a tactical advantage, but force a change in overall military strategy—offering us a glimpse of the future of war.
So what does war at a technological inflection point look like? Nearly two centuries ago, peace in Europe was brought to an abrupt end by a strikingly similar moment. Like today’s war on the same peninsula, the Crimean War of 1853-1856 called on the great powers of the West to defend a smaller state against Russian expansionism. Best remembered for “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and Florence Nightingale, the Crimean War broke out in 1853 when the Russian Empire occupied the Ottoman Empire’s Danubian Principalities, and, fearing an expansionist Russia, Britain and France allied to defend them. When invading the declining Ottoman Empire, Tsar Nicholas I’s technologically backwards Russia met with the full force of the Industrial Revolution in the form of British and French rail, steam, and shell. The last wars in Europe thirty-eight years earlier were fought with wooden sailing ships, solid shot, and logistics by courier, but the Crimean War saw the ironclad steamer, exploding shell gun, and electric telegraph deployed on the battlefield for the first time.
Military leaders had to choose between reliable but less effective capabilities and superior ones that could fail unpredictably at critical moments. Technologies that seem obvious in hindsight—as in the case of the steamboat and the electric telegraph—had not only real detractors but real drawbacks in their early stages. It took a truly paradigm-shifting offensive capability in the form of the Paixhans gun, the first naval gun designed to fire exploding shells rather than solid shot, to make the necessity of modernization unambiguous. The war was ultimately won by the powers who invested in, innovated on, and rapidly adopted these innovations. As we stand—on the same peninsula, one hundred and seventy five years later—in the earliest days of a new military paradigm defined by unmanned systems, what lesson should we take from the past?
The Electric Telegraph Upset Military Conventions
In the story of the telegraph, technology outpaces the human ability to adapt. By the 1850s, the predominant telegraph system—used to coordinate 730,000 British, French, and Russian troops across the Crimean Peninsula, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans—was not yet Samuel Morse’s electromagnetic line, but a primitive optical “semaphore.” The semaphore telegraph used a simple series of towers topped with moveable wooden arms that displayed symbols from one tower to the next like the Beacons of Gondor from The Lord of the Rings. By the outbreak of the war, even these semaphore lines were sparse on the Continent. A message from Crimea in 1854 could take anywhere from twelve days to three weeks to reach London; from Crimea to Varna by steamer, from Varna to Bucharest by courier, and from Bucharest to London or Paris by mail. Russia, which had already invested in a more robust telegraph network, could send a message to the front in only two days—a very meaningful advantage. Naturally, the Allies moved quickly to catch up. They connected British and French army headquarters by telegraph, contracted with the British Electric Telegraph Company to set up 21 miles of buried cable within Crimea, contracted R. S. Newall & Co. to connect Balaklava with Varna, and installed a 150 mile line from Varna to Istanbul. By the time they captured Sebastopol, the most serious victory of the Crimean operation, they could circulate the news of their victory across Europe in only two days.
But there is a caveat in this story of progress. While the electric telegraph was faster in theory, it proved more difficult to set up and less reliable in practice. Submarine cables, unarmored and laid with little slack, often suffered outages due to damage by ships, sabotage or otherwise. While a clumsy semaphore tower could be set up and functioning in only four hours, an electric cable could take weeks to bury in hard, cracked winter ground, and could not be easily moved as needed afterwards. War correspondent William Russell noted “it was rather singular that the French preferred the old-fashioned semaphore” throughout the conflict. Though the French had begun a transition to the electric telegraph in the 1840s, they stuck with the semaphore system for the majority of the war effort, sending over 4,500 semaphore telegraphs, only finalizing their transition to electric after the war was over and reliability less critical.
Worse—the invention of the telegraph was the invention of micromanagement. In past wars, slow communication meant generals were autonomous by necessity; for example, Napoleon’s letters from Italy in 1796 took weeks to reach Paris, and Wellington in Portugal couldn’t expect a response from King George III within two months. In April 1855, when the installation of the first 125-mile overland electric telegraph from Crimea to London allowed messages to pass in only five hours, Emperor Napoleon III and Queen Victoria began to demand daily reports from their commanders in “the Eastern War.” This burden was not received with enthusiasm. On July 7th, 1855, commander-in-chief James Simson complained to British Secretary of State for War Lord Panmure:
The ‘paper-work’ and the correspondence that demand my time and attention here are beyond all belief, and interfere sadly with my military duties. In fact I am at my desk from four in the morning throughout the whole day, while I ought to be outside attending to more important matters. What with the two mails a-week, and the electric telegraph, the writing is incessant, and much interferes with more urgent duties. This I find is my great difficulty.
Across Crimea, Russian officers felt similarly. Administratively bloated and poorly organized under Nicholas I, the Russian military relied on frequent correspondence and required reporting to a disabling degree. Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, responsible for organizing supplies and medical services for Sebastopol, wrote:
People serving in central administrations, living constantly in the capital and preoccupying themselves with a mass of written affairs do not always have completely sufficient information. For this reason the proposals of ministers, although excellently worked out from a theoretical point of view, rarely satisfy the necessities of real life and do not serve the purpose which the government desires.
Europe had the material technology to enable central decision-making, but lacked the experience to apply it wisely. Disgruntled generals suffered a blow to their status from central ministers who believed themselves to be better-informed than they really were. Command suffered and the organizational disaster for which the Crimean War is best-remembered followed suit. As with all technological innovations, their invention is just the first act of innovation, the second are the changes to human social organization needed for adoption.
The Ironclad Wasn’t Ready For War Until Combined With the Paixhans Gun
The modern naval battleship would come to be defined by the ironclad steamer—the metal-armored, steam-propelled gunship that replaced the wooden, sailing ship-of-the-line. But by the outset of the war, both steam propulsion and iron plating were not considered battle-worthy, or had been all but written off. When one British lord requested a steam packet to the Ionian Islands in 1828, the Colonial office wrote back:
It is our bounden duty to discourage, to the most of their ability, the employment of steam vessels, as they considered that the introduction of steam was calculated to strike a fatal blow at the naval supremacy of the Empire.
The steamer was simply immature. The original incarnation of steam propulsion—the paddle wheel—designed in 1776 to emulate the paddling of a duck, was vulnerable to attack; one blow to the large target that was the wheel and the ship was dead in the water. Because the paddle wheel occupied such a large surface area along the hull, an early steamer could not be equipped with a full broadside. Worse, in rough seas, the wheel could become submerged or rise out of the water entirely, damaging the engines; if the boat encountered an obstacle like floating debris, the boilers of early engines could build up too much pressure and explode, causing the ship to sink. For these reasons, the steamer was not trusted in combat.
Ironclad hulls, too, had been decried. When the British Captain Henry Ducie Chads tested the resistance of 5 ⁄ 8 ” iron plating against artillery at Portsmouth in 1850, he found that only two or three shots could cause the armor to shatter into shrapnel that would gravely endanger the crew. The cast iron armor was brittle and prone to fracture, and had not yet been replaced by wrought iron, which could withstand more deformation before breaking. General Sir Howard Douglas summarized the results pessimistically, reporting that “the destructive effects of the impacts of shot on iron cannot be prevented.” The iron ships under construction were condemned, and the existing ironclad vessels were relegated to troopships. By the outbreak of the war in 1853, ironclad ships were “never trusted upon open waters out of sight of more orthodox vessels.” The Industrial Era navy seemed to be very far away.
But a new offensive capability, already developed, would force navies to modernize. At the turn of the 19th century, battleships exchanged solid shot, not exploding shells. Traditional solid shot was designed to kill the crew and take down rigging, but it could typically only inflict repairable damage to the thick oak hulls of wooden battleships, not destroy them. In 1821, French artillery officer Henri-Joseph Paixhans proposed in a seminal pamphlet Nouvelle Force Maritime that the future of naval warfare would look dramatically different. Exploding artillery shells, he proposed, which were already in use on land, could be deployed at sea to sink large wooden ships-of-the-line outright. The exploding shell gun posed a danger to the wooden ship so great, he argued in a successive pamphlet the following year, that each battleship of the future must be armored with metal. The exploding shell gun Paixhans developed had a range of up to two miles and exploded upon contact with the target, allowing battleships to pack a more destructive ordinance at a lighter weight. The French Navy began trials with this gun—the Paixhans gun—in 1824, and had adopted it throughout the fleet by 1837. The British Royal Navy followed suit the following year. Soon, in peacetime, the exploding shell spread even to Russia.
The exploding shell was deployed to resounding effect during the war’s first major naval engagement. On November 30th, 1853, Russian Admiral Pavel Nakhimov approached the Turkish fleet at Sinop Bay, hoping to take the Ottomans by surprise during the initial Russian offensive. Nakhimov’s squadron of three ships-of-the-line, three double-deckers, two frigates, and three steamers with 337 68-pounder exploding shell cannon met commander Patrona Osman Pasha’s squadron of seven frigates, three corvettes, two paddle-steamers, and two lighters with a total of 236 solid shot cannon in port, catching them unprepared. The victory was swift and total: Nakhimov destroyed the Turkish fleet in two hours. Of the total 2,989 crew aboard, only 958 Ottoman captains, officers, enlisted, or crew survived, with 125 taken captive. Every Ottoman frigate and corvette was sunk or forced to run aground to avoid destruction, and only one steamer escaped to carry home the devastating news. Nakhimov did not lose a single ship.
Sinop proved beyond all skepticism that the Paixhans gun had made the wooden battleship obsolete. The Allies immediately took notice. Napoleon II ordered the construction of a flotilla of five armored batteries, with four-inch iron plating that could withstand shelling as well as steam propulsion. Critically, by then, Captain John Ericsson and FP Smith of London had invented the screw propeller, which sat underneath the boat where it was less vulnerable to attack, and where it could be lifted out of the water to allow the vessel to maneuver by sail if necessary. Also critically, these armoring plates could then be constructed out of wrought iron, which could withstand shelling without fragmenting, rather than the brittle cast iron of years past. Three of these batteries, the Devastation, Lave, and Tonnant, with slightly thicker iron plating designed to resist 32-pounder shot at 300 yards, were deployed in Crimea and called the Devastation class. The British followed suit, ordering the construction of the Glatton, Meteor, Thunder and Trusty to similar specifications.
Two years into the war, the screw steamer saw its first decisive victory. On October 17th, 1855, a squadron of British and French vessels, mostly wooden sailing ships-of-the-line approached the harbor at the mouth of the River Bug, hoping to attack a Russian fort at Kinburn which protected their Black Sea Fleet’s access to ships and munitions. However, due to southerly winds, they were forced to halt their journey north to their target for a long seven days. Fortunately, the French squadron also included the three experimental ironclad screw steamers. The formidable Devastation class ironclads had a 1,600-ton displacement and were equipped with sixteen 50-pounder smooth-bore guns. When the fleet was able to make its way to the Kinburn fort, the screw steamers carried out the bulk of the attack, and easily captured the fort from negligible Russian resistance.
The Devastation alone was hit 31 times on the side and 44 times on the deck, but received no more than superficial dents. All three floating batteries sustained only two dead and fifteen injured crew after being struck by fifteen shells in total, whereas the Russians lost forty-five dead and 130 wounded, as well as possession of the fort. While this battle had minimal strategic significance, it incontrovertibly proved the value of the steamer in battle. “Everything may be expected from these formidable engines of war,” wrote an incredulous Admiral in his official report. It also proved for the first time in a major live battle that wrought-iron ironclad plating could withstand shot and shell without splintering and injuring its own crew. In response, the formerly skeptical French navies laid down their first armored steam warship, the La Goire, launched in 1859, followed by six more. The British government quickly ordered the construction of four more armored screw steamers, the Etna, Erebus, Terror and Thunderbolt.
A Failure to Modernize
While Russia had begun the war with a naval victory, the conflict quickly revealed that Russia’s naval administration, strategy, and equipment were incompetent in the face of steam and iron. In 1854, seeking to create a “new screw fleet,” the brother of Tsar Alexander II, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, implemented a crash construction program for screw-propelled cannon craft to defend the Finnish Gulf and replace oared galleys, building 40 such boats from 1854 to 1855, and another 35 in 1856. But the effort fell short—the Black Sea Fleet had spent nearly two years of 1854 and 1855 immobilized, largely due to its failure to adopt screw steamers and ironclads in time. After the Treaty of Paris ended the Crimean War in favor of the Allies, Konstantin enacted sweeping reforms to modernize the navy.
The Grand Duke felt the national shame of their obsolete military acutely. He wrote that “we cannot deceive ourselves but admit that we are poorer and weaker than the great powers and that it is poorer not only in material things but also in intellect.” Konstantin reorganized the naval curriculum to emphasize a more technical skill set required to maintain a modern fleet, and stressed the need for screw steamers to a reluctant administration, emphasizing that “owing to the transformation taking place in the fleets of all nations . . . all our old sailing ships must be replaced by steamships.” He did not anticipate the technological arms race to stop there, writing that “the naval sciences go unhesitatingly forward with various innovations and improvements relating one to another … and ships appear which were unknown, for example, the forged ships-of-the-line and frigates.”
Accordingly, he implemented a twenty-year plan for modernization, including the development of naval resources around steam fleet construction and maintenance that would liberate Russia from its dependence on English or French shipyards, and reorientation of training consistent with the demands of an Industrial Era navy. But Nikolayevich was too late. Russia had already been defeated. The Western powers recognized the paradigm shift, pushed through the unpredictable growing pains of emerging technologies, and adopted proactively to win. In an age of unprecedented transformation and speed at every domain, history teaches us that to slow down change is to accept defeat.
While the Industrial Revolution is long in the past, we are undeniably in our own era of rapid military transformation. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the nature of war seems to change every few months, as 20th century assumptions fall to the wayside and the 21st century way of war is discovered on the battlefield, rather than in pitch decks. In eight prolific decades of Pax Americana, military technology has developed to the point of being unrecognizable from WWII. Military organization, however, remains the same, and the imaginations of procurement offices haven’t moved far either. In an escalating great power competition with China—an adversary who has invested much more seriously into unmanned systems and domestic manufacturing than the United States—we might find ourselves in a conflict that will test a nation’s willingness to adapt to the future of war.
The ultimate lesson of the Crimean War is this: war is a contest between technologies. The global arms race is never-ending—a single offensive capability can quickly make many defensive ones obsolete. Today, on the same Crimean peninsula, quadcopters are eliminating tanks. A new paradigm is already in its earliest days. Today’s Paixhans gun—the offensive capability that will force our military to modernize into a new generation—is the drone. Unmanned systems have revolutionized what is possible on the battlefield, and what manned systems remain must, much like sailing ships giving way to ironclads, completely change their doctrine and armaments to remain viable. The history of the Crimean War reminds us that adopting new technologies is not without challenges, but the failure to do so can be far more consequential. As we look ahead to the next great power conflict, we can only be certain that it will look entirely different. If we are not careful, we might find ourselves echoing Grand Duke Konstantin—lamenting that our adversary has out-modernized us.