Mark Urban

And then the electronic sphere, where for the first couple of years on that front in the east of Ukraine, what each side was looking for was sort of hotspots of mobile phones showing that soldiers were coming together in certain places, either to concentrate or for more innocuous uses.

I went to a sort of frontline concert by some Ukrainian musicians sent to entertain the troops.

And the first thing they said was, have all of you got your mobile phones off?

Because even though we were 30 kilometers from the frontline, they were afraid the Russians would detect it and target it in the time it took for a few songs to be played and try and launch a missile.

So all of those things

make the soldier, whether he or she is on foot or whether they're in a tank or whether they're in a helicopter or whatever, they just increase their vulnerability.

And you end up with this situation where firepower, whether it's from an artillery gun that fires a shell 40 kilometers or whether it's a drone that flies 25, can concentrate very quickly.

And people, if they're traveling across tens of kilometers or several kilometers just,

take a lot longer to come together and indeed to disperse.

And therefore, you've got this situation reminiscent in that sense of the First World War, where the means of killing people are now way ahead of their means of survival.

And so what can they do?

You know, we see this in Ukraine.

They dig deep bunkers, as they did on the First World War trench lines.

But then the Russians might use a glide bomb launched from an aeroplane to blow up down to a depth of maybe 40 feet, the ground.

We see drones being used in such depth now, up to 30, 40 kilometers.

that the Ukrainians have got big problems even evacuating their casualties.

And that's caused them to look to uncrewed vehicles.

And that's how that started last year at a large scale with the Ukrainians, was using them to evacuate their casualties.

And so that's the world we're now getting into, where the battlefield is so lethal that the question of, do you actually need people?

in this flying craft or ground craft or indeed naval ship is being asked more and more.