The dismissive attitude toward Russia (and to lesser extend Ukraine) —particularly its experimentation with drone warfare—mirrors a dangerous historical pattern: the willful ignorance of transformative lessons from past conflicts. Consider the American Civil War (1861–1865), which introduced industrialized killing through rifled muskets, trench warfare, and total mobilization. Despite its staggering death toll (750,000 lives, proportionally equivalent to 6 million today), European powers largely ignored its warnings. When World War I erupted, commanders repeated the same mistakes, sending masses of infantry into machine-gun fire, as if the carnage at Antietam or Petersburg had never happened.

Even earlier, the Crimean War (1853–1856) offered grim foreshadowing: early trenches, railway logistics, and the lethal impact of industrialized artillery. Yet these innovations were dismissed as anomalies rather than harbingers of a new era.

Today’s skepticism about drones echoes this shortsightedness. Like tanks and biplanes in WWI, drones remain in their developmental infancy—clunky, unrefined, and tactically limited. But recall: the tank, first deployed haphazardly at the Somme in 1916, became the backbone of blitzkrieg by 1939. Similarly, biplanes evolved into air forces that dominated 20th-century battlefields.

Russia’s current “drone spam” tactics—crude but relentless—are likely a prototype, not an endpoint. Once a military power (state or non-state) cracks the code of integrated drone swarms—paired with AI targeting, electronic warfare, and mass production—the result will be less "spam" and more blitzkrieg: overwhelming, and capable of rendering traditional defenses obsolete. To dismiss this potential is to repeat the folly of 1914, when generals marched into machine guns, blind to the future they had already witnessed.