Volume 7, Issue 4, Winter 2022 32 on the backs" of the drones to victory with a minimum of fighting by them. To quote a typical example: "Azerbaijan’s UAVs obliterated Armenia’s formidable array of ground-based air defences, after which they systematically decimated Armenia's ground force matériel, including tanks, artillery pieces, and supply trucks. This onslaught forced Armenia to accept a humiliating ceasefire imposed by Russia. … It can be said that this was the first postmodern conflict, in that it was the first in which unmannedaircraft overwhelmed a conventional ground force, grinding it down to the point of impotence and paving the way for the Azeri ground forces to roll in and take possession of a strategic chokepoint."[i] Do the available numbers support statements such as this? And if so – were drones necessary to achieve this result, or could it have been achieved by 'ordinary' aircraft? Nagorno-Karabakh in Numbers First a qualification – neither side in the conflicthas released reliable numbers. Reading the daily claims of both sides during the war clearly shows exaggeration and misdirection by both.[ii] Numbers published daily contradicted numbers published previously and later. Since only Azerbaijan employed armed drones, both munition-dropping and suicide versions, the focus is on the capabilities and limitations exposed by them. However, beyond the technical aspects of the drones themselves, there are tactical and professional aspects on the Azeri side that may have prevented them from fully exploiting drone capabilities and technical, tactical, and professional aspects on the Armenian side[iii] that may have assisted the Azeris in achieving more than they would have against a better-prepared foe. A data study collecting all the publicly available video and photographs of destroyed Armenian equipment, separating proven drone-kills, proven kills by other-weapons and kills by unknown weapons, has been published by an independent research team named Oryx,[iv] but it contains fewer targets than the total claimed destroyed by the Azeris. Perhaps the proven destructions by drones are fewer than the total destroyed by drones, and perhaps the number of photographically proven dronedestructions is virtually all there were. The rest were destroyed by otherweapons that had no photographic backup. In any case, the following analysis must be treated with caution. The opposite is more accurate, in that all claims for or against the future of drones based on this war do not utilize the available data, so are less reliable. After the war, President Aliyev published a summary of Armenian equipment destroyed and captured by the Azeris. [v] For our purposes only the destroyed equipment matters. Some of the captured items were damaged and some were abandoned undamaged, but there is no account separating the two. The following table compares Aliyev's statement with the Oryx video and photograph collection. It should be remembered that the photographic sample provided by the Azeris shows only the successes – never the misses. The total photographic sample covers nearly 60% of Aliyev's claim and 75% of the sample was destroyed by drones, i.e., almost 45% of the total claimed by Aliyev were definitely destroyed bydrones. Even assuming that this is the complete portion of targets destroyed by drones, this is certainly a sizeable proportion. However, the actual proportion might be larger since we do not know how many more items were destroyed by drones without publication of photographic evidence. As far as the destroyed trucks and most other soft skinned-vehicles are concerned, it is likely to be almost all of them, given the locations they were destroyed – some distance from the front lines. It is also unlikely that they were targeted by artillery in those locations. The Azeri air force did conduct approximately 600 sorties by mannedaircraft,[vii] mostly Su-25s and attack-helicopters, but there is only anecdotal information on their targets. Ostensibly the claims of Azeri ground forces riding to success on the back of a storm of drones are vindicated. However, this conclusion is complicated by other data. First and foremost, the casualties suffered by the Azeris, which is a minimum of 2,900 admitted killed and a few thousand wounded.[viii] This was not a ground force that fought a battle made easy by the effects of massive drone Drones in the Nagorno-Karabakh War: Analyzing the Data Eado Hecht
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